Faith and Self-Sacrifice: The Merit for the Land

1“And He said to him, ‘I am Hashem Who brought you out of Ur Kasdim to give you this land to inherit it.’ And he said, ‘My Lord, God, by what shall I know that I will inherit it?’ And He said to him, ‘Take for Me a three-year-old heifer …’”¹ These verses raise three questions. First, why did Hashem need to begin by telling Avraham, “I am Hashem”? This was not the first time He had spoken to Avraham Avinu, for He had already told him, “Go for yourself from your land.”² So what does the verse mean by “I am Hashem”? Second, what does “Who brought you out of Ur Kasdim” have to do with the promise of the Land, that the verse places the two side by side? Third, on “By what shall I know,” Rashi comments: “He did not ask Him for a sign. Rather, he said before Him, ‘Let me know in what merit they will endure in it.’ The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him, ‘In the merit of the korbanos.’” What do the korbanos, the sacrificial offerings, have to do with inheriting the Land?

2aWe may explain this as follows. Dovid HaMelech said, “He gave them the lands of nations … so that they might keep His statutes and guard His teachings.”³ We learn from this that Israel was given the Land for two main purposes. The first is to keep the mitzvos that can be kept only in the Land. Chazal said of Moshe's longing to enter the Land: “Did Moshe need to eat of its fruit, or to be sated with its goodness? Rather, this is what Moshe said: ‘Many mitzvos were given that can be fulfilled only in Eretz Yisrael. Let me enter the Land, so that all of them can be fulfilled through me.’”⁴ The second purpose is faith, for faith is the heart and the goal of Israel's redemption and of the ingathering of the exiles to the Land. As Chazal say, “The exiles are gathered in only as the reward for faith; and so you find that our fathers were redeemed from Egypt only in the merit of faith.”⁵

2b[The Maharal of Prague explains this: “That is why it says that the exiles are gathered in through the merit of faith. For this is what faith is: a person leaves his own domain to belong to Hashem, blessed be He, and to cleave to Him. So the exiles, who are separated from Hashem, are gathered in to Him through the merit of faith, to be bound to Him by way of faith.” That is the gist of his words.⁶ This makes it clear that, at its heart, the Land is the place set apart for being with Hashem in faith.] In the same spirit, R' Meir Shapiro of Lublin, founder of the Daf Yomi, explained a saying of Chazal. Chazal say that Bnei Yisrael held a tradition about the redemption: any redeemer who came and said to them pakod pakadti, “I have surely remembered you,” with the word for remembering doubled, would be a true redeemer.⁷ R' Meir Shapiro explained that the remembering is doubled because two redemptions are needed for Israel to be redeemed and brought to the Land: a redemption of the soul and a redemption of the body. What emerges from all this is that the main purpose of inheriting the Land is to reach complete faith and to keep the Torah and mitzvos. In this Israel is not like the nations, who settle in their lands for no purpose at all.

3This answers our first question, why Hashem opened the promise of the Land with “I am Hashem.” He did so to show that faith in Hashem is the whole foundation and purpose of inheriting the Land, so that it will be made known that “I am Hashem and there is none besides Him.”⁸ It also answers our second question, the link between leaving Ur Kasdim and the promise of the Land. Just as Avraham Avinu threw himself into the fiery furnace in Ur Kasdim to make known that “Hashem is One and His Name is One,”⁹ so Israel comes to the Holy Land to spread faith in Hashem and make His Oneness known, “so that they might keep His statutes.”

4Avraham's question, too, now becomes clear. Rashi says that when he asked “By what shall I know?” he was asking in what merit his descendants would endure in the Land. Avraham's reasoning was this. The foundation of coming into the Land is to increase faith and the keeping of the Torah and mitzvos among Israel, as we saw in the words “so that they might keep His statutes.” But what if, Heaven forbid, they do not keep the Torah? Then they would no longer have any merit that lets them remain in Eretz Yisrael. So Avraham asked the Holy One, blessed be He, whether in such a situation any merit could still help, so that the Land would stay in their hands. Hashem answered: the merit of the korbanos. For the inner meaning of a korban is mesirus nefesh, the readiness to give one's life. The commentators, among them the Ramban, explain that a person bringing a korban should consider that for his sins he deserved to give over his own soul and body to Hashem. He should consider, too, that what is done to the animal ought to have been done to him.¹⁰ If Bnei Yisrael have the strength for mesirus nefesh, that very mesirus nefesh will lead them to return and mend their ways, and to keep the Torah and mitzvos properly. In this way they will be privileged to keep their inheritance of the Land. This answers our third question.

5May the Holy One, blessed be He, help us to be privileged to see the coming of the righteous Redeemer soon. Amen, may it be His will.