Coming Home: Living in the Land of Israel in Jewish Tradition and Thought by Rabbi Dov Lipman, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem, © 2018, ISBN 978-9652299369, p. 141, $14.95.
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California – Dov Lipman, author of Coming Home, has selected a propitious time for publishing a book about the historical and emotional ties between the Land of Israel and the People of Israel, laying out, through law and lore, why diaspora Jewry should make aliyah, immigrate to Israel.
Israel recently passed the “Nation-State” law, asserting Israeli Jews’ right to exercise national self-determination, establishing Hebrew as the official language, making the Jewish Calendar as the official calendar, and declaring Jewish settlements to be of national value. In short, the Knesset made Israel a Jewish state. Many left-leaning and some mainstream American Jews condemn the law as racist and undemocratic, which underscores the point that anti-Israel sentiment could not have taken place seventy-five years ago, or a hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago, or even a thousand years ago. A Jewish state did not exist, but Jews were not welcomed as national citizens either; they were “wandering Jews.” Indeed, Jews possessing civil rights is but a few hundred years old, and as demonstrated by historical reality, what governments give, governments can take away.
Coming Home makes a passionate appeal for diaspora Jewry to return to its national Jewish homeland – to the State of Israel, by calling on the history and mitzvot of Hebrew Bible, as well as the writings of rabbis and Jewish scholars. Lipman establishes that the burning desire to live in the Promised Land did not die with the cooling embers of the bar Kokhba revolt, rather it sparked an insatiable yearning to return. The Jerusalem Talmud, edited more than fifteen hundred years ago, according to Lipman, states that Israel’s redemptions begins by permission of “the kings of the nations.” He goes on to note, “the State of Israel began with the Balfour Declaration and the Partition Plan vote from the United Nations.”
Coming Home also relates the stories of the successes and failures of the greatest Jewish minds striving to reach Ayyubid-occupied Israel, Ottoman-occupied Israel, and British-occupied Israel. Among his stories are tales about Yehuda Halevi, arguably the father of modern Zionism, who left his family and wealth for Israel in the early twelfth century and arrived in Egypt. He departed Fustat, a suburb of Cairo, in May, 1141, but there is no record he ever reached his goal. The great Middle-Ages polymath Maimonides, after a three-year journey, reached Israel at the age of seventy-three. The Talmudic genius Rabbi Avraham Hakohen Kook emigrated from Russia to Israel in 1887, where he became, at age twenty-three, the rabbi of Jaffa, and later the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi under the British mandate. He believed that the establishment of Israel is the first step to the redemption of the Jewish people.
On one hand, Lipman relates that some rabbis, such as the ultra-orthodox Satmar Rebbe, rejected the existence of Israel because the Messiah did not direct its creation, but on the other, he tells the story of Rabbi Yissachar Teichtal, born in late nineteenth century Hungary, who personified the Hungarian position on Zionism at that time, discouraging “any kind of mass movement of Jews immigrating to Israel and waiting for God to return the Jewish people.” The Holocaust changed his perspective. While running from the Nazis he wrote a book offering “criticism of religious rabbis for not encouraging aliyah.”
“Only at the end,” the fictional character Darth Vader might say, “did he understand.” Lipman doesn’t want another catastrophe before criticism of Israel ceases, taking the position that for nearly two millennia the Jewish people awaited redemption, of which the ingathering of all Jews to Israel was a part. To this end, he stresses that the rituals and practices of Judaism can only be satisfied in Israel and how fulfilling those mitzvot is a source of blessing for the country and its inhabitants.
Lipman, envisioning the Land and the People of Israel tied together by a binding and unseverable knot, pleads with diaspora Jews to see this relationship and come home.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. His newest works are: The Comprehensive Jewish and Civil Calendars: 2001 to 2240, The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings, and Sepher Yetzirah: The Book That Started Kabbalah, Revised Edition. The author may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.