Torah’s Awakening in the Land and Tu Be'shvat

“The Torah of Eretz Yisrael continues to develop and be awakened along with the renewal of the building [of the Land], [and along with its] practical initiatives, and together with recognizing our own true essence.” (Eretz Chefetz 2:2)

A story is told of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk celebrating B’shvat with his chassidim.

Sitting around the festive table laden with fruits, the Rebbe began to lavishly praise the Land of Israel, describing its beauty and splendor. As night began to fall there was a knock at the door. The Rebbe of Ger, Yitzchak Meir, had come from Warsaw to celebrate what was left of the day with the Kotzker Rebbe. The Rebbe asked his esteemed friend Rabbi Yitzchak Meir to say words of Torah. Rabbi Yitzchak Meir hesitated to teach in the presence of the Rebbe, but everyone urged him to give them pleasure by teaching Torah in honor of the day.

Rabbi Yitzchak Meir began to speak about the holiday and developed a complex interpretation of the Talmud’s discussion of the New Year of Trees.

The Kotzker Rebbe was displeased because Rabbi Yitzchak Meir had diverted everyone’s attention from the Land of Israel, and he said to him, “Do you know, Itche Meir, that in the Land of Israel you wouldn’t say Torah teachings like

“Why not?” asked Rabbi Itche Meir, surprised.

“Because,” said Rabbi Mendel, “in the Land of Israel the New Year of the Trees is just that - a day to observe the laws about the fruit trees that apply in the Holy Land , and it doesn’t require any complicated interpretations” (A Person Is Like a Tree, Buxbaum, pp. 230-231).

The above anecdote accentuates the notion that living in the Land has an impact on the way its laws are studied. For example, for many centuries these laws could only be analyzed via theoretical study in exile. Returning to the Land compels one to address the law and implementation along practical concerns and based on tangible realities.

The aforementioned teaching from Rav Kook comes to life through the lens of one of the most remarkable Chassidic leaders of the past century. An ardent lover of the Land of Israel. A builder in the Land. A man of unshakable faith: The Klausenberger Rebbe. Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam was a heroic figure and a holy man.

After the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust, and his own personal experience of destruction, the loss of his wife and eleven children, the Rebbe’s greatest desire was to restore and to rebuild. He made a personal pledge during those days of horror that his efforts to reconstruct the nation will be focused on one place: the Land of Israel.

Although many survivors after the war viewed Immigration to America as their ticket to a better future, the Rebbe was quick to remind them, the Land of Israel is the Jewish people’s true home (The Klausenberger Rebbe, Lifshitz, p.162).

The Rebbe made a promise to himself during the Holocaust, in the midst of the suffering, that if he merited to survive the Nazi horrors, he would move to Eretz Yisrael (Ibid., p. 266).

On his first trip to Eretz Yisrael in 1954, he first stopped in London en route to the Holy Land. On Shabbos afternoon a large group of people came to be present at this auspicious gathering. The Rebbe gave a stirring speech, addressing the topic of educating the children in Torah, yiras shamayim, and the holiness of Eretz Yisrael. He denounced the fact that religious Jewry was largely uninvolved in the rebuilding of the Holy Land (Ibid. 281).

The Rebbe would finally make aliyah on the 19th of Kislev (1959). In the years that followed, he would celebrate the 19th of Kislev as the day of his ascent to the Holy Land.

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He would liken it to another major event that also occurred that same date. “Just like Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Rebbe of Lubavitch, celebrated his release from prison on this day, I celebrate the day I left America and was saved from its depraved society” (Ibid., p. 336).

Not only did the Rebbe build the city of Sanz in Netanya, he promised himself that he would build a hospital. The vision of building a hospital came to him during the Holocaust, when he self-treated a Nazi- inflicted gunshot wound on his arm with a leaf and a branch. He said at that time, that if he got out of that inferno alive, he would build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael where every patient would be treated with dignity and where all doctors and nurses would believe in God and know that they were fulfilling the greatest mitzvah in the Torah.

Parshat Beshalach from Rav Kook

Rav Kook teaches that the entire Jewish people have a single soul. He made an acute observation regarding this point when commenting on the experience of the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. When God gave the Torah to the Jewish people, the term vayichan, “and he encamped,” in the singular was used to describe the masses of people standing around the mountain. Rashi commented that the Torah’s strange usage of the singular verb was used because the Jews were like a single entity, “like a single person with a single heart.”

However, when discussing the unity of the Egyptians in hot pursuit of the Children of Israel on the shores of the Red Sea, Rashi used a similar term, yet it was reversed to, “with a single heart like a single person.”

What accounts for the difference?

Why are the Egyptians called “like a single heart in a single person,” whereas the Jews are described as, “like a single person with a single heart?”

Rav Kook explained that the unity of the Egyptians flowed merely from the fact that they had unity of purpose. They all had the same goal - to recapture their Jewish slaves. They were first and foremost “of one heart,” be-lev echad. They had a common goal, and as a result they were unified as a single unit.

This was not the case for the Children of Israel. The Jewish people have an inherent unity which exists regardless of personal beliefs and interests. We are a family, and a family has unbreakable ties. No matter where its members may be or what they may do, we are above all else, a “single unit,” k’ish echad. (The Light That Unites Haggadah, pp. 129-130)