The dark side of a ‘holy’ name

Did you ever wonder why some Christians almost always refer to Israel as “the Holy Land” but almost never (if ever) as “Israel”?

The quick answer — “who cares what they think?” — is also the wrong answer because we do need to care.  There is a serious issue underlying this question that could have serious and highly negative political repercussions for Israel in the current political climate.

“The Holy Land” permeates the Christian world, and those annual “Holy Land” tour packages we see offered by Christian groups only scratch the surface. Surf over to Amazon, for example, and enter “Holy Land” in the search box. I did and I was blown away. Almost instantly I got what I estimated to be 15,000 to 20,000 listings spread across several hundred pages. Beyond books, maps, and DVDs, there were anointing oils, holy water, holy soil, Christological olive wood carvings, rosaries, skincare products, and much more. Some of these were directed at us, of course, but many more were Christian and Messianic versions of Jewish items — prayer shawls, kippot, menorahs, and the like.

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On the surface, that Christians refer to Israel as the “Holy Land” would seem to be no big deal. After all, we also refer to Israel that way. What makes this a serious issue, however, is that what we mean by “the Holy Land” and what Christians mean by it are worlds apart.

For us, the land is holy because God promised it to our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, set it as the foundation of the Covenant made with us at Sinai, and declared it and the land that comes with it to be irrevocable. As God said to Abraham, for example, “I assign the land in which you sojourn to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding.” (See Genesis 17:8) If we, designated by God to be a “holy nation” (a “goy kadosh”), violate the Covenant, we lose our right to live on this land precisely because it, too, is holy, but the land still belongs to us. When we finally atone for our sins, God says in Leviticus 26:42, “Then will I remember My covenant with Jacob; I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and I will even remember My covenant with Abraham—and I will remember the land.”

We and the land are inextricably bound to each other, as the Torah bluntly states (see, for example, Deuteronomy 11:13ff, which is also the second paragraph of the liturgical Shema). We even symbolically caried the land with us into exile, because so much of what we do is tied to the land. We end our Passover seders and other events with “Next year in Jerusalem.” So many of our prayers are focused on the land, including its agricultural calendar.

Even non-Jews at times recognized how strong was our connection to the land. In December 1789, for example, when the French National Assembly was debating whether to grant Jews citizenship in the new republic, Count Clermont-Tonnerre argued that we should be granted citizenship, but only as individuals, not as a nation, because the “existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.”

He said that because of how he interpreted Jewish life in France. We had our own courts, our own communal governance, our own laws (halacha), even our own forms of taxation. In so many ways, he argued, we saw ourselves as separate legal and social entities. By granting us citizenship as individuals, however, he held out the hope that we would soon see ourselves as true French citizens and that Judaism was just a religion (which it is not, as I have argued so often in the past).

To the Christian world, “Holy Land” has nothing to do with any covenantal relationship with God. That relationship ended with the appearance of Jesus, and so did our claims  to the land. This is known as supersessionism, or replacement theology. The Church was now God’s covenant people. It was the “New Israel.” The land was still “holy,” but only because holy things happened there, by which is meant that Jesus had walked the land, had lived on it, had died on it, and was buried beneath it.

It wasn’t until the 4th century of the Common Era, however, that “the Holy Land” became more than just a phrase. Credit for that goes to the Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena. She not only visited the land, but she took it upon herself to identify various sites that were associated with Jesus’s life. Doing that turned the land, in effect, into a vast shrine. It was sacred because it had touched the sacred, and Christians began making pilgrimages to it.

From its very beginning, supersessionism had a problem. Replacement theology required acknowledging that something had been replaced. There could be no “New Israel” if there had never been an “old” one. That problem was finally resolved in the late 4th century C.E., when the Hebrew Bible was officially made a part of the just-finalized Christian canon. Yet this “Old Testament” contained God’s repeated promise of an “everlasting covenant” made with the Jewish people, starting with God’s promise to Abraham. God said that it was to be “an everlasting covenant throughout the ages.” (See Genesis 17:8.)

To get around this meant reinterpreting God’s promises, reading the inconvenient ones as metaphors (something our Sages of Blessed Memory and our biblical commentators also engaged in). There also were several new ways to define the “promised land,” for example. The Church was meant, according to one version. The anonymously written Epistle to the Hebrews said heaven was meant because it was the “better country.” (See Hebrews 11:16.)

Augustine played up this “heaven” theme in the first quarter of the 5th century when he wrote “City of God,” the “Civitas Dei.”

“Two cities have been formed by two loves,” Augustine wrote, “the earthly by love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” (See City of God 14.28.)

As Augustine saw it, there is no place on Earth, not even the land on which Jesus trod, that is of any consequence. Heaven alone is the “promised land,” and always has been. His “Civitas Dei” has played an enormous role in Christian thought ever since.

The thorniest problem of all emerged for the suppressionists and other Christians on May 15, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel], to be known as Medinat Yisrael [the State of Israel].”

Those words created a profound theological challenge to replacement theology. If God’s covenant with the Jewish people had been permanently superseded, if “promised land” was a metaphor for heaven, how could it be that God’s promise in Leviticus 26:42 to “remember the land” had just been fulfilled?

To be sure, for some Christians, Israel reborn was glorious news. These Christians are collectively known as dispensationalists. This branch began in England in the mid-19th century. Dispensation, as used to define this branch’s philosophy, does not mean “letting someone off the hook.” Rather, it means that God relates to different groups in ways that are distinct to each group, including that God maintains separate covenantal tracks for Israel and the Church. Dispensationalists firmly believe that our covenantal relationship with God was never broken, and that God’s promises to us remain in force — and the rebirth of Israel among the nations proves it. They eagerly refer to the Jewish state as Israel, which to them is a prophetic sign that Jesus will soon return, at which time we will either convert or be condemned to eternal damnation. The Rev. John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, with 10 million members the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States, is explicitly dispensationalist, for example.

For the supersessionists, however, calling the Jewish state “Israel” is theologically indefensible, unlike “Holy Land,” which is free of Jewish covenantal claims. Among these groups are various Eastern Orthodox churches, and several major Protestant denominations (mainly the Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians).

Also among the supersessionists is the Roman Catholic Church, which continues to prefer using “Holy Land.” If “Israel” is mentioned, it is part of a geographical pair — “Israel and Palestine.”

The Church was hard-core suppressionist in 1948. Its views about Jews and suppressionism moderated somewhat when the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, “In Our Time,” 60 years ago (on October 28, 1965), but otherwise this most important document said nothing about the State of Israel.

In 1993, in order to guarantee the protection of Church property and other interests, the Vatican did establish diplomatic relations with Israel, but it did so in a way that carefully avoided upending its core suppressionist beliefs. Those remain in force liturgically and theologically. Anti-Jewish themes are still to be found in Holy Week prayers and homilies, for example. Readings from our biblical texts are often taught together with Gospel texts in a way that suggests that our sacred texts anticipated Jesus. Jesus’s life, for example, was foretold through Isaac’s life.  And so on.

As long as suppressionism remains dominant in the Christian world, “Israel” will not replace “the Holy Land.” As long as so many in the world now view Israel as a pariah among the nations, a door has been opened for the suppressionists to resolve their theological problem Israel represents by eliminating it.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.