1.
Year after year, Jews read in the Torah about the purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs, about the insistence of the father of our nation not to bury his beloved wife until he had bought a burial plot in full, holding fast to the soil of the Promised Land. Even in the depths of exile, when the Land of Israel was the subject of dreams lost in the fog of history, Jews passed this story from generation to generation. The sweetness of memory was stronger than the bitterness of reality.
2.
In the twelfth century, Rabbi Judah Halevi asked with emotion: “Zion, will you not ask after the welfare of your captives, your seekers of peace who are the remnant of your flocks? And later, he longed to wander through “the places where God appeared to your prophets and messengers.” In his imagination he reached Hebron and the resting place of the great founders of the nation: “Even as I stand upon the graves of my forefathers, I am struck silent in Hebron before your choicest tombs.”
When Moses sent spies to scout the land of Israel, the only place they knew from the stories was Hebron and within it the Cave of the Patriarchs: “They went up and scouted the land… they went up through the Negev and came to Hebron” (Numbers 13:21–22).
Two of them withstood social pressure and clung to the truth against the ten who slandered the land. One was Caleb son of Jephunneh, who after the entry into the land conquered Hebron and made it the capital of the tribe of Judah. Years later, the reign of King David began in Hebron, and from there, it spread across the land and history, until it reached Jerusalem.
3.
The negotiations between Abraham and Hittites described in the Torah echo well-known conventions of the ancient Near East and Hittite documents, yet they contain a unique innovation. Abraham says to the Hittites: “I am a resident alien among you. Grant me a burial holding among you so that I may bury my dead before me” (Genesis 23:4).
A resident alien was someone who arrived from another country and settled in a place, typically with the consent of the local landowners. His residence was considered temporary and he lacked rights to acquire land permanently, certainly not for a family burial estate.
Rabbi David ben Amram al Adani, author of the Midrash Hagadol (Yemen, mid-14th century), writes: “Come and see the humility of our father Abraham. The Holy One blessed be He promised to give him and his descendants the land forever, yet now he found no burial place except by paying money, and he did not question the ways of God or protest. Moreover, he spoke to the inhabitants of the land only with humility, as it says, a resident alien. God said to him: Because you lowered yourself, I swear I will make you a lord and leader over them.”
It is a timely message: faith is measured in historical patience regarding the gap between what is hoped for and what is present, both personally and nationally. Many times, we protest political or military decisions that appear weak, only to discover later that they were part of broader stroke, whose value becomes clear with time.
4.
The Hittites offer Abraham their choicest burial sites as a gift, but he insists on purchasing one. A gift can be regretted, if not now then in future generations. So what of the prohibition on selling land to foreigners? The solution comes through a legal workaround: the place is given as a gift for which one pays a tremendous price. “Abraham weighed out to Ephron the silver he had spoken of before the Hittites, four hundred shekels of silver of the accepted weight. And the field of Ephron in Machpelah, facing Mamre, was established as Abraham’s property in the presence of the Hittites and of all who entered the gate of his city”) Genesis 23:16–18(. And today we may add: before all of humanity.
The cave held within it the fathers and mothers of the nation, like seeds planted in the earth that sprouted not as words in books but as living reality. A central symbol weaving through the Book of Genesis is the womb. The Garden of Eden appears as a cosmic womb containing the embryo of humanity in the form of Adam and Eve. Noah’s Ark is a human-made womb that also holds humanity in its embryonic state. Then comes the cave to which Lot and his daughters fled, where Moab was born, from whom came Ruth, the ancestral mother of King David. And now the Cave of Machpelah. And what is the cave if not a womb holding the memory of the nation until its rebirth?
5.
In many myths and folktales we meet a hero who sets out in search of a treasure hidden in a cave. This reflects a quest for the treasure that the psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the self, the deep core of our being beneath disguises and masks. Jung distinguished the self from the ego, which is only the center of consciousness, while the self is the whole personality toward which we grow.
Guardians protect the treasure: a dragon, a serpent, a monster. They symbolize the binding force of the Great Mother, a figure whose dominance can overwhelm us and prevent the development of an independent self. Overcoming the dragon represents the triumph of the emerging self over the old ego, shedding the masks and emotional chains that imprison us. It is the release from the heavy shadow of our parents. After a painful and demanding process, the hero gains his essence and independent identity and is reborn in the cave. This is true both personally and nationally.
“Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening, and he lifted his eyes… and Rebekah lifted her eyes, saw Isaac and fell from the camel… and she took the veil and covered herself” (Genesis 24:63–65). Isaac goes out to pour out his soul in the field of Machpelah. He had mourned his mother for three years, her only son, visiting her grave throughout that time. Even now he enters the cave where his mother lies, a place where his self is bound to her memory. Something within him is stuck. The Abrahamic movement of lech lecha has frozen. Isaac stops laughing.
Did Abraham see this paralysis in his son? Perhaps that is why he sent his servant to find a wife for Isaac, to release him from the paralyzing memory and help him build an independent life. And so, Isaac emerges from the cave with eyes blurred by tears and longing. Then Rebekah approaches him, and the hope of the house of Abraham is reborn, the hope of thousand years: “Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother. He married Rebekah, she became his wife and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after his mother” (Genesis 24:67). And with him, we too are comforted.
6.
Judah Halevi ends his poem of longing for Zion: “Happy is he who waits and arrives and sees the radiance of your dawn, whose mornings break forth upon him, who sees the goodness of your chosen ones and rejoices in your joy when you return to the days of your youth.”
Here is a great Jew who lived nearly a millennium ago and expressed the essence of Zionism: the Jewish people return home to their father and mother. Once our first father was a resident alien here, but then our mother Sarah, the first Hebrew woman, died. Abraham purchased a burial estate, and from it began our permanent settlement. We returned not because our ancestors are buried here, but because they lived here, because these were “the days of Sarah’s life”, because here they created and founded a nation with an eternal message.
As I write these words, my eyes are filled with harsh videos of the wave of antisemitism sweeping the Jewish world. These verses are more relevant than ever: our brothers and sisters, come home. This is your place.
And not only in his poems. Judah Halevi ended his great philosophical work, the Kuzari, with a Zionist call as well, in the classic translation of Judah ibn Tibbon: “For Jerusalem will truly be rebuilt when the people of Israel long for her with the utmost longing, until they cherish her very stone and dust.”
Will we listen?
