NO PLACE LIKE HOME

I recently returned from a short visit to Johannesburg (my third time this year!) to attend the wedding of a good friend’s daughter. The ‘golden city’ is a very different place to Cape Town. It’s dusty, crowded, and fast-paced, and almost every available space is covered with some banner or large poster advertising this service or that product. The roads are full of potholes and the pavements are overgrown with long grass or weeds. Many streets are cordoned off with ugly metal fences creating enclosed suburbs where motorists enter via a boom-gate controlled by private security officers. There is very little by way of natural beauty: no sparkling ocean, sweeping cliffs or majestic mountains. Walking around the Zoo Lake with its fearsome ducks is a Joburger’s closest experience to strolling along the Sea Point promenade. After 25 years in the Mother City, I find the contrast between Cape Town and Johannesburg to be quite stark. And yet, when I return to my place of birth with all of its warts and failings, I feel at home. The streets are familiar and the place has a certain gritty grandeur and vibrancy. 

Rabbi Yochanan (Sotah 47a) taught that there are three things that always engender favour and grace (chein): a wife to her husband, a purchase to its buyer and a place to its inhabitants. Rashi explains that even if a woman is unattractive, she nevertheless finds favour in her husband’s eyes and even if a particular town is unpleasant, its inhabitants will still admire it. The same is true of a significant purchase – even when someone buys an oddly coloured garment or an unusually shaped ornament, the item remains precious in his or her eyes. I once had to officiate at a funeral in a small town. When I returned, someone who had lived in that town and later relocated to Cape Town, asked me about my experience there. I told the person that I had found the place oppressively hot and dry and that I thought the landscape was flat and the surroundings as bare as a desert. Although the person did not comment on what I said, I could sense by her body language that she was upset about my description of the place. It was truly an awful place, but in the mind of someone who had been raised there, it was paradise. 

Perhaps Rabbi Yochanan’s principle can be used to explain why the Israelites who left Egypt so often desired to return there, despite God’s promise of a land flowing with milk and honey. Why would any sane person want to go back to a country whose government had persecuted them for centuries? Why would any rational human being choose Egypt, which is mostly desert, over the lush valleys of the Galilee and the fertile plains of central Israel? It seems ludicrous, but for those Jews, Egypt had been home for a long time and it still exerted a strong emotional grip over them. This was not true, however, regarding the new generation who entered the Promised Land. Egypt meant very little to them. They were born in the wilderness and never really had a home for they had been nomads wandering from place to place for 40 years. Finally, after an arduous trek, they reached the boundaries of the Holy Land. It was then that Hashem addressed Moses and told him how the land would be divided amongst the Tribes (Bamidbar 33:50-56) and what its borders would be (ibid 34:1-15). For the generation born in the desert, Israel would become the new Egypt. It would always be home, no matter how far they might wander from it or to what distant lands they would be exiled. Even if life in the Diaspora would be pleasant, the Jewish heart would never forget its home. No other possible location could ever take the place of Israel, despite some very real offers. 

In 1903, the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, offered Theodor Herzl a Jewish homeland in Africa. This was to be a territory in Uganda under the sovereignty of the British crown into which a million Jews could immigrate and settle. It would be administered by the Jews and have a Jewish governor. Herzl accepted this offer to the outrage of those Zionists for whom Palestine (as it was known then) was the one and only objective of their efforts. Herzl’s logic was that by accepting the first offer presented by a Great Power, he could provide at least a temporary place of asylum for the Jews of Russia. When his colleague Nordau protested that Uganda was not Palestine, Herzl replied that, like Moses, he was leading the people to their goal via an apparent detour. His acceptance of this plan split the Zionist movement. At the Sixth Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland, the idea of Uganda, even as a temporary place of refuge, led to a stormy debate and was vehemently rejected by the delegates from Kishinev who had suffered a ruthless pogrom that year. Nevertheless, Herzl worked tirelessly behind the scenes to win over Nordau and to secure a majority of 295 for 175 against and 99 abstentions. But this did not end the matter. So violent was the objection to the Uganda plan that in Paris, a Russian-Jewish student fired two pistol shots at Max Nordau with the words, ‘Death to Nordau, the East African.’ In April 1904 at an emergency Zionist meeting in Vienna, the famous Menachem Ussishkin spoke with passion against Uganda but still, Herzl refused to accept that Palestine alone must be the Zionist goal, and a state of ‘armed peace’ was declared. However, with Herzl’s untimely death at the age of forty-four in July 1904, the Uganda scheme came to an end and once again, the Zionist bodies concentrated all of their efforts on establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel. (See Israel – A History by Sir Martin Gilbert, pages 21-22). 

Uganda was not the only territory considered as a place for the Jews. In 1940, Hitler (may his name be blotted out) suggested Madagascar as a place where all the Jews of Europe might be sent, before his policy turned to physical extermination. Later in October 1945 during the British Mandate over Palestine, a Cabinet meeting was held during which the Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, made it clear that Britain could not take in a large number of Jewish survivors of World War II.  He stressed that “any large-scale extension of schemes of this kind would involve unjustifiable demands on available housing accommodation.” But where were the Jews of Europe to go? They could not return to their homes in Poland, Hungary and Germany and immigration to Palestine was strictly controlled. Once again, Madagascar was suggested as a possible destination for the Jews. But in 1946, the British Consulate-General in Madagascar reported in confidence to the Foreign Office in London that while Madagascar might be suitable for 200 colonists ‘of the peasant class’, stress should be laid by Britain, ‘on providing the right type of colonist in the first instance, and not city-bred Jews who were worn and emaciated through long confinement in concentration camps.” (ibid, pages 113, 131 and 132).

Dr Chaim Weitzmann eloquently put forward the Jew’s connection to Israel when he gave evidence on July 8, 1947 before the United Nations Special Committee On Palestine (UNSCOP). It was his duty, he explained, although in the past he had never thought it was necessary, “to try to explain: ‘Why Palestine?’ and he went on to ask: “Why not Kamchatka, Alaska, Mexico, or Texas? There are many empty countries. Why should the Jews choose a country which has a population that does not want to receive them in a particularly friendly way; a small country; a country which has been neglected and derelict for centuries? It seems unusual on the part of a practical and shrewd people like the Jews to sink their effort, their sweat and blood, their substance, into the sands, rocks and marshes of Palestine. Well, I could, if I wished to be facetious, say it was not our responsibility – not the responsibility of the Jews who sit here – it was the responsibility of Moses, who acted from divine inspiration. He might have brought us to the United States, and instead of the Jordan we might have had the Mississippi. It would have been an easier task. But he chose to stop here. We are an ancient people with an old history, and you cannot deny your history and begin afresh.” (ibid 147-8). The Jews’ home was Israel and they were homesick. No country, no matter how attractive, could take the place of the land of milk and honey, even if it lay in ruins. The great Spanish poet and philosopher, Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi (circa 1080-1145), put it best when he wrote:

“My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West; How can I taste what I eat and how could it be pleasing to me? How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet Zion lies beneath the fetter of Edom, and I am in the chains of Arabia? It would be easy for me to leave all the bounty of Spain – as it is precious for me to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.”

Lee, Chani Merryl and Naomi join me in wishing you Shabbat Shalom!    

Rabbi Liebenberg

Link to Rabbi’s YouTube message for Shabbat: https://youtu.be/NXBvsmOuClM?si=2l7IwL4HL0GAqxWp

Lee and I are away this Shabbat and will be back in office on Monday 5 August. Rabbi Chananyah Duthie will deliver the sermons and Shimpa Moch will read the Torah. My sincere thanks to both of them.