This was my D’var Torah on Saturday, July 26, 2025 for Parashiyyot Mattot-Mas’ei.
I have probably mentioned before one of the most unusual early manuscripts of a Talmudic text. It’s unusual because it was found in the ground about five miles west of the Jordan River in the field of Kibbutz Ein HaNetziv, and when I say in the ground I don’t mean it was a document that was dug up inside a clay pot — the manuscript is literally in the ground. It is 29 lines of Hebrew text in the form of a mosaic, about 9 by 14 feet! Ein HaNetziv is part of a cluster of religious kibbutzim in the northern part of the Jordan River Valley.
The text begins: Shalom! And then it continues: These fruits are forbidden in Beit She’an in the sabbatical year. Then it talks about various squashes and melons. Further on, the mosaic says: The boundary of Eretz Yisrael, the places held by those who came up to the land from Babylonia, are: the passage of Ashkelon, the wall of Sharoshan Tower [of Caesarea], Dor, the wall of Akko, the source of the spring of Giyato — and it continues to details a series of areas and towns. Certain areas north of Akko all the way to the city of Tyre in today’s Lebanon are mentioned as being not in the land but subject to the laws of the sabbatical year, and the mosaic also discusses the status of towns just to the south of the mosaic in Samaria, which were not taken back by the returning exiles and restored to Jewish rule. Toward the end the mosaic once again says Shalom, and then someone added something that’s been cut off or was unfinished.
I have seen this mosaic basically in the field where it comes from – a replica of it, since the original is in the Israel Museum. It was once part of the floor of a synagogue in later Roman times in that area. Can you imagine if on our floor was inscribed something that is all at once a historical marker, a border reference, and a legal memo?
I am telling you about this this text in the ground today because it is a kind of update to a section we read in the Torah today, which tries to answer a question that’s pretty important: What exactly is the Land of Israel? We all know what Eretz Israel generally. But what it is exactly?
And both the Torah and the Talmudic mosaic answer the question for some very practical purposes. So I just wanted to sketch out some of the ways Eretz Yisrael has been defined in our religious tradition, and what the significance of those definitions has been. It’s important background knowledge for people to have who read the Torah and are engaged with modern Israel.
The Torah defines Eretz Yisrael in our parasha because each tribe and family is going to receive a parcel of land, so obviously the territory has to be defined. Basically, the way the book of B’midbar describes the borders of Eretz Yisrael has some things in common with our time.
The Mediterranean Sea is a western boundary, and the Jordan River from the Kinneret to the southern edge of the Dead Sea is an eastern boundary. The southern boundary is an arc that goes across the middle of the Negev desert – it seems to include the place where the Israelites sit for most of their 40 years, Kadesh-Barnea, but it doesn’t go down to today’s Eilat and about half of Israel’s desert territory today is not in this definition of Eretz Yisrael. The border does go into the northern part of what today is considered the Sinai peninsula, toward today’s city of El-Arish. So the Gaza Strip and some of the territory in Egypt today is part of this map. In the north, a good deal of Lebanon and southern Syria is within the boundaries.
The Torah’s map, while large in some ways, is not quite as large as the general promise we read about in Genesis, where Avraham is promised that his descendants will inherit a land all the way to the Euphrates River.
The Torah’s map is not a surveyor’s map but it is specific, with a lot of particular reference points. The borders described in the Talmudic mosaic at Ein HaNetziv are quite smaller.
The Talmud has actually gradations of Eretz Yisrael. For whatever reason, the Sages decided that all land conquered by those who came from Egypt had what they callkedushah rishonah, “initial holiness”, but that when the exile happened that state of kedushah disappeared. Only the land that was held by those who returned from Babylonia has kedushah shniyah, “second holiness”, which is permanent.
Kedushah shniyah was not about tribal inheritance, but about mitzvot hat’luyot ba’aretz – mitzvot that are operable only in the land. The mosaic is positioned near a boundary and most of its discussion is about the laws of the Sabbatical and about tithes. If something grows in Eretz Yisrael, it is subject to a series of tithes which are mandatory, and it can’t be harvested in the seventh year. So the rabbis of the Talmud deal with the question of the boundaries of Eretz Yisrael in order to determine where the tithes and the sabbatical apply.
Their position is that only territory that was originally conquered in the era of Joshua and then reintegrated as a Jewish-ruled domain in the Persian period is obligated in these laws. And what you get in the mosaic text is a patchwork. There are gaps – some of the territory of Samaria in the West Bank today does not have kedushah shniyah, even though it’s sandwiched between territories that do, such as Judea. A lot of the central and eastern Galilee is outside this line, and the coastal area is smaller than what the Torah says.
And at the same time, we know from the Talmud that the Sages made exceptions to their rule about the period of return from exile. They decided that the city of Beit She’an on the Jordan should be obligated for tithes, and they did it for policy reasons – they wanted people who lived in or near Beit She’an not to have to travel long distances to glean during the seventh year. But it seems like they found it convenient for Ashkelon itself to be outside, so they could have access to its markets all seven years.
And the Sages also defined an area they call Suria, which is the modern Hebrew name for the country of Syria. Suria is land that is so close to Talmudic Eretz Yisrael, and has so many Jews living there, that some parts of the laws of the sabbatical fruits apply by the authority of the rabbis, though not by the authority of the Torah. The Diaspora in those days began so close to Israel, much like the tribes in our parasha who wanted to live across the river from Eretz Yisrael to raise their herds more easily.
Throw in the idea that the rabbis in the 300s weren’t sure in an exact way which lands had been governed by the Jews after the exile 800 years before. So there are towns that are considered “possibly Eretz Yisrael.”
In our day, we think about Eretz Yisrael in different geographic terms, defined by the British and French and the League of Nations. In that sense, Eretz Yisrael is some or all of the territory governed by the State of Israel. The laws of the sabbatical year apply, for those who observe them, throughout Israeli governed territory. But it’s also true within the religious world that the territory of Israel and the halachic land of Israel are overlapping but not identical.
And the earlier definitions from the Torah and Talmud are at play in contemporary religious Zionist debates, because of another mitzvah framework: whether it is obligatory or optional to go to war to conquer or defend particular lands, based on whether they are considered Eretz Yisrael or not. I have been lately reading the fascinating essays of Rav Yehuda Amital z”l, who was co-head of the important Yeshivat Har Etzion which is a center for Religious Zionist philosophy and education. Repeatedly, he addresses these questions of contemporary policy in light of these Talmudic traditions, while also wondering whether people really experience the land in halachic terms or simply as the Jewish homeland and the contemporary Jewish state.
I am mentioning all of this today just to widen all of our frames and give you more knowledge, when it comes to thinking about the history of Eretz Yisrael and what that history means for the present day. Some of these definitions of the land in Torah and Talmud you may or may not find significant. But they are significant within many segments of the Jewish world, in and out of Israel. And whenever we talk about the historical significance of “the land”, even separate from its religious significance, we should know as much as we can what we are talking about.
The religious tradition reminds us that the land has significance always in relation – to mitzvot, and to the people those mitzvot serve and organize.
And if nothing else, we should be fascinated by the lengths our ancestors went to survey and record information about the land in imaginative ways, like a mosaic border manual written square by square on a synagogue floor.
Shabbat Shalom!
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