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During modern history, as Jews returned to their homeland and formed the modern state of Israel, tension and mistrust between those in Israel and those outside it have persisted. While tossing around concepts of loyalty, responsibility, sacrifice, and dialog, it’s worth seeing what the Torah itself says about the diaspora.
The book of Numbers, Chapter 32, lays out the problem and the Israelites’ solution in ways that seem very familiar to us today. In this chapter, after 40 years of wandering in the wake of their liberation from Egypt, the Israelites have parked themselves on the eastern side of the Jordan river. They are preparing to enter an wage war in Canaan. But a few Israelite tribes, Reuben and Gad (Deuteronomy and Joshua add Manasseh to the list) have found this land congenial and want to settle there permanently.
Let’s pause to ask why this chapter is in the Torah at all. The consistent message from the entire Tanakh is that the land of Israel is the Jews’ homeland. Yet here, even before the battle for Israel, tribes are settling outside it.
Clearly, regardless of how much of Numbers, Deuteronomy, or Joshua is myth, the settlements on the East Bank were a historical fact. The authors would not have invented these settlements had they not existed. The authors were bothered by the persistence of Jewish life outside the land of Israel, and had to explain it.
And in fact there has been a Jewish diaspora throughout the history of the Jews. The Assyrian and Bablyonian take-overs scattered Jews throughout Asia, but many Jews have gone elsewhere on their own volition. Settlements in Egypt go back a very long way.
So the next question the Torah must face is how to handle the relationships between Jews in Israel and those in the diaspora. Numbers 32 presents a deal made between Moses and the tribes that, whether myth or fact, can provide a model for today.
The conversation does not start out promisingly: Moses answers their request with a tirade of nasty accusations and complaints. But then the tribes promise to leave their women and goods on the East Bank while their fighting-age men enter the land of Canaan at the head of the Israelites. They will be an avant-garde or kind of shock troops (both of these terms appear in English translations) helping the other tribes win Canaan before returning to the East Bank.
(This chapter introduces the term חלוץ—ḥalutz—for the fighters who will head the Israelites’ battle. That term, related to a verb for "remove," was adopted in the Zionist movement to refer to the early Jewish immigrants who resettled Palestine.)
Moses accepts this compromise. In short, the Bible endorses the Jewish diaspora but enjoins solidarity upon the Jews. Those outside the land are tasked with supporting those in it.
Thus, the Bible records a successful dialog between the leader of the Jews and the diaspora. We can learn a lot, even today, from Moses’s compromise.
Andy Oram
August 3, 2024
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.