The Ashkenazi Revolution

20“burdensome people”, the stiff-necked people. When the God of Israeltakes mercy upon His people, He gives it the land. When he is angry withHis people, He takes it away from it and banishes it to exile. Theownership of the Land of Israel takes the struggle between the People ofIsrael and its God from disembodied form and gives form, fleshing it outinto a concrete concept. But despite all this, the Land of Israel does notpossess a central theme in the Jewish perspective as much as twoprinciples: The first is eternal life and the second is the unification face toface with the creator.The Jewish People places more emphasis, than any other people, on all thatrelates to the conquest of time, but at the same time, it places minimumemphasis on all that involves the conquest of space – including also theLand of Israel. The Jews wanted very much to settle in Egypt. Before hisdeath in Egypt, Jacob commanded his sons to bury him in the cave ofMachpela. This is a concrete instruction. In contrast, Jacob does notcommand his sons to immediately return to the land of Canaan and he issatisfied with the repeated promise of his God, God Almighty, to give theland to his descendants (“to your seed”) for an eternal holding. There is theimpression that the Jews were very much inclined to settle in Egypt for along time and only the oppression of Pharaoh forced them to take the staffof wandering. Furthermore: About 175 years separate the death of Joshuaand Saul and David. This is a very long time, but the Jews took advantageof it only minimally in order to consolidate their conquest. The promise toAbraham, in the treaty of “between the pieces”, had been forgotten fromtheir hearts. The peoples of Canaan, which were not uprooted, and thepeoples of the surrounding areas, persecuted the tribes, and only with thestrengthening of foreign pressure, did mighty judges rise up and push backthe oppressing intruders. There is no comparison between the systematiceffort toward consolidation of the conquest of lands and in the fortificationof strongholds – which we see with other peoples in the same period of theJudges - and the ways of the Judges of Israel. Over and over again, greatmen arose from among the tribes. Among them were those who capturedforever the imagination of literature, but all their deeds were limited only todefense. This proves beyond all doubt that the tribes of Israel had no