No yishuv hadaas: 78 years of building Israel
It has been a distressing time for our brethren in Israel. Sirens sound. Families run in and out of bomb shelters. A ceasefire holds, then falters, then holds again. People yearn for yishuv hadaas, for peace of mind. Life feels frenetic, unsettled.
And yet, if you ask the average Israeli how they are doing, most will tell you they are fine. More than fine, actually. According to global happiness surveys, Israel consistently places among the happiest countries in the world. How does that work?
I once heard a striking insight from Rabbi Yechezkel Freundlich (of Congregation Beth Sholom in Lawrence) that’s rooted in the Ramban on this week’s parsha.
Parshas Tazria-Metzora discusses tzaraas, the spiritual condition associated with lashon hara and other moral failures. Most people know the version that affects the skin, but the Torah describes something stranger: tzaraas does not begin on the person — it begins on the house.
“When you come into the land,” the Torah says, “I will place an affliction on a house” (Vayikra 14:34). The walls develop a discoloration, stones turning red or green. The kohen inspects, quarantines, removes the affected stones. If the affliction spreads, the entire structure must be taken apart.
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The Ramban explains that this is not a natural phenomenon. We understand that skin can change color — but stones in a wall changing overnight, a garment developing a stain without cause, those are in an entirely different category. Tzaraas is not a medical condition but a spiritual one.
When the Jewish people live in closeness with Hashem, the Shechinah rests among them. When something fractures in that relationship, the walls of the home bear witness. This sensitivity exists specifically in Eretz Yisrael, a land uniquely attuned to holiness.
The Gemara in Arachin 12b tells us that tzaraas on houses did not begin right away when the Jewish people entered the land. It began only after 14 years, seven of conquest under Yehoshua and seven of settling and dividing the land. Only then, the Ramban says, did the people reach yishuv hadaas, a settled mind, the kind of closeness with Hashem where even the walls of their homes could reflect their spiritual state.
That kind of awareness is not handed to a people. It is built, slowly, over years of planting and constructing and holding on.
Those 14 years were not quiet. They were years of war and grief and uncertainty. Yehoshua buried soldiers. Families mourned. People went to sleep not knowing what tomorrow would bring. And still, over the course of those years, the land became theirs. Not because the fighting stopped. Because they remained.
Yishuv hadaas is not what you feel before you commit to a place. It is what you earn by having committed. It accumulates in the walls you repair and the fields you plant and the children you raise in the same rooms where you once trembled. You do not wait until it feels safe to plant. You plant, and eventually the settling comes.
This is the paradox the happiness surveys cannot fully capture. A people can live with sirens and still experience joy at the same time, not because it is numb to the danger, but because it knows what it is building toward, and it has already built enough to trust the direction.
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Next week is Yom HaAtzmaut, marking 78 years since the founding of the State of Israel. A people returned after two thousand years of exile, rebuilt a homeland from desolation, established cities and yeshivos and hospitals and armies, and continued to grow through wave after wave of loss and threat. This is not yet the settled calm the Ramban describes. But it is the foundation that makes that calm possible, 14 years stretched across generations, still in progress, still unfinished.
On Yom HaZikaron, we pause and confront the cost. Each name is a world. Each family carries a wound that does not close, a place at the table that remains empty, a silence where a voice once was. We do not rush past that pain. We stand within it long enough to recognize what has been given, and what has been sacrificed.
And then, on Yom HaAtzmaut, we move forward, not away from that reality, but deeper into it. We celebrate because of what those lives made possible, and because the people who gave everything for this land would have wanted nothing less.
Seventy-eight years in, we are still building. The sirens have not stopped. The settling is not yet complete. But yishuv hadaas does not arrive all at once. It is earned, stone by stone, year by year, through the steady persistence of a people that refused to stop building.
Until even the walls begin to hold something sacred.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach, www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
