D'var Torah

Judea and Samaria - Not the 'West Bank'

RAV HANAN SCHLESINGER

This Tuesday night and Wednesday the Jewish people will be celebrating Yom Yerushalayim to commemorate the events of the Six Day War 33 years ago in which Israel captured East Jerusalem as well as Judea and Samaria from the Kingdom of Jordan which had illegally invaded and annexed them back in 1948. No matter what our political beliefs, we ought to know why these events are cause for celebration. But most American Jews – and many Israelis for that matter – although they may understand the centrality of Jerusalem in the Jewish consciousness, have no inkling of the historical significance of Judea and Samaria for the Jewish People, and unconsciously obfuscate the historical and religious facts through the use of the inaccurate and inane term “West Bank”.

The Jordan River in its meander from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the Dead Sea in the south, almost never exceeds a width of 50 yards. It does not reach the volume of our Trinity River, and compared to the Mississippi can only be termed a small creek. Yet the whole world today insists on referring to a land mass that extends 40 miles from the river by the words “West Bank”. Such convoluted reasoning would describe Plano as situated on the northeast bank of the Trinity! The truth is that the term West Bank was first used by the Jordanians when they occupied this area at the end of Israel’s War of Independence. The description was apparently invented with a dual purpose in mind – to intimate a connection between the lands described as the West Bank, and the Kingdom of Jordan on the East Bank, and secondly, to refrain from showcasing the historical Jewish connection to these territories by avoiding the using the language of the United Nations, the British Mandate, the League of Nations, and the Roman Empire, who had all called it what Jews had called it from time immemorial – Judea and Samaria!

Judea is the Roman form of the biblical Judah, the inheritance of the tribe of Judah, stretching to the south of Jerusalem both to the east and to the west of the central mountain range that extends down almost to Beer Sheva. Samaria is the Roman province to the north of Jerusalem, called so after the Israelite Kingdom of Shomron which was established by the descendants of King Solomon after his death.

In biblical times Judah and Samaria were the heartlands of our people. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob spent most of their time here. Here they built their alters and experienced visions of God. Here Abraham purchased land for a burial place in which all three generations of the patriarchs and their wives are interred. (And the magnificent edifice in the city of Hebron marking their burial sites is the oldest completely intact building in the world.) Here King David established his kingdom and Jewish sovereignty ruled for 500 years.  At the beginning of the 2^nd Temple period Jewish settlement was by and large limited to Judea in the south, but later the Hasmonean Kingdom expanded into all of Samaria and beyond. It was only after the tragic defeat of the forces of Bar Kochba at the hands of the Roman Empire in 135 CE when the Romans resolved to erase all traces of Judaism from the Land of Israel, that they changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina and that of Judea and Samaria to Philistina.

Be your political beliefs what they may be, to the left or to the right - we must know our history and our use of language must be faithful to that history. Jewish survival I believe depends on it. We will wither and we will die if we cannot articulate the deep Jewish connection to the historical heartland of the Land of Israel, and that heartland is centered in Judea and Samaria, with all its rich archeological sites, tombs, battlegrounds and ancient places of worship. That’s where are hearts must be, and that is what we are called upon to express this year on Yom Yerushalayim.