Life and Death in the Land of Israel

Exploring the connection between burial in the land of Israel and redemption.

Welcome to Torat Ha’Aretz. The Jewish relationship with the land of Israel has never been so vital, fraught, and complex. In light of this, these weekly essays seek to better understand what the Torah reveals about the land and our connection to it.

Parashat Vayechi is the final portion of the book of Genesis. The portion describes the final days of Jacob, the blessing given to his sons, Jacob’s death and burial, and the death of Joseph.

Parashat Vayechi, despite its name (“vayechi” translates to “and he lived”) is a portion that deals mostly with death. First, we learn of the death of Jacob, who has Joseph promise that he will not bury him in the land of Egypt, but will rather carry him up to Israel and bury him in the place of his ancestors—the cave of Machpelah where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rivka and Leah are all buried.

In this, Parashat Vayechi recalls another portion—Chayei Sarah—which also deals heavily with death despite being named for life. “Chayei Sarah” means “the life of Sarah,” and yet it tells the story of her death, and how her grieving husband purchased a burial plot for her.

Later in Vayechi, the Torah recounts Joseph’s death, and how he too extracted an oath from his brothers to bury him in the land of Israel. Unlike the oath to his father, however, this oath was not to be fulfilled immediately, but only when the Israelites were redeemed from the Egyptian exile.

The figures we encounter in the book of Genesis are not afraid of death. They do not speak of heaven or hell. They seem to accept their finitude with perfect equanimity. In this, despite all of their rich humanity and timeless pathos, they are unlike us and inaccessible to us.

And yet, the experience of death on foreign soil stirs a primal fear with them and awakens a yearning for the soil of the promised land that later commentators will struggle to account for.

Those very commentators, however, are more like us than they are like the patriarchs. By the time they were writing, we Jews had begun to fear death and to dream of eternal life, and so they projected these preoccupations onto the patriarchs.

Why does Jacob want to be buried in the land of Israel? Well, according to the Talmud, only those buried in the land of Israel will be resurrected when the messiah comes. Another voice retorts that those buried outside of the land will also be resurrected, but their corpses will have to roll underground until they reach the land of Israel—only then will they pop out of the soil.

Or, according to Rav Anan, anyone buried in the land of Israel is considered as if he were buried beneath the altar of the Temple, which is to say that his sins are forgiven. Burial in the land of Israel is thus a kind of papal indulgence, which is to say that it is a ticket to paradise.

I don’t find these ideas convincing. If ever the dead return to life, I don’t imagine that God will cause them to roll miserably underground until they arrive in Israel. If a God capable of resurrecting the dead exists, surely He is capable of devising a better system than this.

And yet, the connection between burial in the land of Israel and redemption is not pulled randomly out of the air.

When Joseph tells his brothers of his desire to be buried in the land of Israel, he states, “When God has taken notice of you (pakod yifkod), you shall carry up my bones from here” (50:25, JPS 1985). In this sentence, he links the return of his body to the land of Israel with the redemption of the people from exile.

These ideas are also linked in the very person of Moses, who is the redeemer of the people of Israel and also the one charged with finding the bones of Joseph and lifting them up out of Egypt.

Why should these ideas be connected? To answer this, we must look back at the purchase of Machpelah. Why does the Torah dedicate so many words to the purchase of this burial plot? And further, why is the first land purchase in the promised land a burial plot? Why not a house of study? A Temple? A home?

Perhaps it was merely practical. Sarah died, and thus there was a need for a burial site that had to be attended to immediately. But perhaps also there is more to it than that.

To be buried in the land is to become entangled in it—to become a part of it. It is to consummate God’s promise.

And so perhaps also, for Jacob and Joseph, to be buried in Egypt is to become entangled with exile, with slavery, with debasement.

These ideas have had a tremendous impact on Jewish thinking. To this day, many Jews in the diaspora are shipped to Israel for burial when they die. And as we fight for the return of the living hostages from Gaza, we fight also for the repatriation of the bodies of those who have died, including some—like Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul—whose bodies have been held captive in Gaza since long before this war began.

Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul Z”L

Their families have never stopped fighting for them. Their pain is real and their plight is deeply understandable. And so we pray for the return of these fallen sons to their native soil. They cannot be abandoned.

Nevertheless, our main focus must be the return of the living. To behave otherwise is to become like the ancient Egyptians, for whom one’s day of death was the most important day in one’s life.

The Jews have always fought this tendency. As I wrote above, the Torah says nothing about what becomes of us after we’re gone, and even goes so far as to call Torah portions that concern death by names that emphasize life.

As Rav Elazar says in the Talmud, though burial in the land of Israel is a great thing, there is no comparison between one whose body was absorbed by the land in death and one whose body was absorbed by the land in life. (Ketubot 111a).