Goats milk and date honey? Is it worth it?

In this week’s Torah reading, we hear for the 10^th time that the Land of Israel is described as a land flowing with milk and honey. (Literally. I looked it up. The Torah says it 15 times.) And I know that the Torah must mean that this is a good thing, but at first glance, I think we might all prefer if it were a land flowing with rich oil reserves and Dunkin’ iced caramel lattes. So, what’s up with that?

Speaking of things that G-d said that don’t seem to make sense, I have a question about us being in the Land of Israel at all. Instead of taking us from Egypt to the Land of Canaan, wouldn’t it have made more sense to take us to Tristan de Cunha? (I’m sure that everyone knows that Tristan de Cunha is archipelago in the South Atlantic that is has most remote inhabited island in the world. It is 1,500 miles from anyone else.) Doesn’t that sound idyllic? Just the Jewish people and G-d and the Torah. We could just be out there, doing our own thing, not bothering anyone and no one bothering us. And maybe every once in a while a person seeking enlightenment could get swept there on a magic wave, and it would be great. So why did we end up in Israel and not Tristan?

And I’m not just saying this because right now, in August of 2024 it seems like a giant Iranian cloud is hanging over our heads. It’s not like Hamas or Hezbollah breathing down are necks is the first time we find ourselves thinking, “What’s a nice people like us doing in a place like this?” You will no doubt recall that the entire biblical period was one where, if we weren’t trying to survive the Canaanites and the Philistines, we were caught in between Egypt and Aram or Egypt and Assyria or Egypt and Babylonia. In the Second Temple era, we were stuck between Persia and the Greeks or the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. Even if this place was flowing with milk and honey, it sure seems like a lot of people felt like it was theirs to take.

I don’t mean to seem like a heretic, but really, really, how good does this milk and honey have to be to make it worth being in the crosshairs of every empire except the Mongols? (Just kidding. The Mongols came in 1260.)

The first time the Torah describes Israel as a land flowing with milk and honey is way, way back at the story of Moshe and the Burning Bush. G-d tells Moshe that he will lead the people from slavery and bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey. Rashi tells us that it means the land is so lush that the goats grazing will be extremely plump, and the milk of the new goat mothers will leak causing a literal flowing of milk. And the dates will be so sweet and full that streams of honey flow from under the date trees. I think it should be clear that Rashi is not making our question any better. As good as I’m sure a land with streams of fresh, warm goat milk is, how is that worth all of the trouble it takes to be there, when good ol’ Tristan was an option?

It must be, it just must be true that “milk” and “honey” are metaphors. It must be true that there is something so special about Israel that it’s inconceivable that Tristan de Cunha or Uganda or New Jersey could possibly be a stand-in for it. But what are they symbols for?

The Ramban comments on this phrase that this reference to milk and honey is similar to the milk and honey mentioned in Shir HaShirim (the Song of Songs). And that’s all the clues he offers.

If you look up 4:11 in Shir HaShirim you get this, “Sweetness drips from your lips, [my] bride! Honey and milk are under your tongue. The scent of your garments is like the scent of the Lebanon forest.” At first glance, this is not very helpful. I mean, it’s clear that there is something mystical happening here, because as the parable of Shir HaShirim unfolds, we get that the Lover (Hashem) is praising the bride (the Jewish people). Maybe we can understand the first phrase, “Sweetness drips from your lips,” easily enough. Without much work, it probably means that Hashem thinks our prayers are sweet. Or maybe the words of Torah that drip from our mouths are sweet to Him. That’s straightforward. But the phrase we’re trying to unravel, “milk and honey are under your tongue,” is not any more clear here than the phrase “land flowing with milk and honey.”

Which gives us only two choices: wait until we are scholarly enough to delve into the hidden, kabbalistic parts of Torah, or hope that someone reveals the secret to us. Luckily for you and me, the Malbim is nice enough to shed just enough light here that I think we can move forward[1]. The Malbim writes that honey is something that started out as an aspect of the world of “vegetation,” but through the efforts of the bee, it gets lifted up to something more perfected. And milk is something that started out in the domain of “animal” but then it gets refined to something higher. And this hints at the idea that mitzvot in their essence are about using our words, thoughts, and actions to raise up our bodies and the physical world to redeem the sparks of holiness in them. To raise this physical world into something more perfected.

And with that help from the Ramban and the Malbim, into what honey and milk might symbolize, it’s not too far to say that this is what must be happening in the phrase, “land flowing with milk and honey.” It’s a place that is especially created to help us change the physical world into the spiritual. It seems like this land is not just a piece of dirt that can be easily traded for some other because this is the place where the world of the spirit and our physical world are the “closest.”

It is worth noting one other comment from the Ramban that I think clicks right into place here. Ramban on Leviticus 18:25 explains why it is that the land of Israel will “vomit out” the Jewish people if they violate morality mitzvot, but other parts of our world are less sensitive to those same sins. As part of that explanation, he says that all the lands of world, like all the nations of the world, have an intermediary angel. The land of Israel, however, is directly under the auspices of the Creator. (He brings a lot of sources to back this up, but this is the summary.) I can’t help but think that these ideas overlap really nicely.

The land of Israel is a land flowing with “milk” and “honey,” in the sense that this is the place where the physical can interact with the spiritual, where the physical can be imbued with the spiritual and the spiritual world can be influenced by the actions in this physical realm. And it’s also a land in the direct presence of the Creator.

Israel might be lush and green and it might be a place where literal goat milk flows next to literal date honey, but I can’t believe that that’s the whole point. Uganda is not Israel. Teaneck is not Israel. Baltimore is not Israel. It’s not a hunk of earth that can be exchanged for some other hunk. Not just because its geography is a fit for our mission, but because its essence is a fit for our essence.