Milk, honey, and the terms and conditions

Re’eh does not promise an easier Jewish life. It asks what our freedom is producing, and what kind of country our choices are creating.

I have just returned to Israel after three weeks in Sydney, and Australia did not make a feeble case for itself.

There was family. There were ferries, bakeries, long conversations, superb customer service (in English), and coffee made by people who appeared to regard it as a profession, rather than a warm brown emergency. I was surrounded by siblings I adore, a father and bonus mother who planned a magnificent holiday, and the dangerous discovery that I could fit quite comfortably into their lives.

Then I boarded a plane and came home.

Not because Israel had won an objective international competition. I did not compare public transport, salaries, property prices, customer service and the likelihood of completing a bureaucratic transaction without needing a second bureaucratic transaction. That table would not necessarily end with Hatikvah playing triumphantly in the background.

I came home because easier and right are not always the same thing.

This week’s parasha, Re’eh, begins with Moshe saying: “See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.”

See. Not believe. Not hope. Not develop an attractive spiritual theory and circulate it on WhatsApp before Shabbat. Look clearly at what your choices produce.

We often treat free will as G‑D’s non-interference agreement: I am free, therefore I may do whatever I want. Re’eh offers the less marketable version. Yes, you may choose. You must also live inside what your choices create.

The blessing follows loyalty to the covenant; the curse follows abandoning it. This is not a childish promise that religious people will have painless lives while everyone else develops mysterious plumbing problems. Jewish history has supplied rather too much evidence against that reading. Re’eh is concerned with the moral and national consequences of repeated choices. A society can choose justice, restraint and responsibility, or it can choose appetite, power and convenience. Eventually, it becomes what it practises.

We love describing Israel as the Land of Milk and Honey. It sounds excellent on tourism material and asks very little of the person reading it. Yet immediately before Re’eh, Moshe speaks of the good Land; then comes the choice between blessing and curse. The Promised Land was never presented as a prize handed over without obligations. It came with terms and conditions, and the Israelites did not get to tick “I agree” without opening the document.

That matters to Zionism.

Zionism restored something astonishing: Jewish agency. After centuries of living at the mercy of rulers, mobs, quotas, expulsions and the fluctuating tolerance of other nations, Jews could again make decisions as a people in our own land. We could speak Hebrew in parliament, defend ourselves with a Jewish army and argue about municipal parking in the language of the prophets.

(Still… some of us stand on the side of Israeli life, repeating “I don’t understand/ Ani loh mavinah” “English, please/ Anglit bevakasha”).

But agency is not the same as innocence. Sovereignty does not merely give us power; it makes us answerable for what we do with it.

Re’eh moves rapidly from altars and prophets to meat, debt, poverty, employment and agricultural produce. Holiness must survive contact with a bank account. The Torah commands us not to harden our hearts or close our hands to the poor. Hebrew servants must be released and not sent away empty-handed. Festival joy must include the Levite, stranger, orphan and widow.

In other words, a Jewish state is not blessed simply because it contains many Jews, several kosher supermarkets and flags on every available lamppost. Geography cannot rescue us from moral failure. If we worship power, tolerate corruption, humiliate the vulnerable or persuade ourselves that poverty is always somebody else’s character defect, then we can inhabit the correct postcode while choosing the wrong path.

That is the Zionism Re’eh demands: not only returning to the Land, but accepting responsibility for what Jewish life in the Land becomes.

Aliyah, for me, was part of that responsibility. I left South Africa and came to Israel in 2021. It was not an upgrade to an easier operating system. My Hebrew remains capable of turning a simple request into an administrative event involving four strangers, six hand gestures and no identifiable conclusion. The cost of living is brutal. War is not theoretical. Sirens are not a metaphor. Family is scattered across continents, and there are days when the distance feels less like geography than amputation.

None of that proves I made the wrong choice. Nor does my choice make me morally superior to Jews who live elsewhere. People remain in the Diaspora for family, health, finances, work, history and a thousand serious reasons that deserve more respect than an aliyah slogan. Re’eh addresses choice, not smugness.

The honest claim I can make is narrower: for me, living Jewishly meant coming home. Not because home would always protect me, reward me or make sense, but because this is where my private Jewish identity became participation in the public fate of the Jewish people.

Sydney reminded me how much I had given up. It also reminded me what I had chosen.

There is a seductive idea that freedom means keeping every option open. Re’eh suggests the opposite. A meaningful choice closes one road because you have committed yourself to another. You surrender the fantasy of all possible lives and accept responsibility for one actual life.

That is true of aliyah, of Judaism and of Zionism. We are free to build almost anything here. The terrifying part is that we might.

The question is not whether Israel is automatically the blessing. It is whether, having returned to the Land, we will choose in ways that make our return a blessing: how we use power, how we treat the poor, how we conduct war, how we disagree, what we excuse and what we refuse to become.

Re’eh does not ask us to romanticise the Land. It asks us to see it clearly.

I landed at Ben-Gurion knowing that another life might have been more comfortable. I came home knowing comfort was not the only measure of a life.

The blessing is not simply that we are here. The blessing, if we earn it, is what we choose to make of here.