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About 120 years ago, when the Zionist movement was founded, there were approximately eleven million Jews in the world. (Actually, Religious Zionism had gotten off the ground fifty years earlier, through the work of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Rabbi Judah Alkalai.) Over five million Arabs lived within the boundaries of the biblical Land of Israel (including parts of today’s Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq), and another half-million lived on both sides of the River Jordan. The early part of the 20th century was an opportunity for the Jewish people to return and populate the Land. (This was called the Second Aliyah.)
However, the majority of Jews were afraid to uproot themselves and move to Israel, to fulfill our destiny as the Torah requires. Admittedly, immigrating to Israel then involved great hardship, so asking people to do so was a true test of religious commitment. Nevertheless, the failure to fulfill the mitzva of settling the Land when it was possible to do so can be described as the modern version of the sin of the spies. And just as the consequences were dire for the original version of the sin (section 1 above), we have paid a terrible price for the modern version of the sin. We have suffered the Holocaust, communist suppression, and assimilation.
Currently, about fifteen million Jews identify as such, with seven million of them in the Land of Israel. In contrast, the Arabs who surround the Land of Israel have reaped the benefits of the Industrial Revolution and advances in food production and medicine, and they now number over eighty million.[1] These numbers clearly show the severity of the sin of the spies – the sin of being afraid to move to Israel, conquer it, and settle it. As a result of the first sin, the generation that left Egypt had to die in the desert. Furthermore, God warned the Jews that if they didn’t rectify the sin, it would lead to the Destruction of both Temples, for which we mourn on Tisha Be-Av (37:4 below). As a result of the second sin, most of the Jews who stayed in exile assimilated, were oppressed and even murdered.
How fortunate were the Jews who did choose to immigrate and settle the Land. Thanks to their efforts, the Jewish people succeeded in rebuilding after all these catastrophes. Imagine what the Jewish world would look like now if millions of Jews had immigrated to Israel before the Holocaust. We would number fifty million, and scholars of general and Torah studies would be dedicating themselves to perfecting the world under God's sovereignty. It is not too late. We can still correct the problem. In the words of the Bible (Jeremiah 31:5-6): “Come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God! For thus said the Lord: Cry out in joy for Jacob, shout at the crossroads of the nations! Sing aloud in praise, and say: Save, O Lord, Your people, the remnant of Israel!”
[1] If we include all the Arabs who lived in Egypt and the Maghreb (northwest Africa) 120 years ago, there were approximately twenty-two million, only double the Jewish population. Today they number approximately 270 million.
