The Land I Will Show You, sec. 7, chapter 12
Tzitzis, Resurrection of the Dead, and the Sanctity of the Land
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12: Tzitzis, Resurrection of the Dead, and the Sanctity of the Land
We have learned that the land is like a garment – a covering for the hidden God. Considering the land as a garment that conceals immediately brings to mind another perspective: The land actually covers the dead buried within it. The land is full of dead corpses and covers them as if there is no death, the living above it largely unaware of all the people beneath them, hidden behind clothing of dirt, the multitude of people who have passed.
The prophets’ parables capture this notion, as it is said:
Your dead shall live, my corpse shall rise. Wake and sing, dwellers in the dust, for your dew is as the dew of brightness… For, behold, Hashem is coming out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth shall lay bare its blood, and shall no longer cover her slain (Isaiah 26:19–21)
The land is as a cover for its slain, dwellers of dust who are destined to rise. It conceals them all beneath it, as if they are not there.
But this will not last forever: Eventually, the land will lay bare her blood, for the land is a treacherous garment. Just as it pretends to be a reality disconnected from its Creator, while in truth, it is nothing but His action – and indeed, in the end, God’s action will be well revealed, and He will no longer hide – so it pretends that there are no corpses beneath it, while in reality, people are deposited there, resting on their beds until the time they stand. And these two treacheries are really one. For the action of the living God is an action of life and goodness and gives life forever. God breathed a soul into man and placed him in the garden of the Tree of Life and every good tree, but man and his wife ate from the Tree of Knowledge and introduced evil and death into existence, such that the land became dark. Since then, the land conceals the light of Hashem and the eternal life flowing from Him to man created in His image. Hashem is hidden and concealed, and there is no goodness and no life revealed; darkness, evil, and death stain Hashem’s pure garments, and they don’t shine. The land conceals. The externality hides all the interiority of Hashem’s good and eternal actions. The concealment of life is the concealment of Hashem, the negation of God’s action.
The clothing of light was sullied. But the garment stained with darkness and death will wear out and reveal, and Hashem’s light will be revealed on the corners of the earth, which will no longer cover its slain. God’s garments will revert to being garments of pure and clean light. Hashem will come out of His hidden place and be revealed, and the land will shine, and the dead will rise from it.
This too is thanks to the tzitzis that leads a person to know the interiority, as Chazal interpreted the verse “To seize the corners of the earth” (Job 38:13):
All the righteous who died outside the Land, their souls are gathered to the Land... and all the dead from the wicked in Eretz Yisrael, their souls will be thrown in a slingshot outside the Land... in the future, Hashem will grab the corners of Eretz Yisrael and shake it from all impurity, like a man who shakes a garment and throws out everything inside it... as it is said, “To seize the corners of the earth and shake the wicked out of it.”1
This is the character of the new heavens and the new earth, the illuminating garments of Him who is clothed with light as with a garment: The corners of the earth will be illuminated, and there will be no more place for the wicked to hide in darkness, for Hashem will shake out His tallis.
Who are the wicked who are shaken off from the earth?
Anyone who despises the mitzvah of tzitzis, about him the verse says: “To seize the corners of the earth and shake the wicked out of it.”2
All is in the merit of tzitzis. The tzitzis marks the garment as treachery, clothing as a temporary concealment, and thus hints that the good is found specifically within the external garment, and it is the essence: The person himself beyond his garment, Hashem behind His actions, and the sleeping dead beneath the surface of the earth. The tzitzis indicates that the garments of darkness will revert to being garments of light, the light of life, Hashem’s light.
This is the principle of the resurrection of the dead. The root of the resurrection of the dead is the eternal life hidden deep within a person, that is, the eternal divine will in his creation. As Maimonides wrote:
Resurrection of the dead is for the righteous only. And how can the wicked live when they are dead even in their lifetime? And thus they have said: “The wicked, even in their lifetime, are called dead, and the righteous, even in their death, are called alive” (Berachos 18b).3
The dead will live to the extent that they were always really alive, that is, to the extent that their actions reflected their eternal inner essence, namely the will of the living God in their creation. The question of good and evil, or righteousness and wickedness, is how much a person’s externality reflects his interiority, the good and living Will at the root of his existence. The Will of the good God is eternal, and only the body that clothes the Will comes and goes.
The spies did not understand the essence of the land. They did not see well, and the mitzvah of tzitzis comes to correct this mistake. And as explained, the darkness of the land is, especially, the concealment of the life force: The land covers its slain and conceals the lives that have passed, as if God did not grant man eternal life and as if man is indeed meant to return to dust forever. The mitzvah of tzitzis corrects this mistake and hints at interior, hidden things. It teaches to overcome the betrayal of externality and to know that man was created to see the good and to live forever, and that death is but a temporary decree. And if the spies erred in seeing and misunderstood the essence of the land, it would imply that their mistake borders on disbelief in the principle of the resurrection of the dead – and indeed it is so. For, as clarified, the journey of the spies ascending the Negev and coming to Hebron continues the journeys of Abraham our father which ended in disappointment, in death and the purchase of a burial field. Sarah’s death caused doubt to arise: Perhaps the children of Israel will never merit a pure land, cleansed of death-bringing Satan? Or perhaps the burial of the righteous woman in Hebron is a sign of eternal inheritance, an early stage of the eternal inheritance that will culminate in the acquisition of the Temple Mount?
The question of death and resurrection is the question of the treacherous land. Is the land a complete betrayal of life and a mask of death, or a temporary concealment that will be illuminated when the dead live? And this question is rooted in the original decree of death upon Adam and Eve who confused the sight of good with the sight of evil and returned to the earth’s dust – was it decreed that the good will be hidden forever and darkness will cover the land forever, and man’s fate is but dust of death with no escape, or perhaps deep down the good light and eternal life are hidden, in momentary concealment under imagined darkness until the time when the dead live?
The inner theme of the parashah of the spies is the belief in the resurrection of the dead. The ten spies explored after their heart and eyes and thought that the land is a place of the death-bringing Satan, that the land “consumes its inhabitants” (Numbers 13:32). They thought that Satan had won and dominated the land, the place of death. Not so Joshua and Caleb. “And he came to Hebron” (ibid 22) – “This teaches that Caleb... separated... and went and prostrated himself on the graves of the fathers.”4 Caleb understood the holiness of Hebron, that is, the spiritual level of the righteous buried within it who are called “alive” even in death. He continued the vision of Abraham who lifted his eyes in divine vision and also looked beyond the betrayal of the land’s externality – he saw a land hiding righteous within it and preserving them until the time of their resurrection, until the time when the light sown for the righteous will return. He believed in the resurrection of the dead and therefore did not see Sarah’s death and burial as an end, but as one step on the path to the complete sanctification of the land.
These ideas are hinted at in another spy mission, this time successful – that of the sons of Joseph to Bethel. About this mission it is written:
And Hashem was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain... And they gave Hebron unto Caleb, as Moshe said... And the children of Joseph also went up to Bethel, and Hashem was with them. And the children of Joseph explored Bethel (and the name of the city before was Luz). And the spies saw a man come forth out of the city, and they said to him, “Please show us the entrance into the city”… And he showed them the entrance into the city... and they let go the man and all his family. And the man went into the land of the Hittites, and built a city, and called its name Luz: which is its name until this day (Judges 1:19-26)
From this episode, we can learn about the character of correct exploration, which is to see the unseen; we can learn how eternal life is founded on this point; and we can also learn about the connection of it all to tzitzis. Caleb received Hebron by virtue of his good vision of the land, and the sons of Joseph also explored properly like him, and Hashem was with them as He was with the sons of Judah. They explored and found Bethel, the invisible city. This is the story of the correct exploration, seeing in the eyes of Hashem: the search for the truth hidden from the eye, to reach knowledge of a hidden concept by virtue of what comes forth from it, as the sons of Joseph did and discovered the entrance to Bethel.
The tzitzis teaches this exploration, how to see through all the coverings until the innermost depths, to the core of pure goodness that ends in the principle of the original, eternal life of man; and so our sages said about the city of Luz: “It is Luz where they dye the blue (techeles) for tzitzis... and even the angel of death has no permission to pass through it.”5 This is the uniqueness of the city hidden from the eye, which guides man to explore properly and to penetrate to the inner essence of things: They dye techeles for tzitzis in it and people don’t die in it, and it is also named for the bone from which Hashem will ressurect the man in the future, the “luz” bone;6 to teach you that the mitzvah of tzitzis leads to seeing the hidden goodness, and upon it depends the eternal life promised to those who look into the inner depths of things.
Above we spoke about seeing the land from the perspective of God, simply to consider how He sees; and from the parashah of tzitzis we have learned another method to do the mitzvah of divine vision – to look at everything according to its inner essence. Everything leads to one place: to superhuman, spiritual vision, the root of all good deed.
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Midrash of Chazal, brought in the commentary of Rabbeinu Bachya, Numbers 15:38; and there he writes further that the tzitzis hints that Hashem will eventually resurrect the dead and raise them in their garments.
Perush Ha’Mishnah to Sanhedrin 10:1, translation by Rabbi Yosef Qafih.
See Genesis Rabbah 28:3.