The Torah is not focused on place. Most of the Five Books report the trials and tribulations of the Jewish people in Egypt or in the desert when they were fleeing Egypt. The Torah never reports that the Children of Israel safely arrive to the Promised Land.
Israel is a goal that is never reached. It is a place that exists more in the imagination of the people than in any reality. Indeed, the imagination of the people allows them to interpret the testimony of the spies who were there in the darkest of colors. When in the Book of Joshua, the first book of the Bible after the Five Books of Moses, the Hebrews reach Israel, they do not confront giants as they had expected.
The land does not eat them up, as they had been told that it would. However, they do find war and entrenched peoples in so many towns who just do not want the Hebrew people to settle there. Every inch of the holy Land is a contested inch. The number of wars fought to secure the land was legion, and the number of casualties was great.
That first generation in Israel found through warfare how ordinary the land was. That first generation suffered the same ills, defeats and victories that people in every generation must fight. There was no fantasy to conquering the land even though the Children of Israel had dreamed of the kind of land that they were entering.
In the Torah, the Children of Israel are wanderers. They circled the Sinai desert for forty years. Almost all of the former slaves died before setting foot in Israel. In fact, only two of the original 600,000 made it there.
The Torah is not concerned with geography. It is concerned with time. Over and over again the Torah presents rules with regard to time. The calendar, for that generation and for every generation of Jews, has always been more important than place. In our very formation, we learned how to be a people without a land. In our very formation, we learned that Jewish existence was tied more to the calendar, to Shabbat, to the holidays, to the times when we had to offer sacrifice. And the calendar has been the device that allowed us to survive exile after exile. We learned to feel at home in every part of the world. As long as we had a Shabbat, we had something to look forward to. As long as we had a Pesah, we understood bout freedom. Yom Kippur taught us that we are human and not all powerful. Every holiday and special season gave life to our people.
Therefore, in the portion that we read today, we read, not of Israel, but of the holidays. In this week's portion we begin to learn the miracle of Jewish survival.