Timeless Torah

One of the most powerful scenes ever painted by the renowned Chassidic artist, Zalman Kleinman, is based upon the Covenant that is graphically described in this week's Torah reading. "I am Hashem Who brought you out of Ur Kasdim to give you this land to inherit it...Take to Me three heifers, three goats, three rams... He (Abraham) took all these, he cut them in the center and placed each piece opposite its counterpart...Birds of prey descended ... A deep sleep fell upon Abraham And behold, a dread, great darkness fell upon him."

According to the Midrash, this final sentence is an allusion to the four exiles Israel would have to undergo. The word, dread, refers to Babylon which destroyed the First Temple, darkness, is Media which imposed the decree of Haman, great, is the kingdom of the Syrian-Greeks and the persecution that eventually led to Chanukah, and fell upon him, is the Roman Empire which destroyed the Second Temple.

When G-d made the irrevocable gift of Israel to Abraham, He foretold that even after receiving the Land, four monarchies would subjugate Israel. This prophecy was repeated in tangible form when Abraham mobilized his disciples to wage war against the four kings who invaded Israel and took Lot captive. The Ramban explains that the war was intended to demonstrate that four kingdoms would arise to dominate them, but in the end Israel would triumph. Thus Abraham was shown, in a prophetic vision and in a symbolic microcosm, that four world powers would rule his children.

A question often posed is why (a) the slavery of the Egyptian exile and (b) the many centuries that Jews spent under Arab rule, much of it extremely oppressive, are not included in the list of kingdoms. According to our Sages, the Egyptian exile was not included in the vision; indeed Egypt was prophesied separately, because it was an exile of a different type. Egypt was the necessary prerequisite to nationhood, not an aggressive interruption of Israel's independent status.

But what of Ishmael? Surely their persecution of Jews throughout the Arabian countries and in Israel itself when they controlled the Land, should be enumerated alongside the other four? The Maharal defines the Four Kingdoms as predicated upon one of two conditions: either they directly conquered Israel as did Babylon, or they succeeded to the sovereignty of Israel's conqueror as did the Persian-Median Emperor or the Greek Empire.

Ishmael, however, never directly conquered an independent Jewish nation nor was its greatness built on the ruins of one of Israel's conquerors. It arose independent of Israel and of Rome.
That it held mastery over Israel was incidental, not central to its role in G-d's master plan, for there is a basic difference between the relationship of Isaac and Ishmael, and that of Jacob and Eisav, the forefather of Rome.

Until Jacob's time, impurity still existed in the seed of the Patriarchs, for Abraham and Isaac each begot an evil son. Because evil and good could exist side-by-side, there could be no such concept as, "when this one rises the other one falls." This rule could be said only of the relationship between good and evil as personified by Jacob and Eisav who could not exist concurrently, for they were diametrically opposed to one another. When one prospered, the other declined.

This condition of diametric opposition however did not exist between Isaac and Ishmael (the Arabs). True, there was conflict between them and it reached such proportions that Ishmael was expelled from Abraham's home; nevertheless that was not basic to the relationship of the two nations. Indeed, G-d blessed Ishmael with greatness, a blessing entirely independent of Israel's status, unlike Eisav's blessing which was predicated upon Jacob's failure to maintain the standards required of him.

Ishmael, therefore, was never considered a direct conqueror of Israel: his dominion over Israel was incidental to Israel's status, not in conflict with it. Ishmael neither conquered a Jewish kingdom nor displaced one of Israel's conquerors.
Can it be different now?