This year, we read parashat Ha’azinu on the Shabbat we call “Shabbat Shuva”, recalling the haftarah “Shuva yisrael” - “Return, O Israel” (Hosea 14:2) - that we read on the Shabbat preceding Yom Kippur. The name “Yom Kippur” or Yom Hakippurim derives from the term kappara – atonement – a word that appears in the last verse of Moses’ Poem in Ha’azinu: harninu goyim ‘amo ki dam avadav yikom ve-nakam yashiv letzarav ve-khiper admato ‘amo - “Rejoice, O nations, with His people; For He will avenge the blood of His servants, And will render vengeance on His adversaries, And will atone for His land and His people." (Deut. 32:43).

The meaning of the words ve-khiper admato ‘amo is unclear, and each translation interprets the phrase somewhat differently.  As opposed to the New American Standard Bible (above), which renders the words as “And will atone for His land and His people”, the New Revised Standard Version and the New Jewish Publication Society translation give us “And cleanse the land of His people”. The King James Version reads: “and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people”. The Douay Bible gives us: “and he will be merciful to the land of his people”. As we shall see, each translation follows a different interpretive tradition.

Rashi (1040-1105) refers us to Genesis 32:21 where the term kappara means “to appease” or “placate” and explains that “when His people are consoled, His land is consoled”. R. Samuel b. Meir (1080-c.1174), Rashi’s grandson and student, seeing a literary parallel to “avenge the blood of His servants,” suggests that the text meant that God would “cleanse the blood of His people from the land through the spilling of enemies’ blood”. Ibn Ezra (1070-1138) presents the view that the text may be missing a vav conjunction that would render the phrase ve-khiper admato ve‘amo (“His land and His people”), while modern commentators, like Prof. Robert Alter in his new translation of the Bible, suggest removing a vav, giving us ve-khiper admat ‘amo (“the land of His people). Other scholars, like Prof. Yitzhak Avishur in his commentary to Deuteronomy in the Olam Hatanakh series, deduce the meaning of kappara as “forgive”, “blot out” or “wipe away” from the parallelism in Jeremiah 18:23, and looking to parallels in Isaiah 25:8 and elsewhere, they suggest that the phrase should be read: “ve-khiper adema’ot ‘amo” – “wipe away the tears of His people”. According to this last approach, the connection is not that between “blood” and “land”, but rather a parallel between “blood” and “tears”.

As opposed to the above attempts to understand the plain meaning of the words in context, the sages understood the word kappara in the sense of atonement, and interpreted the phrase as promising that the land would forgive our sins. Thus, for example:

R. Elazar said: Whoever resides in the Land of Israel lives without sin, for it is said, “And the inhabitant shall not say, ‘I am sick’, the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity” (Isaiah 33:24)...R. Anan said; Whoever is buried in the Land of Israel is deemed to be buried under the altar; since of the latter it is written, “Make for me an altar of earth” (Exodus 20:21), and in respect of the former it is written, “And His land shall atone for his people” (Deut. 32:43). Ulla was in the habit of visiting the Land of Israel but his soul departed outside the Land. This was reported to R. Elazar and he said: “Ulla, that ‘yourself should die in an unclean land!’ (Amos 7:17).” They said to him: “His coffin has arrived”. He replied: “Receiving a man in his lifetime is not the same as receiving him after his death” (TB Ketubot 111a).

Based on this, Maimonides writes: “The sages have taught that whoever resides in the Land of Israel is forgiven his sins…even if he walked four cubits in it he earns the world to come. Whoever is buried there is forgiven, for it is as if his plot is an altar of atonement, as it says “And his land shall atone for his people”…But entering [the land of Israel] while alive is not the same as entering after death, but nevertheless, the greatest sages buried their dead there, and we learn from our father Jacob and the righteous Joseph” (Laws concerning Kings 5:11).

However, the Jerusalem Talmud adopts a less idyllic view:

R. Bar Kiriah and R. Elazar were walking in the stadium [in Tiberius] when they saw coffins that had been brought from abroad for burial in the Land of Israel. R. Bar Kiriah said to R. Elazar: “What good is this? I say of them ‘and made my heritage an abomination’  in your lifetime, and ‘when you came in you defiled my land’ (Jeremiah 2:7) in your death.” He replied: “When they arrive in the Land of Israel they take a lump of earth and place it on their coffins, as it says, ‘And His land shall atone for His people” (Kilayim 9:32(3); TJ Ketubot 12:35(2); and see Genesis Raba 96).

Ibn Ezra is critical of this approach, saying; “According to the midrash, the land will atone for His people. Even if this is an appropriate understanding, it is not appropriate to the context.” In Ibn Ezra’s opinion, the “land” cannot be the subject of the phrase because it does not agree with the verb in gender. The subject must be the people. It is the people that shall cleanse or purge the land.

1. We have before us three approaches to repentance. The first sees God as the source of atonement. The second focuses upon the Land of Israel as the source of atonement, while the third makes atonement contingent upon humanity. Ibn Ezra presents a syntactic argument to justify this third approach, but is his criticism purely grammatical?

2. Do the sages really mean that burial in the Land of Israel expiates sin? If so, what need is there for repentance? Can the sages be understood not as providing an alternative to active penance, but rather as making a value statement that adopts the kind of hyperbole we find in statements like: “If a man performs but a single commandment it shall be well with him and he shall have length of days and shall inherit the Land” (Mishna Kidushin 1:10)?

3. Inasmuch as R. Bar Kiriah and R. Elazar spoke about people buried in the Land of Israel, we may assume that “they take a lump of earth and place it on their coffins” is meant as an explanation of the custom outside of Israel. What does this custom express? It is reported that after the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, the late Senator Edward Kennedy spread earth from the graves of John and Robert Kennedy on the grave of the murdered prime minister. How might this symbolic act be compared to the custom of putting earth from the Land of Israel in Jewish graves abroad?

4. Without any apparent reason, and somewhat surprisingly, we are told that R. Kiriah made his statement while walking in the stadium. Is it possible that his comments were not actually directed at the dead in the coffins, but were intended as an oblique criticism of those who frequented the stadium? If so, how might we understand R. Eleazar’s response? Are there other ways to understand this odd conversation in the stadium? (Note: In addition to the rabbis’ general disdain for Roman culture, according to Josephus, after the fall of Migdal and the battle on Lake Ginnosar, Vespasian herded the survivors into the stadium of Tiberius. “The aged and the useless, 1,200 of them, were disposed of by his orders…The rest of the people to the number of 30,400 he auctioned, except those he presented to Agrippa” (The Jewish War III:10).