15. Where Does the Mitzvah Apply?: Borders, Footsteps, and Eilat

בוקר טוב, שבוע טוב לכולם. I have a special הכרת הטוב for seeing Mr. Katz and Mr. Morgen here this morning. Great to be davening with you. ממש. Moshe too.So, this week's הלכות, בעזרת השם we're going to be learning is a very fascinating subject. And it's going to bring up a lot of interesting questions, הלכתית שאלות regarding the status of ארץ ישראל in places that we weren't commanded to settle in. For instance, do you דוכנן in Eilat? Do you keep two days of יום טוב in Eilat? That's another, that's a little bit of a different שאלה. But different places that really according to the ways that we were given over the גבולות of ארץ ישראל, what we did with it is already a different story. But before we start learning all the הלכות inside, we got to refresh ourselves with just a few פסוקים. Just a few פסוקים to kind of remember בכלל the whole story, what השם had in mind and what kind of ended up happening back then and where we're at today. So just a few פסוקים like this. Because we have the שאלה is the דין of כיבוש, the דין that we have of conquering and the מצוה of ישוב הארץ. We have to see where those two meet and where perhaps maybe they don't meet and what הלכתית ramifications those two עניינים have.So first of all, where does it start? It starts with אברהם אבינו being told: ביום ההוא כרת השם את אברם ברית לאמר לזרעך נתתי את הארץ הזאת. So where was Avram told? מנהר מצרים עד הנהר הגדול נהר פרת. Where is נהר פרת? Euphrates. Right. Just keeping this in mind for a second, okay? We're just kind of like, we're going to do some illustration for a minute. And then it says later in ספר שמות, we're going to see it later: ושתי את גבולך מים סוף ועד ים פלשתים. Okay, so where's that? ים סוף עד ים פלשתים. Yeah, we're more or less there today. Aside from some Kassam rockets flying over the area, it's more or less, we have that, we have that covered, okay? וממדבר עד נהר כי אתן בידכם את יושבי הארץ וגרשתמו מפניו אמן כן יהי רצון. Now we have also in the beginning of דברים: פנו וסעו לכם ובאו הר האמורי ואל כל שכניו בערבה בהר ובשפלה ובנגב ובחוף הים ארץ הכנעני והלבנון עד הנהר הגדול נהר פרת. It's already a lot more territory. ראה נתתי לפניכם את הארץ באו ורשו את הארץ אשר נשבע אדוני לאבותיכם לאברהם ליצחק וליעקב לתת להם ולזרעם אחריהם. Continuing a few פרקים later, now this is where it gets tricky. Okay, this is where it gets tricky. And this is where after 1967 and 1973, a lot of questions started coming up again. כל המקום אשר תדרוך כף רגלכם בו לכם יהיה. That means, anywhere where your feet end up, כל המקום אשר תדרוך כף רגלכם, anywhere where your feet go and end up basically walking on, לכם יהיה. מן המדבר והלבנון מן הנהר נהר פרת ועד הים האחרון יהיה גבולכם. And it repeats this in יהושע in פרק א': כל מקום אשר תדרוך כף רגלכם בו לכם נתתיו כאשר דיברתי אל משה. מהמדבר והלבנון הזה ועד הנהר הגדול נהר פרת כל ארץ החיתים ועד הים הגדול מבוא השמש יהיה גבולכם. Where's the tension here? The tension shows up in a place like we said before, Eilat. And the first real evacuation that happened by an Israeli government in the last, since the modern state, the real one, was of course Yamit. Yamit. Now why, what was so complicated about Yamit? On a הלכתית status, what's so complicated about Yamit, about that area? That area, it's very, it's very, we have tension between the פסוקים over here. Because on the one hand, we're told exactly, especially in פרשת מסעי, the גבולות are basically given to us as very clearly. We come up with the ראשונים, they say basically the way we conquer ארץ ישראל is based first and foremost the way that משה רבינו gave it over, the end of ספר במדבר in פרשת מסעי, the גבולות are very much, they're clearly, clearly described to us. And afterwards, everything else comes. So the question is, do you worry about conquering other areas מדין כיבוש and ישוב הארץ when the first place isn't fully conquered? So some would ask today, what, what's changed today? Is ירושלים fully conquered? So it's an illusion. It's כאילו and it's not. But these things, we're going to see, these things play a role in the way that we understand הלכות of places that either fall under the status of דין כיבוש and דין ישוב הארץ or they wait until the first places that we were told in פרשת מסעי first have to be conquered. Is this a chronological ענין or is it like don't get your emotions get the best of you? This is, this is really a, we see this a lot in הלכה. So what we're going to be seeing in the next few days is how these things play out, what needs to be conquered first. Rav Melamed told us already two weeks ago, the more you're in a place that hasn't been dwelled yet, the more of a מצוה it is. But מצד הדין of כיבוש and the הלכתית status of places that let's say did not necessarily fall under the גבולות we were first given, like the whole area of Egypt, נכון? There, then we have שאלות. We have a lot of שאלות that begin to come up. Just want to say, it's such a שמחה that these are things we're even talking about again. These are, it's a שמחה, this is even something that you and I are dealing with today because this was בגדר חלומות for almost all of our grandparents. So we shouldn't forget that for one second while we're learning these הלכות, it should be ממש פקודי השם ישרים משמחי לב. This, this stuff brings utmost שמחה to the picture. Yes.One very short thing I need to add that Rav Tuvia told me that when I asked Rav Miller once, Rav David, but I think I saw him on Zilla, and he said, and he said, which was also a whole story in itself, but he said something like, you know, we don't celebrate in חוץ לארץ because we're not בשמחה, and Rav Miller said, everybody in Eilat is בשמחה.Careful, they could use that in Boca Raton, the same line, too.