Where Are You Holding?
On Achuza and Aspiration from Abraham to Moses
I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting holding (achuzat olam). I will be their God.” (Genesis 17:8)
“I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site (achuzat kaver) among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.”
Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding (achuza) among our father’s kinsmen!” (Numbers 27:4)
“It would be a favor to us,” they continued, “if this land were given to your servants as a holding (achuza); do not move us across the Jordan.” (Numbers 32:5)
Ascend these heights of Abarim to Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab facing Jericho, and view the land of Canaan, which I am giving the Israelites as their holding (achuza). (Deuteronomy 32:49)
What does it mean to have a holding in this world? The Hebrew word achuza refers to land to which one has a legitimate claim of ownership, but achuza also holds psychological meanings that include claims to legacy, continuity, belonging, and purpose. To have a holding on a place is to be committed to it in a way that is different than being either a landlord or a tenant. A visitor or itinerant doesn’t have a holding. The generation that wanders in the desert wanders their way to a holding. A family’s identity, and a people’s identity, are attached to what they do with their achuza.
One can inherit, purchase, or receive an achuza as a gift, but, as the word suggests, an achuza only comes to those who labor for it, who are active in some way. In the opening of the Talmudic tractate, Bava Metzia, we are introduced to the paradigmatic conflict of lost, stolen, and/or contested property in the phrase “shney ochazin b’tallit” (two people are holding a tallit, each one claiming sole ownership). We know that from an objective point of view, the tallit only belongs to one claimant, but from the subjective point of view, both are holding it, and so in some sense it does belong to both. The language of achuza in the Talmudic passage is ironic, for the very word that refers to ownership suggests that ownership is always complicated and contested. If one were truly a secure owner of the tallit, one would not need to hold it at all. But in zero-sum conflicts about legitimate ownership, holding something becomes a form of tug of war. One holds on for dear life. One grips the holding only to the extent that one does not have a grip on it.
God promises Abraham the land of Canaan as a perpetual holding, an achuzat olam, but the fact that the land is named here for the Canaanite inhabitants, and not the Israelites, suggests that to take hold of something means to change it, and to change oneself in the process. The entire land of Israel is referred to as an achuza, not just in Genesis, but in Deuteronomy, when God tells Moses to ascend Mount Nebo and look upon the promised land.
Earth and soil are natural phenomena, but property is a human device. An achuza only exists where human beings have taken hold of a plot of earth, and turned it into their place on earth. If land in itself has a kind of naturalism about it, achuza has a kind of artifice about it. The second example of an achuza in the Torah, the first being God’s promise to Abraham, is Abraham’s purchasing of the Cave of Machpela from Ephron. One of the first achuzot we meet is a burial site.
In Numbers, the two most famous cases of achuza are both exceptional and exemplary. In one case, the daughters of Zelophehad seek to inherit their father’s holding, to carry on his lineage, even though, until their case it was not customary for daughters to inherit. In the other case, the tribes of Gad and Reuben request that their achuza be not in the land of Israel proper, but just next to it, on the other side of the Jordan River. The two cases foil one another. In one case, a marginalized group steps up to the plate and becomes more responsible than was previously thought possible. In the other case, a group of people decide to lessen their responsibility, by taking themselves physically away from the main action. Both groups achieve their achuza, the legacy of one being a legacy of opting in and the other being a legacy of opting out.
The stories of Zelophehad’s daughters, on the one hand, and the Gadites and Reubenites on the other, present us with alternative models for relating to spiritual destiny. In one model, spiritual destiny is something that we must seek out and make for ourselves, by asking to be called rather than waiting for a calling. In the other model, spiritual destiny is a given. The Reubenites and Gadites can rest easy knowing they are part of the people, and can thus focus on optimizing (in their limited view) for economic opportunity. They can live outside the land, because their specific place of residence is not the final word on their sense of connection to the Israelite endeavor. One teaches aspiration and ambition, the other comfort and contentment.
Aspiration without contentment is anxious and listless, but contentment without aspiration is complacency and decadence. Zelophehad’s daughters are both disadvantaged and advantaged by virtue of their social position, for their lack of recognition and ownership leads them to a level of willfulness they might otherwise not know. The Reubenenites and Gadites feel no desire to live in the land of Israel, by contrast, because their status is less in doubt. They have nothing to prove. But their plot outside the Land of Israel is still called an achuza, all the same.
In some sense, the story of Zelophehad’s daughters is a story of conversion (or baal teshuva), the story of the Reubenites and Gadites, a story of de-conversion (or chozer l’she’eyla), but both are metamorphoses, and both are stories which have their place, their holding in the story of national formation. Some people need the intensity of deprivation to motivate a desire to belong and lead; others are tired of the burden of assumed leadership and need to go their own way, drawing just outside the lines of their assigned place. It’s worth saying that the Gadites and Reubenites remain adjacent to the Land, not far away.
The Torah speaks of achuza when it speaks of liminality, those who belong and don’t belong at the same time. In this regard, the Talmudic story of two holding a tallit reflects an originally Biblical ambivalence; only in the Torah, it is not so much two different people who fight over a tallit, but two tendencies within the Jewish nation that struggle with one another—one is a tendency to see Judaism as a function of grace, the other as a function of effort; one as a function of God’s (grandfathered-in) promise to Abraham, the other as a function of spontaneous revelation born of the moment (the Torah reveals us the law of inheritance through the case law of Zelophehad’s daughters, rather than a simple, codified rule).
The tension goes back to Abraham’s journey—is Abraham selected by God because he is already good and wise, or does Abraham only become good and wise by saying “yes” to God’s invitation to “leave yourself”? Why would God invite Abraham if Abraham were not already good and wise? A moderate answer to this question is that Abraham is not yet good and wise, but he is on the way to being so. He is an aspirer and is rewarded for his aspiration. The perfect reward for an aspirer is a journey to an unknown place, a journey to an achuza.
This is the paradoxical meaning of an achuza—it is both a place to which you have a claim and a place you have not yet claimed because it is the place to which you aspire. A physical place can be settled, but an ontological place is a life’s work, even the work of many generations.
How fitting that the Torah sets us up with a divine promise to Abraham about an achuza and ends with Moses looking at the same achuza, but not actually holding it. And in the middle, gives us two edge cases of achuzot. Now, thanks to both Zelophehad’s daughters and the Gadites and Reubenites we have a literary-moral holding in their example. The Torah is an achuza—one which we can touch even when we live on the other side of it. It is also one that we can take hold of even if or when we seem to ourselves and to others unfit for it. For as Zelophehad’s daughters can see —if they don’t take hold of their ancestor’s holding, who else will?
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh