The Commandment to Redeem the Land

The Commandment to Redeem the Land gives religious purpose to the pursuit of Jewish property and settlement, but the novel places that purpose inside concrete financial and political struggles. Through Michel Sommo’s appeals, activism, and dealings, land redemption becomes at once a commandment, a fundraising cause, and a means of shaping who owns and inhabits contested territory. The contrast between sacred justification and practical negotiation—along with Alexander Gideon’s scrutiny of the schemes—keeps the commandment from appearing as an abstract doctrine alone.

Religious Meaning and Personal Appeal

Michel presents land redemption as a duty connected to the restoration of the homeland and to religious life. In a letter to Boaz, he welcomes the young man’s work with other young people, describing their cultivation of the land and production of bread through labor as fulfillment of that duty. He praises Boaz’s progress while continuing to urge him toward observance, making the work a basis for renewed connection even where religious disagreements remain.

Michel later tells Boaz that he has left teaching and now devotes much of his time to land redemption with comrades from the Jewish Fellowship Movement. He invites Boaz to visit without obligation, suggests that he could take a security job, and presents participation as an opportunity to work, learn Torah, and contribute. The invitation makes the commandment practical: it offers Boaz a place in a collective project, not merely an idea to affirm. Michel also says that the family would help with money if needed, joining religious welcome to material support.

Alkalai House and the Cost of Redemption

The Sommos’ request to Alexander A. Gideon makes the financial scale of the cause explicit. Their letter seeks about $60,000 to pay off a mortgage and add a room and a half, and another comparable sum for the future of Boaz and their daughter, totaling $180,000 for those needs. They request an additional $95,000 toward purchasing and renovating Alkalai House in Hebron, a Jewish property in the Jewish Quarter that they say was seized by force during the 1929 Palestine riots. Their stated plan is to repossess it by paying the full market price rather than through violence.

The appeal places family provision and land redemption side by side: the requested contribution for the house is additional to the money sought for the household and the children. It also presents a particular account of the property’s history and a specific method of recovery. The religious cause therefore depends on financing, legal ownership, and a claim about past dispossession; the language of redemption does not remove those practical and political conditions.

Michel’s Political Program

Michel’s engagement with land is part of a wider political history. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, he campaigned against the government’s wait-and-see policy and supported taking the military initiative. After the war, he volunteered for the Greater Israel Movement, where he worked in propaganda and demonstrations. He left that movement in 1971, later made a public display of resigning from the National Religious Party, and helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement in 1972. He remained on its executive committee.

After the Yom Kippur War, the Jewish Fellowship Movement protested troop disengagements in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights and attempted to purchase land illegally from Arabs around Bethlehem. Michel was interviewed by police twice in connection with the organization’s activities but was not charged; the investigative account says it found no indication that he personally took part in violent lawbreaking. It also records his published advocacy of encouraging Arab residents to leave Israel and the occupied territories through financial inducements. This record makes clear that the commandment’s political setting includes not only acquiring property but also proposals about population movement and territorial control.

Transactions and Alexander Gideon’s Scrutiny

In correspondence with Michel, Alexander A. Gideon examines the organization’s proposal to pay Arabs for their land and property and provide one-way tickets for departure. He questions the projected expense, working through the stated offer of $20,000 per person against a population of roughly two million and arguing that the cost could exceed the value of the state itself. His response proposes, with evident irony, exchanging the coastal plain for the mountains rather than financing mass relocation. The exchange exposes the gap between a seemingly orderly financial plan and the scale of its human and economic consequences.

Gideon’s scrutiny extends to a proposed transaction involving Bethlehem, Toulouse, and property in Zikhron Yaakov. He identifies a Paris supporter who, he says, financed Michel’s trip and helped secure the restoration of his French nationality, providing a legal basis for negotiations on the organization’s behalf. Those negotiations concerned land west of Bethlehem belonging to a Christian religious order based in Toulouse. Gideon understands the prospective arrangement as an exchange: the order’s fields near Bethlehem for a substantial building with land inside the pre-1967 borders. He also notes that completion of this arrangement depends on whether he sells his own property in Zikhron Yaakov, a decision he may yet change. Sacred purpose here runs through a chain of financiers, citizenship, property, and conditional exchange.

Money, Family, and the Commandment

The cause also shapes the terms on which Michel imagines family money might be used. In a later letter, Alexander A. Gideon says that the $107,000 he sent in three unequal installments appeared to leave the Alkalai House contribution abandoned; he urges Michel to contribute a further $120,000 to what he calls a sacred cause. He links the requested donation to divine justice and to the possibility that Boaz might one day live in the house. The appeal turns land redemption into a proposed form of moral reparation, while also making clear that the money is contested and that its intended use is not settled by the religious language surrounding it.

Michel’s confidence in the availability of Gideon’s wealth appears elsewhere in Ilana’s account of their household. As Michel learns about plots, loans, property law, and development, he treats Gideon’s money as potentially available to him, Ilana, or Boaz, and imagines it supporting the redemption of the land. That expectation sits uneasily beside Gideon’s questions about the organization’s proposals and the family’s repeated requests for aid. Across these episodes, the commandment remains both an ethical claim and a practical instrument: it can invite labor and solidarity, justify political aims, and attach religious significance to financial demands and property transfers.