We take land for granted.  It is just there as is the air we breathe and the boundless faith that we will live forever.  The land is not just there.  It is property and can be owned and used for many purposes some of which are antithetical to life including the air we breathe.  In my mind I feel the greatest problem is the quite common belief that land can be bought and sold by us humans and that gives us the right to pervert its potential to be useful to all living things.  We have carried ownership too far and beyond the “history” of a slave people who journeyed for forty years through the “wilderness” and desert to a land promised them by a God in whom they believed and a place characterized as “flowing with milk and honey.”  And therein lays a convoluted history of exchanges in land ownership and the spawning of endless chains of war over ownership of that land and the living beings left alive in war’s wake.

I am concerned with the fact that Moses lived long enough to write a whole book, Deuteronomy, from which I will take my portion to be read in my second Bar Mitzvah.  The Torah tells of the disposition of the land the Hebrews are to occupy with just a few chapters. The military conquest is turned over to Joshua while the bureaucratic details are left to Pinchas, the grandson of Aaron who died before Moses.  It is the recording of these very meticulous words that has given us great grief over land ownership and I would like to put forward my understanding of the history of land possession from that day to this.

In the sense that no one person can claim forever that land belonging to a people is a personal possession, we can discern that ALL land is owned by a PEOPLE and that personal use is conditional.  I would also like to remind my readers that for thousands of years land belonged to the king of that land. Use of it was granted for favors received and the class structure of nobility, theocrats and the business elite were given ownership of the land  while there was an underclass of workers, serfs, peons, or slaves who did the will of those who were better than they.  This, too, is an inheritance from the time of Pinchas, the lawyer type, who divided the power of Moses (who spoke with and for God) along with the militarist and conquest oriented Joshua.

Land obviously cannot be taken for granted.  I did so when I bought into my Condominium.  In looking over my apartment’s papers I discovered that there was a 99 year lease on the land owned by the builder.  In trying to find out why there was a change in the address where the checks for paying our share of the lease, I was informed that the land was considered owned “In Perpetuity” by a new LLC. I will do battle over this interpretation which is not only wrong but, I think is illegal in the State of Florida.  But, it all goes back to Moses and Pinchas and the land.