ALIYAH: CONFLICT AND AMBIVALENCE

from the Scriptural positive precept that God commanded us to possess the Land and settle it. Therefore, this must be a Torah commandment for all generations that obligates each and every one of us, even in an age of exile, as we learn from the Talmud in many places,...“Dwelling in the Land of Israel is the equivalent of all the other mitzvot of the Torah .”

The Ramban ’s entire exposition is based on the premise that the Torah has divinely commanded the People of Israel to settle in the Land of Israel. Therefore, this commandment must be one of the 613 Commandments of the Torah . Maimonides left it out of his list; Nahmanides corrected his oversight.

MITZVAH VIS-A-VIS REALITY

In view of his ideological and theological stance, we might have expected that the Ramban would have shown the way to Spanish Jewry by going on aliyah to Eretz Yisrael, which he had extolled in his halakhic and kabbalistic writings, commentaries, and poetry.

On the contrary, we find him in his native Gerona almost all his life, first serving as its rabbi and then as the spiritual and temporal leader of the Jews of Spain , as the chief rabbi of Catalonia . Then, in his sixty-ninth year, the watershed year of 1263, King James of Aragon , at the urging of the powerful Dominicans, ordered the Ramban to engage in a disputation with the apostate Jew and now Dominican monk , Pablo Christiani . The Nahmani’s conduct of the theological contest as well as his later treatise on the disputation, Sefer HaVikuah, aroused the wrath of the monks that initiated the debate. The Dominicans demanded that the rabbi be severely castigated. Pope Clement IV sent a bull, dated 1266 or 1267, to King James calling for

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