Nothing Lacking in the Land

A Land wherein you shall eat bread without scarceness, you shall not lack (lo techsar) anything in it, a Land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you may dig brass.                 Deuteronomy 8:9

            Ba’al haTurim connect our verse’s use of the words “lo techsar” with that in I Kings 17:14:

For thus says the Lord God: the jar of flour shall not be spent, neither shall the cruse of oil fail (lo techsar), until the day the Lord sends rain upon the Land.

            My father explained that just as oil continued to flow from the jar for as long as the widow of Tzarfat continued to pour [v.16], so too our verse’s blessing is that as long as Israel works its Land, the Land will provide its bounty.

            Further, Ba’al haTurim notes that the final letter of the word “techsar” is written in a Torah scroll with decorative “crowns”, because the Land is “the beginning of the dust of the world” [Proverbs 8:26] (our Sages [Babylonian Talmud Ta’anit 10a] understood the verse to mean that the Holy Land is the dearest part of earth for God).

            My father noted that our Sages [ibid.] taught that it is through the blessing of the Land that the remainder of the world receives Divine blessing, and this, in turn can happen only when Israel is within the Land.