2 Nephi 29 (II)

2 Nephi 29:5 O ye gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them. Have not sought to recover them--as in have not tried to help them return to Israel and displace the Palestinians living there? In politics, the relationship with Israel is always an interesting topic, because I am not convinced that America's role in the world needs to be the big brother type, who is pulling the younger siblings apart as they squabble over their toys. If this is saying that we are under condemnation for not doing more to return the Jews to Israel, then I may have to rethink that. Of course, I always struggle with limiting the Jews to the tribe of Judah, when spoken by prophets who lived hundreds of years prior to Christ, and within liven memory of the transplantation of the other tribes. In this particular case, Nephi isn't even of the tribe of Judah, making it doubly unlikely that in his mind, recovery means helping one tribe (not even his) recover specific lands. Remember, Judah was granted only a small portion of the lands modern day Israel is trying to reclaim. (Here's a map of ancient Israel's land allocation


And here's a map of modern day Israel



You can pretty clearly see that modern day Judah is claiming lands that formerly belonged to his brothers, which may or may not be part of the appropriate course of action. Like I said, I'm not convinced that the US needs to be telling Abraham's squabbling boys how they need to share.

Is it perhaps a spiritual recovery that Nephi is referencing? Spiritual recovery would mean that we are supposed to recover them to the covenant graces of God, through baptism and recognition that Christ was their Messiah, despite not saving them from Roman physical bondage, and it gets us out of the semantics of whether Judah should inherit all the lands given to Abraham, because we should teach the gospel to all the world, and when everyone is baptized, you can confidently say that Abraham's descendants are all baptized, thus, recovered. The biggest problem with this is that we sometimes choose to look at a physical instruction as a spiritual instruction because it's easier to pat ourselves on the back and say, "I prayed for the poor lost Jewish souls, so I'm meeting the clear injunction to recover Israel and now I can stop thinking about them and go to Heaven" than it is to work toward a physical recovery. I'm not sure which is correct, but there are clear prophesies about modern nations being the suckling parents of scattered Israel, that are hard to put into spiritual terms.