by Frances Degen Horowitz, delivered at Minyan M'at


Added to our usual celebration of Shabbat today are two special events. One is the celebration of those graduating – completing a segment in their educational journeys; journeys of academic achievement and signal accomplishments. The other is the celebration of some personal journeys as Floyd and I, and our close, long-time friends, Jerry and Eileen Siegel, this weekend mark each of our covenantal journeys in marriage across 50 years.

So it is perhaps fitting that today’s Parsha is also about journey – the preparations for the beginning of the journey from Mt. Sinai to the Promised Land. Unlike Michael Paley, I did not approach this Parsha thinking it is or would become a favorite though, as I studied, its richness and its presence in our lives today became increasingly evident. Our Parsha follows on Bemidbar with its account of the census and the organization of the tribes around the Mishkon and the Tent of Meeting, and then Naso, with its Priestly Blessing, Moses setting up the Tabernacle, and the contributions of each of the twelve tribes to the Tent of Meeting.

Beha’alotecha opens with the last of the preparations for the use of the Tabernacle, with Aaron putting up the lamp-stand, the Menorah, and the purification of the Levites. But then, the Parsha settles in to take up the narrative where it was left at the end of Shemot, the people Israel being readied for the journey to the Promised Land.

In the course of reading this Parsha one is struck by its links to current practice and symbols: The Menorah, perhaps Judaism’s most enduring iconic image; and Chapter 10’s verses 35-36, that we recite whenever we take the Torah from the Aron Kodesh, the symbolic remnant of the Mishkon: V’yahi binsoa ha’aron, vayomer Moshe, kumah Adonoy, v’yafustzu o’yevecha, v’yanusu mishanecha, mipanecha, “And when the Ark was to set out, Moses would say: Advance, O lord, may your enemies be scattered, And may Your foes flee before You.” And when we return the Torah to the Ark we finish the verse: uvnuho yomar: shuva Adonoy, rivavot, alpi, Yisroel, “And when it halted he would say: Return, O Lord, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands.” (Etz Hayim, p. 826.)

And then there are the descriptions for the long and short trumpet blasts, Tekiah, Teruah, Tekiah - which it is said, formed the basis for the Talmud’s specifications for the blowing of the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah. As well as the story of the second Passover, the first “annual” observance of the remembering of the deliverance from Mitzraim, with the injunction to eat unleavened bread with bitter herbs, the source for our current Seder practice of the Hillel Sandwich. (Etz Hayim, p. 820)

And, of course, the Tent of Meeting with the Mishkon and the Tablets - or as Everett Fox prefers, The Tent of Appointment, which he notes has also been called the Tent of Rendezvous, or the Trysting Tent – the site of the Tabernacle, the portable center of Judaism and the Jewish people, now not the Tablets but the Torah scrolls in the Ark, in the Aron Kodesh.

Fox suggests that the whole of Bemidbar is structured in three parts: The first 10 chapters contain discussions and descriptions of the Wilderness camp; Chapters 11-25 he names “The Rebellious Folk, Narratives of Challenge; and the last ten chapters deal with the Preparations for the Conquest of Canaan. Our Parsha, Beha’alotecha, chapters eight to twelve, thus straddles the first two sections – completing the description of the Wilderness camp before the people Israel set out on the journey to the Promised Land, and then the first of the Rebellion narratives.

Interestingly, like the Menorah, like the verses accompanying the receiving and the putting away of the Torah, like the Tekiah, Teruah, Tekiah trumpet blasts, and the Hillel Sandwich, the Rebellion narratives, if not in specifics, but in kind, have a remarkable continuity to the present. For it would seem to be the case, from Biblical time onward, that in addition to a being stiff-necked people, we are surely a kvetchy, argumentative, rebellious people – railing at God, quarreling with our leaders, and among ourselves. Tranquil, resigned to whatever fate has in store, and docile, we are not. Not when it comes to the smaller matters such as the appointed time for a communal dinner, or to the larger matters of destiny and compromise. Nor is that ever the ideal – not then, not now.

One might expect such a quarrelsome people to have long ago split up, gone disparate ways, and died out. For so many communities that have had names and even places has that been true. Rashi (2002 edition) interprets the complaining in Beha’alotecha about not having the right kind of food, and the expressed yearning for the supposed halcyon days in Egypt – as just a pretext for those who would really like to be released from the obligations they now regard as onerous. They complain but they are not released. As we, the Jewish people today, among those of us who complain and talk of rebellion, hold fast to a stubborn sense of Clal Yisroel even when patience is tried, and disagreements intensify. Though we have fractionated into sub-groups, seen souls depart for other kinds of lives, are disputatious and warring at times among ourselves, we can take sustenance from the fact that a semblance of Clal Yisroel has maintained across our recorded history.

Many have tried to analyze and understand why this has been so: The language of our people, Hebrew, as a unifying force; persecution, discrimination, and oppression that reinforces “us vs. them”; a set of oral and literate traditions that facilitate generational transmission; and, perhaps most critical, the portable center, the portable Torah – and the overwhelming powerful emotions that are associated with an enduring, portable covenant.

It is not original to note the contradiction in terms – the portable and the centered – since “portable” is moveable and “center” has the connotation of stationary and unmovable. But it is just this paradoxical juxtaposition that perhaps can be credited as the critical factor in the continuity of Clal Yisroel – centering a whole people and centering as well the individuals who accept the covenantal pact we make as members of the Jewish people. The endurance of the individual and the collective commitment to the covenant has been made possible by the mobility, both physically and intellectually, of the Torah – it goes where we go on our journeys; it moves with us over time with successive interpretations, all the while anchored in an unchanging text and the concept of a covenantal relationship to God, if one wishes, or a covenantal pact with the spirit and basic social values of the law inherent in the Torah.

This central covenant relationship is forcefully represented in the physical presence of the Tent of Meeting and the relationship of the people to the Tent of Meeting. The spatial choreography is telling. Most of the time the Tent of Meeting is not to the side, the back, or in front of the people but in their midst –in the center of the camp, in the center of the life of each individual. And across time that physical Tent of Meeting in the middle of the people evolved into an abstract metaphor for covenantal relationship that anchors a people -that anchors and binds each individual to personal commitment and responsibility.

It is in some ways amazing that the metaphor did not weaken and evaporate. Instead, it strengthened. It strengthened because the physical centeredness of the Tent of Meeting, with the Mishkon and the Tablets, were replaced by an equally powerful portable Torah that had meaning only if it was actualized in the values and precepts by which its people lived, only if it was a part of the life journeys of that people. Thus is it that to be a part of the Jewish people is to take unto oneself the responsibility to be personally centered by a core set of Torah values. This duality of communal and individual responsibility with no intervening agent or object can be seen as a most remarkable recipe for the stability of a people, for the stability of individuals, as a powerful leit-motif to accompany the journey of a people and the life journey of individuals.

In Beha’alotecha there is described the elaborate preparation to make ready for the journey upon which the Israelites were to embark, -contentious and rebellious at times, but centered by the covenant. On this Shabbat as we celebrate in the Minyan the markers on the educational journeys of all who are graduating as well as an anniversary marker in the journey of marriage, we are perhaps reminded that these kinds of journeys also had their preparations. And as we stop along the way to commemorate the journeys each of us has taken, with all their pleasures and all their challenges, we can think of these journeys to date as themselves preparations for the journeys to come, for each of us and together. For we do not live our lives in separate epochs but cumulatively. We live cumulative lives, as individuals, as couples, as members of a family, as friends, as a community. And when our cumulative journeys, past and future have the anchors of law and community, with the centeredness that is enabled by the enduring portable covenant, then do our journeys hold always the possibility to be journeys of sweet pleasures and deep satisfaction. May it be so for each of us and for all of us.

copyright reserved by the author