Tag Archives: Transformation

Masei, Numbers 33:1-36:13

Masei, , , ,
Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/masei

 

12 Tribes

 

Living Your Own Narrative

By Mark Kirschbaum

Perashat Massai begins by stating:

‘These are the journeys of the Children of Israel who left the land of Egypt and Moshe listed their goings and comings, by the word of God, and these are their comings and goings’.

After this is a long list of where the people camped and where they moved on to, all beginning ‘…and they left place X, and encamped in place Y…

There are several textual peculiarities that are noted by the Midrashim and commentators:

  1. the first word, eleh ‘these’,  is not preceded by the usual ‘and’, meaning, by Midrashic convention, that this section is set off from the texts preceding it (as opposed to it being written ‘v’eleh’).
  2. The odd word appearing later, motzaeihem ‘the place they left’’ provokes comments, as does its chiastic use in the verse, first mostzaeihem l’mas’eihem ‘where they came from and where they went’, later maseihem l’motza’eihem ‘where they went and where they came from.’
  3. The dangling clause, al pi Hashem, ‘by the word of God’, is ambiguous- is it that the Israelites traveled by the word of God, or listing by Moshe of these stations that was commanded by God?
  4. The obvious question: Who cares what places were traveled past? Is there any purpose whatsoever to this list of transient camp sites the people passed through on their way from Egypt to the Land of Israel?

As is frequently the case, the Midrash offers several alternate possible purposes imparted by this itinerary review, so as we are discussing lists, here’s another list:

1. To commemorate God’s miracles which were performed at these places, so that the events that transpired at these locations would not be forgotten. This theme is picked up by the Ramban as well, but one would have to say this approach is at best problematic, as we have, indeed, forgotten what happened at most of these places.

2. The Midrash quoted by Rashi grants this passage a message related to healing and growth; on their way home, a father might point out to his now healed son all the stops along the way to the hospital where the son had crises- so too Moshe is instructed to record all the places where the people angered God. Thus, this approach is meant to recall the actions of the people as they matured, at these places, so the list serves as a growth chart.

3. The Midrash states that these places are recalled in order to, as it were, thank the places themselves for their hospitality in letting the Israelites camp on them.

These approaches are repeated by the medieval commentators, and appear in the Hasidic writings in a transformed manner. For example, the Mei Hashiloach, in Perashat Devarim, cites midrashic approach number 3, but ‘in reverse’. Rather than thanking the places, as in the Midrash, it is to exonerate the people by placing the blame for any problems upon the place itself, that is to say, if the people sinned in a certain place, it was the fault of an inhospitable environment, not the people. Their sins were the result of a bad “situation”, so to speak.

Still, the critical question remains, why does the contemporary reader need this list of place names?

The Baal Shem Tov is quoted by the Degel Mahane Ephraim as teaching that the 42 journeys enumerated here, which correspond to the 42 letter name of God, represent the development of spiritual stages along the way of each and every individual, and could be decoded if one only knew how to interpret the place names properly.

Following the Baal Shem Tov’s lead, other thinkers try to pinpoint exactly what it is at these places that correspond to our lives. The Degel Mahane Ephraim, and the Kedushat Levi, for example, both suggest that there were spiritual challenges faced and won by the Israelites at these sites, which explains the odd word ‘motza’eihem‘ as being derived from the term ‘nitzotzot‘, spiritual sparks or quanta, which were transformed and assimilated by the people at each of these places.

The Degel adds that these sites had to be enumerated by Moshe because the people themselves were unaware at the time that they had brought about this spiritual sublation, as is so frequently the case. However, Moshe, being in a superior spiritual situation, was aware of these spiritual victories, and therefore could detail them, and this information is what is being transmitted to the people, that in these places something of importance was accomplished.

The Arvei Nahal is bothered by this approach, however- he is bothered by what is now a standard sci-fi trope:  if these journeys and stations were necessary fulfillments of a 42 stage development of holiness, then how could this spiritual journey have been accomplished in God’s original plan, whereby the people go straight from Egypt to Israel? After all, we are taught that it was the sins of the people that led to this prolonged itinerary…

The Arvei Nahal answers that in different spiritual states different amounts of physical actualization are required. Had they not sinned, ‘all these journeys would have been rectified without needing any journeying at all’…

(I do suggest reading the actual answer of the Arvei Nahal in the original text; he sets this answer in the context of the difference between spiritual imagining of martyrdom vs. the actual act of  dying as a martyr, and presents a sensitive bit of consolation to victims of crisis,  claiming that those who give their lives ‘al Kiddush Hashem’, who are martyred as victims of spiritual persecution, do not suffer. Were that were true. In the last few weeks my sleep has been frequently disturbed in thinking of all the  children that were killed in the recent weeks, as well as a NY Times Book Review article regarding the SS death squads; there was a story cited of one Nazi soldier who marched on proudly carrying a still sighing one year old on his bayonet. I pray that the Arvei Nahal is correct).

To the Sefat Emet, it is the journey that is the message. This repeated clause, ‘comings and goings’, is to remind us that in every person’s life, every step towards something is also a step away from something (… you’re sick of hangin’ around and you’d like to travel; get tired of travelin’ and you want to settle down, I guess they can’t revoke your soul for tryin’…); in this textual instance the 42 journeys forward plus the 7 sites reached in retreat (see Rashi in Bamidbar 26:13) correspond to the 49 levels of impurity traversed by the people en route from Egypt (lowest rung) to Israel (highest rung).

Every step towards a goal is a step away from past failures, but how do we become conscious of this process in our own everyday life? After all, we see ourselves every moment of the day, it is hard to notice change in our weary busy lives… The Sefat Emet answers, it is in the review, in the act of each person looking back at their own life journey, it is looking at the big picture of where you’ve been, where you are going, and what you’ve learned from all those moments that effects the transformation and elevation of each of these episodes in retrospect into a spiritual journey.

To the Tiferet Shelomo, this kind of consciousness is not only about a big picture, but even from moment to moment, with every interaction, every time one speaks.  He sees the odd term motza’eihem as not being derived only from ‘nitzotzot‘, as we saw earlier, rather he sources it to the phrase ‘motza’ot hapeh’, literally translated as ‘speech outputs’to teach that our utterances, our words, can travel farther than we know, have ramifications way beyond our intentions, sometimes the right word at the right time in the right place can be utterly transformative.

A theme of these reading on the ‘comings and goings’ of the human journey is that we are not always aware of the monumentality of seemingly trivial events in our life; sometimes an unplanned random episode or chance conversation might affect the whole world…

So let’s return to the first textual problem noted earlier.  The verse opens with the word eleh, ‘these are the journeys’ vs. v’eleh, ‘And these are the journeys’. As we noted earlier, it is a midrashic principle that if there is no ‘and’ at the beginning, it signifies that this passage represents a break from what was transpiring previously, that something new is occurring, that a new story is about to happen.

This break from the previous text suggests that the listing of place names is in some way a novel event, a new episode. What new episode can we find in a seemingly formulaic recapitulation of places visited?

I submit that this listing of place names signals a transformative moment in the people’s consciousness, the crucial first recognition of shared history.  Previously they were a band of freed slaves who seemed to wander from one place to another, things simply happened as they do in nature.  The wandering freed slaves are about to enter the land, and become a free people, with their own independent story. The people will now have a History, a collective narrative. By virtue of this narrative, by recounting the places the people have journeyed and thus engraving into collective memory ‘places where things happened’, the wandering freed slaves become transformed into a People with an epic saga. By listing these places, Moshe has constructed the ‘narrative’ of the early history of the Jewish People. As Paul Ricoeur explains:

…the activity of narrating does not consist simply in adding episodes to one another; it also constructs meaningful totalities out of scattered events. This aspect of the art of narrating is reflected, on the side of following a story, in the attempt to ‘grasp together’ successive events. The art of narrating, as well as the corresponding art of following a story, therefore require that we are able to extract a configuration from a succession…

Thus, in the simple act of listing all the places where the people have been, which in other contexts may simply be the result of chance, Moshe has transformed a group of people into the People, with a story, a history, a narrative, with all that it implies in terms of a ‘living project’ for the future. The Netivot Shalom adds that even if we don’t understand how to decode the specific names listed here into corresponding moments of our personal spiritual bildungsroman, the mere encounter with this perasha, and the idea of a meaningful sequence in our lives, is in a sense already transformative of how we think of our own personal evolution.

Recognizing the transformative nature of the personal narrative, realizing that our life story is in fact a story, is already a step towards attributing meaning to our existence. A critical component of the Jewish concept of teshuva, ‘repentance’, involves a review of where the events of our lives have taken us, how we have responded, and how we might act differently faced with a similar challenge. It is worthwhile to recognize the centrality of the narrative function in our own self estimation; it is not in vain that the Rabbis, in discussing the acts of repentance and reconciliation used the metaphor of a ‘Book of Life’. Our lives are not unlike a text, a book, a book we ourselves author with a text made up of each and every life choice we make, a volume in which every individual is their own dramatist, “and what a long strange trip it’s been”…

Kirschbaum, Mark. "Living Your Own Narrative." Tikkun Daily Blog. (Viewed on July 26, 2014). http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/07/20/weekly-torah-commentary-matot-massei-2-essays/

Ki Tissa, Exodus 30:11-34:35

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/kitisa

Transformative Power

By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch

The story is told about Franz Kafka that the last time he visited Berlin, he chanced upon a little girl in a park awash in tears.

When he inquired as to the reason for her distress, she sobbed that she had lost her doll. Compassionately, Kafka countered that not to be the case. The doll had merely gone on a trip and, in fact, Kafka met her as she was about to leave. He promised that if the little girl would return to the park the next day, he would bring her a letter from her doll. And so Kafka did for several weeks, arriving each morning at the park with a letter for his new friend.

As his tuberculosis worsened, Kafka decided to return to Prague where he would soon die at age 41, but not before buying the girl another doll. Along with the doll came a letter in which Kafka insisted that this was the doll that belonged to his friend. Admittedly, she looked different, but then on her long trip the doll had seen many remarkable sights and gone through many searing experiences. Life had changed her appearance. (Jack Wertheimer, ed., The Uses of Tradition, p. 279).

Of the many meanings in this profound parable I wish to focus on the most obvious: that a transformative experience alters us externally as well as internally. This is the point of the closing narrative of our parashah. The second time that Moses ascends Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments–that is after the debacle of the golden calf–the Torah uncharacteristically gives us a profusion of details. In contrast to the brevity of description pertaining to his first ascent (Exodus 19:18-25; 24:1-4;31:18), the Torah now divulges that Moses stayed atop the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights without eating a morsel of bread or drinking a sip of water (34:28).

The intensity of this experience of the divine sets Moses’ face aglow permanently, striking his people with fear. Thereafter, Moses would cover his face with a veil, except when he entered the Tent of Meeting to talk with God or when he addressed the nation (34:29-35).

This exceptional passage is marked by vocabulary equally rare. While the noun keren–meaning “horn”–shows up often in the Tanakh, the verb karan (same consonants), meaning “to emit rays,” appears only here. Hence the mistranslation by the Vulgate to the effect that Moses came down with horns, a sign of sanctity. Similarly the noun for “veil” masveh, is unique to our narrative. Clearly, subject and language join to underscore the impact on Moses of being in God’s presence for an extended period of time.

The description interfaces with two earlier passages. As the Israelites grow uneasy over the delay in Moses’ return from Mount Sinai the first time, they suspect that he is but an ordinary, fallible mortal (33:1). Aaron, on the other hand, who serves as the Tabernacles’ chief priest, is distinguished by his ornate vestments. The radiance on Moses’ face counters both perceptions. Transformed by his experience, Moses stands out among mortals, a leader without need of special garments. The visible manifestation of his inner state sets him apart from the ordinary or conventional.

The midrash imagines the change to have occurred in one of two ways. One view suggests that God actually touched Moses as he cowered in the crevice of the rock. It was literally God’s hand that shielded Moses as God passed by to give him a glimpse of the divine presence (33:22). The other conjectures that as God instructed Moses atop Mount Sinai, Moses absorbed some of the divine sparks that emanated from God’s mouth (Tanhuma, Ki Tissa, no. 37). Either way, whether by physical or spiritual means, the aftermath of the golden calf effected a lasting transformation in the appearance of Moses.

To be sure, the external is only a reflection of a reality that is internal. Is that not the mark of a great portrait painter like Rembrandt that he makes the face reveal the soul of his subject? Grace should be visible. Thus when we find ourselves in the presence of a truly great scholar of Torah we thank God in a berakhah for having endowed someone who fears God with divine wisdom. The labor of a lifetime exudes an aura of equanimity.

On a smaller scale, what happened to Moses is replicated in our own lives each week with the observance of Shabbat, a topic taken up twice in our parashah (31:12-16; 34:21). As the light radiating from Moses’ face attested to his relationship to God, so integrating Shabbat into the rhythm of our lives infuses an extrasensory dimension of existence into our being. Both are a sign signifying the convergence of the holy and profane, of that which is eternal and that which is passing.

Janus-like the Sabbath reminds us of the cataclysms by which God created the cosmos, even as it provides us a tad of a foretaste of the peacefulness that awaits us in the world-to-come. By expressing our reverence in rest, we gain a measure of renewal. The combination of prayer and study, of food, family and friendship imbues us with an expansion of spirit, a veritable extra soul that leaves us only as the Sabbath fades away.

But we enter the work week illuminated and restored with a touch of eternity to carry us through the ordeal of the mundane. At best, the spiritual respite has transfigured our demeanor, like Kafka’s doll.

Schorsch, Ismar. "Transformative Power." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on February 15, 2014). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/kitissa_jts.shtml?p=0

One G-d?

By Elisha Ancselovitz

Living can be painful. Economies can collapse. Does it matter whether people believe in one G-d, multiple gods, or no G-d? Does it matter whether the Jews in this week’s Torah portion serve the G-d who speaks through Moses or the merely superior god of a pantheon who rides on a young bull (Exodus chapter 32)?

Let us begin answering this question by acknowledging that Jewish mysticism has included various imageries of a multi-personality G-d and that Jewish philosophy has included a G-d without a personality, and that some Jews have even believed in Satan’s free choice. More importantly, let us acknowledge that if G-d cared about correct theology for His own sake, G-d would no longer be good, as in one who acts for the sake of others. In other words, let us begin answering by acknowledging that theology cannot be important for its own sake.

If theology is not important for its own sake, our other option for understanding the problematic of idolatry is to examine what G-d in Tanach ultimately desires of humans (however we imagine that G-d), to discover the contra to idolatry. In answer to that question, we turn to the three explicit prophetic statements of G-d’s desire. Each prophet states in oratorical parallelism that G-d desires goodness:

The first is: “He has told you, O man, what is good. And what does the Eternal require of you other than to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your G-d?” (Micah 6:8) The second is: “Let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me as the Eternal who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth. For these things I desire, declares the Eternal.” (Jeremiah 9:24) The third is: “For I desire kindness and not sacrifice Knowing [or Internalizing] G-d over burnt offerings.” (Hoseah 6:6)

According to the prophets, the point is to live with one solitary G-d, an underlying source of reality that is Goodness and calls for Goodness. Sometimes we will find ourselves in a period of Revelation and we will hear and see G-d in thunder and lightning (Exodus 20:14). Sometimes, with a blink of an eye, we will feel ourselves abandoned in the desert, like the Israelites this week. Other times, we will find ourselves in a world of evil like Elijah the prophet, and we will not find G-d in powerful manifestations but rather in a thin silent voice:

“…Then a very strong – mountain and stone shattering before the Eternal – wind blew, but the Eternal was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Eternal was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire, there was a quiet, gentle sound.” (1 Kings 19:12-13)

No matter what manifestation of G-d we experience and in whatever theological form, the Biblical commandment is to connect with and express the reality of Go[o]d[ness].

Ancselovitz, Elisha. "Ki Tissa 5769." Limmud On One Leg. (Viewed February 15, 2014). http://limmud.org/publications/limmudononeleg/5769/ki-tissa/