The Chumash lists the travels of the nation of Israel from their leaving
Egypt until they are standing on the Jordan River opposite Jericho poised to
enter the Holy land. Rashi (see Numbers 33:1) brings the Midrash Raba that the
recounting of the various campgrounds is analogous to a king whose son took
sick. After the son was healed his father enumerated the places they traveled
saying here we slept, here we were cold, here we were worried about your head.
Similarly the Holy One, blessed be He, is saying these are the places where you
angered me therefore it refers to them as travels (Bamidbar Raba gimmel).
The next section of the Midrash Raba is somewhat different in that it
praises the places in the desert that hosted Israel. It continues that in the
future the holy One blessed be He will reward them like a person who hosts a
religious scholar in his home. The verse, “Desert and wasteland shall rejoice over
them, and the plain shall rejoice and shall blossom like a rose”, (Isaiah 35:1),
is quoted. Rashi explains that “the plain shall rejoice” is the plain of
Jerusalem (Bamidbar Raba dalet).
The contradiction is rectified by the Or HaChaim. To paraphrase Israel’s
journey in the desert was in order to find and collect the sparks of holiness.
For example an unprincipled person would be forced camp in the desolate desert
among the snakes, vipers, and scorpions, then the dedicated of Hashem would
tread there to remove the bad ideas from his head. The reason that Israel would
camp in one place a year and in another twelve hours, was because that was the
time necessary to quarry the sparks that had fallen to that place. The underlying
goal always was to properly apply a principle to its relevant details. The
perfection of holiness revolved around reconciling the heavenly presence,
Israel, and the Torah. The details are the 600,000 souls of Israel and the
principles are personified by Moshe our Rabbi. So to speak he is the tree from
which sparks the sixty myriads were drawn. The successful conclusion is
breaking the fangs of those that abuse and a precise selection of that which is
holy.
The basic idea of the travels of Israel in the desert is the acquisition
of wisdom. The beginning is learning from others, after that one specifically
learns the traditions of the past from a teacher. The final step is to meditate
on this knowledge in order to understand the fundamental reasons and make
appropriate inferences. The reason these places are listed is because they are
the places that the nation of Israel learned something. The reason they are
called travels is because after the people learned what they needed to learn it
was time to move on.
The parsha ends with the conclusion of the intermittent story of the
daughters of Tzelafchad. The holy One blessed be He had commanded that
ancestral parcels of the Holy Land should be given to all adult men. The
daughters of Tzelafchad objected saying that this it is unfair because their
father’s name will be lost because he only had daughters. With that the law was
amended to allow girls to inherit the family plot in the absence of a son. Tzelafchad’s
tribe, Menasha, then objects saying this may result in their tribal land going
to another tribe. At that point the daughters of Tzelafchad agree to only marry
a man from their tribe and the issue is successfully resolved.
The give and take, Aramaic shakla v’tarya, of this debate is what much
of the Gemara is composed of. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto lists seven components
of a Talmudic inquiry; the original propositions, questions and answers to
establish validity, disproofs and proofs of existing legitimacy, difficulties
and excuses. The idea is to arrive at a refined principle of law. To a certain
extent this is what the children of Israel were learning in the wilderness and
what the Jews are presently learning in this long exile.
This is where the narrative of the Chumash ends. Mariam perishes in the
first month of the fortieth year after the exodus from Egypt. Aharon perishes
on the first day of the fifth month of the same year. Moshe perishes on the
seventh day of the twelfth month. The remainder of the Torah is his final
discourses.
The Chumash in many ways is an unfinished book. The Tanakh more or less
ends with the construction of the Second Temple but is still an unfinished
book. Even if Moshe crossed the Jordan River and built the Temple it would
still not be a satisfying ending. The only satisfying ending is the perfection
of man and the beginning of the Messianic era. The symbol of all of this is the
land of Israel. This is what Rabbi Nachman of Breslav meant when he said, “My
place is only in Eretz Yisrael, and wherever I go I’m going to Eretz Yisrael.
It’s just that, in the meanwhile, I’m stopping in Breslov.”
From here we can understand something about the death of Moshe Rabenu in
the desert. Just like Moshe struggled to rectify his soul and his world but
never saw their perfection, we must do the same, as it says in Ethics of our
Fathers (2:21), “You are not responsible to finish the work and neither are you
free to ignore it. If you learned much Torah, much compensation will be given
to you and the Master of the work is faithful to pay you the wages of your
labor. And know that the recompense of the righteous is in the time to come”.
לע"נ, הדוד ,לייב
הערש בן אהרון ז"ל נלב"ע י"ז תמוז תשל"ב
Acknowledgements to websites:
תורת אמת, וויקיטקסט, http://dictionary.reference.com/,
http://hebrewbooks.org/,
וגם בדואר אלקטרוני
ניתן באתר http://dyschreiber.blogspot.co.il
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