Parshat Bmidbar 5766 - In the Wilderness

Parshat B’midbar 5766 (Numbers 1:1-4:20)
This week we begin the book of Numbers, which in Hebrew is known as B’midbar, translated best as in the wilderness. Both names are appropriate. Both at the beginning and towards the end of the book, there is a lot of census and genealogy data. But in between that data is the story of the journey of the Israelites in the wilderness between Sinai and the east bank of the Jordan River, when they are almost ready to cross into Israel.

A friend of mine, who is giving a D’var Torah this week, was mentioning to me about how difficult trying to come up with a topic for discussion is when all you have is census data. I told him I have a hard time ever getting past the first two verses. I have a hard time getting past that single word B’midbar. Another friend who is doing the Torah reading at that same service also was talking about the difficulty of chanting her Torah portion, and I totally agreed with her that all the Zakef Gadolim in there makes hers a lot more difficult. But using the cantillation marks in their duty as punctuation, the two verses I find so challenging to interpret read like this:

1.
And the Lord spoke to Moses
In the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting
On the first day of the second month, in the second year
After they came out from the land of Egypt, saying,
2.
Raise the heads of all the congregation of the Israelites
By families, by the house of their fathers,
By the number of names,
Every male by their head;

Last weekend, I got to study several times with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner about Hasidic thought and mysticism. At the Sunday session he read a rather interesting quote found at the beginning of his book Invisible Lines of Connection that I really liked. It’s a story about Rabbi Kushner and his wife getting ready to hike on a wilderness trail, and noting all the warnings about bears on the trail. Asking a local ranger about if it the trail was totally safe the reply was, “If it was totally safe, it wouldn’t be a wilderness, would it?”

In Hawaii, I thought similarly while hiking to the active lava flows in Volcano National Park. The signs and warnings for various hazards on the trails, from dehydration to toxic sulfur dioxide emmisions, aerosolized glass inhalation or falling into a lava pit from a cave-in were everywhere. Here the idea of a trail was nothing more than a four-inch high sticky reflector adhered to the Shimmering black cooled, hardened lava flow. It was indeed wilderness, taking me almost fifteen minutes to climb lava flows the 300 yards from the paved road this previously hot lava oozed over only a few years ago to an observation point overlooking where lava fell into the sea, making new land in a huge cloud of toxic steam about a mile away. This was the “Safe trail”. The other trail would have meant climbing over these same lava flows for about another half a mile, and in the noonday sun I decided against it.

The power of the wilderness was very apparent here. It controlled what was going on, not people. No matter what civilization constructed, it was no match for the lava. The land here is always changing. And moving from the safety of an asphalt paved road to climbing over very uneven lava it occurred to me how much that wilderness not only changes the landscape but those who wander in it.

While the book of Numbers talks of accounting in the literal, on a deeper level, this is an introduction to something more, to a book of recounting, of telling stories. As several teachers have pointed out to me such a pun does not exist only in English but in the Hebrew as well, and in a rather large abundance. As R. Allen Secher once pointed to me, the word for wilderness is also the word for mouth, or the present tense verb to speak. And, As R. Mordechai Gafni points out in Soulprints, The word for number is also the word for Story. Add to this an observation: it is hard to tell a story looking down, but one has to look up into the eyes of the listeners to tell an effective story. Conversely, telling one’s story makes us more open to others, raising our heads. In B’midbar, the words for taking a count is raise the head. Put together, we have an interesting idea, that the census is not a mere headcount but a convocation of story, a time where all who were responsible enough to tell a story, which at the time were males over twenty, told their story.

For a lot of the book of Numbers we will have such a story. It is not a chronicle just of what Moses does or heard at Sinai, but a chronicle of many people, all with their own story. We will once again meet Miriam and Aaron, of course. The rest of their lives will be chronicled here. Yet Balaam, Balak, Korach, Joshua, Caleb, Dathan, Abiram and Pinchas will also be integral to the story. B’midbar starts with stories of great failure and hopelessness, but ends with stories of triumph. Joshua may start as the spy no one believes, but ends as the head of an unstoppable army, and next in line for leading the people. And what changes people might be their environment, the wilderness and the stories that are there.

While on the big Island of Hawaii, while either climbing lava flows or driving on the switchback roads, past jungle or prarie, I thought of wilderness. On the island of Oahu, I thought about story, but in a different context. While taking a tour of the island, I was more than a little irritated on the number of times there were references to television shows, particularly the currently filmed one, Lost. I have never seen the show, (I’m studying Biblical Hebrew at the time it’s on) but given the media attention, one would think this was a true story, with every plot twist even more critical to our lives than the current body count in Iraq. But as my experience with the Chicago Tribune demonstrated to me recently, not even true stories are completely true.

Then there is the early media attention to The DaVinci Code movie, and an odd thing about religion-based movies: that they will be taken as truth. Many feared that the “Mel Gibson movie” would be taken as truth and a rash of anti-Semitism would ensue. On the other hand, others feel their name is damaged by the novel The DaVinci Code as they are portrayed as the bad guys, and the proposition that much of the bible is false. Funny thing is, the ones we are most concerned about taking fiction as fact are followers of a teacher who had loved the use of the mashal, the parable. And funnier even still is that the modern majority do see it as mashal or pure entertianment and not fact.

Throughout rabbinic texts, starting with early Mishnah, we find an expression To what is this compared to? To… This is an introduction, in one form or another to a mashal, a story which really didn’t happen but whose purpose is teaching and bringing meaning to a difficult concept by changing the way we look at the essential issue. Here’s an example from Sukkah 29a:

Our Rabbis taught, When the sun is in eclipse, it is a bad omen for the whole world. This may be illustrated by a parable. To what can this be compared? To a human being who made a banquet for his servants and put up for them a lamp. When he became wroth with them he said to his servant, ‘Take away the lamp from them, and let them sit in the dark’.

In some ways the book we begin this week is the mashal of human development and of the many frailties of the human condition. It’s also how we can overcome those same frailties and become a stronger person and a stronger humanity. It’s about truly being our fullest self so we can fully serve God. The mashal of the wilderness itself tells us much, as does each of the stories of the Israelites as they live with the world in the wilderness.

Another Story that R. Lawrence Kushner last weekend told is instructive. He tell us of a congregation he used to lead were he had invited the youngsters to see the main sanctuary and to see what a Torah scroll looked like. But his time ran out, and he never got to open the Ark. So he told the kids that next time they got together he’d show them what was behind the curtain at the front of the sanctuary. When the kids got back to their class room they excitedly wondered what was behind the curtain, one child said that there was nothing, one said that it must be Jewish books, yet one rather sagely said, “No it must be a mirror.” And indeed in one sense it is a mirror, as is the stories within it. It is for us to now write the story of ourselves, true or false, fact or mashal, from our stories and from the stories told to us by others, to raise our heads in our own story, in our own development in the wilderness which is existence, reflected in the text of Torah.