Starting from the Stratosphere

Presumably, G-d was capable of splitting the Sea of Reeds prior to the Jews' plea for salvation (Shemot 14:21), there was no lack of water in the Divine reservoir before the Jews beseeched Moshe for something to drink (ibid. 15:26), the manna was available before the Children of Israel gave voice to their hunger (ibid. 16:3), and the Divine defeat of Amalek was no less possible before Moshe raised his hands toward heaven (ibid. 17:11). Why, then, were our ancestors compelled to plead for Divine assistance no fewer than four times in our parshah, and for the most basic of human needs – water, bread, and the defeat of their foes?

One might answer by citing the Talmud's explanation for childlessness of our ancestresses. (Yevamot 64a) The sages suggest that G-d calibrated His treatment of the matriarchs based upon the prayers he expected from those paragons of righteousness. However, this seems a cruel exercise for a nascent nation. Surely, a ragtag group of slaves, newly emancipated and entering an environment both foreign and hostile, could have been afforded the bare essentials of life while they found their equilibrium!

Indeed, the same question may be asked at the very start of the Torah. Adam and Chavah are formed on the morning of the sixth day of Creation, and given one instruction (Bereishit 2:16-17): Eat from all of the trees, except one. G-d places that one prohibited tree in the middle of the garden, where it is certain to attract their attention, and He assigns it great beauty. Why place such a challenging test before Adam and Chavah for their first day on the planet?

One answer might be found in a talmudic debate (Menachot 89a) regarding the way the kohanim calculated the amount of oil needed each night for the menorah in the Beit haMikdash. One view is that the kohanim started with a small amount, and added as needed until they determined the necessary quantity. A second view is that they started with a large amount, and reduced as they were able until they determined the necessary quantity.

The Talmud's focus on how the kohanim calculated their quota is odd; normally, the Talmud says of such discussions, "mai d'hava hava!" "What happened, happened!" Why do I need to know whether the kohanim started with a teaspoon of oil and worked their way up, or whether they started with a litre and worked their way down?

The answer may be that we are meant to learn from the philosophies behind each of the two oil-measuring approaches. As the Talmud continues to explain, the approach of beginning with a small amount is predicated upon the idea that G-d cares about the means of the Jewish people, and He does not wish to waste their property; therefore, the kohanim tried to use as small a quantity as possible. On the other hand, the approach of beginning with a large amount is predicated upon the view that the Beit haMikdash is a luxurious setting, and the poverty expressed by stinting on oil would be inappropriate for that venerated venue. The fundamental distinction between the two approaches is where we place our focus: Meeting our needs, or Rising to a majestic occasion.

Perhaps this is why G-d tested Adam and Chavah immediately after their "birth". Certainly, Hashem could have been patient with them, starting them slowly and having them work their way up to their full abilities. However, the Divine plan set the tone for their growth immediately, informing them that they were "a luxurious setting", like the Beit haMikdash. The spiritual poverty implied by early coddling would be inappropriate. G-d assigned them the highest possible test, and only after their failure did He make allowances for a lower bar.

Perhaps, too, this is why the Jews confronted thirst, starvation and the intimidating force of two separate foes in our parshah, all while taking their first, wobbly steps. Allowing a gentle "getting to know You" period out of concern for their welfare and emotional health would have been a case of what American President George W. Bush termed "the soft bigotry of low expectations". The Divine preference was to set the tone for our national existence by making the greatest of demands, establishing us as a luxurious setting, in which spiritual poverty would be unseemly.

The natural question, then, is how we will develop our own spiritual lives. Will we add a little bit of oil at a time, scraping by with a minimum of investment out of mercy upon our means? Or will we aim high, starting from the stratosphere and reducing only when we find it necessary? Let there be no poverty in our luxurious spiritual setting.

The Pioneer Women of Palestine

[This week's Toronto Torah is here!]

I'm delivering a shiur on Shabbos (in Hamilton) about "The Pioneer Women of Palestine" - the women's organizations and movements of 1882-1923 (hence the name "Palestine"). It's an update of a history class I developed in Allentown.

As part of the class, we'll note interesting parallels between the midrashic praise of the "Women of the Wilderness," the generation that entered Israel, and the experiences of the women who helped re-establish Jewish life in much of Israel in the First, Second and Third Aliyot. We'll look at Sejera, the Kineret Girls Training Farm, the Women's Workers Council, WIZO, Federation of Hebrew Women and more.

There is no space here (or time, for that matter) to expand on this, and as it's a Shabbos shiur there will be no recording. Nonetheless, in advance of Yom haZikaron and Yom haAtzmaut, here are some sources on the righteousness, and the love of Israel, of the Women of the Wilderness:

1. Talmud, Sotah 11b
Rav Avira taught: In the merit of the righteous women of that generation, the Jews were redeemed from Egypt. When the women went to draw water, HaShem prepared small fish in their pails, such that they drew half water and half fish. They then heated two kettles, one of water and one of fish, and brought them to their husbands in the field. They bathed and anointed their husbands, fed them and gave them water to drink, and lived with them.

2. Midrash, Pirkei d’R’ Eliezer 44
Aharon made a calculation for himself, saying, ‘If I tell the Jews to give me silver and gold then they’ll bring it immediately. Rather, I’ll tell them to give me their wives’ and children’s’ rings, and the whole idea will be nullified.’ The women heard and refused to accept the idea of giving their rings to their husbands. Rather, they said, ‘You wish to make a disgusting idol, which has no power to save you!’ They refused to listen.

3. Ibn Ezra to Shemot 38:8
They were servants of Gd, who abandoned the desires of this world. They gave their mirrors, which had been used to adjust their hair-coverings, to the Mishkan as a donation; they no longer had any need to pretty themselves. Instead, they would come to the Mishkan daily to pray, and to learn the Mitzvot.

4. Midrash Tanchuma, Pekudei 9
The women said: What do we have that we can give as a gift for the Mishkan? They stood and brought their mirrors to Moshe. When Moshe saw the mirrors he reacted with outrage. He told the assembled Jews: Take sticks and break these people’s thighs! Why do we need these mirrors? Gd told Moshe: Moshe! These are the ones you disgrace? These mirrors are what created the entire nation in Egypt! Take the mirrors and make them into the copper sink and its base for the kohanim, so that the kohanim will sanctify themselves with them.

5. Talmud, Sanhedrin 109b-110a
Rav taught: On ben Pelet’s wife saved him. She said to him: What will come to you from all this? If one is the leader you will be his student, and if the other is the leader you will be his student. On replied: What can I do? I am in the plot, and I swore to join them! She told him: Sit, and I will save you. She gave him wine to drink, made him intoxicated, and put him to sleep inside the tent. She then sat by the door and untied her hair, so that anyone who came to the door saw her and left.

6. Kli Yakar to Bamidbar 13:1
Alternatively, this is why the Torah specified that the spies were men, because the sages said that he men hated the land of Israel, and they said, ‘Let us set our heads in the other direction and return to Egypt.’ The women were the ones who loved the land, and they [the daughters of Tzlafchad] said, ‘Give us a share in the land.’ Gd said to Moses: In My opinion, knowing what I see in the future, it would be better to send women, for they love the land and they won’t speak disgracefully about it. Send them for yourself, though, according to your opinion, for you believe these men are righteous.

7. Rashi to Bamidbar 26:64
The decree of death issued for the sin of the Spies was not applied to the women, for they loved the land.

8. Midrash, Sifri Bamidbar 133
Rabbi Natan said: The women’s strength was greater than that of the men. The men said, ‘Let us turn our heads and return to Egypt,’ and the women said, ‘Give us a portion among the brothers of our father.’

9. Midrash, Bamidbar Rabbah 21:10
In that generation, the women fenced in the ruptures created by the men.

It's the middle that matters (Derashah - Masei 5768)

Some ten years ago I visited a good friend in the hospital; she was recovering from a life-threatening operation, and we talked about her two daughters, who were beginning their teenage years. I mentioned something about how people say kids grow up so fast; our son Amram was just an infant at the time, and already people were warning us about that.

She said something that has remained with me ever since; it went something like this: “I don’t wish I could keep them as they are. As long as I’m happy with the way they’re developing, the journey they’re on, I’m content.”

This, to me, is the message of the beginning of our parshah, with its exhaustive record of the Jews’ travels through the desert.


For a space of dozens of pesukim, the Torah painstakingly enumerates each and every step the Jews had taken, from one generic wilderness site to the next, on their way from Egypt to Israel.

And not only is every stop listed, but every stop is listed twice - “And they traveled from X and camped in Y, And they traveled from Y and camped in Z.” A simple X-Y-Z list would have been, apparently, insufficient.

Clearly, this is not an interesting travelogue for the reader - many of the sites along the way are mentioned nowhere else in the Torah, and have no familiar events associated with them. We know nothing about what happened in אלוש, or מתקה, or לבנה - their only mention in the entire Torah is in this list of highway rest stops. So why does the Torah dedicate all of this space to recording the nation’s trail?

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein suggested that this enumeration teaches us the value of journeys.


I’ve been reading a book called “Making the Corps,” about the Boot Camp training of a squad of United States Marines, and the way their experiences on Parris Island shaped them. The book breaks down every step of the Marine Corps indoctrination, analyzing its methods and results. As the books shows, removing any single step from that military journey would significantly alter the results - each part of the journey matters.

All journeys are about more than their beginnings and endings. Imagine an abridged version of The Wizard of Oz that would begin with a tornado and end with Dorothy returning to Kansas, skipping all of the adventures and crises, all of those points about courage and brains, etc. Hey, her ultimate goal was to get back home anyway, right? What’s the big deal? But few people would anyone be interested in a Wizard of Oz stripped of its middle.

Applying that to our parshah, then: Had the Torah just recorded that the Jews left Sinai and arrived in Israel, we would have missed the importance of the journey in between.


Witness this moment, at the end of the trip, through the eyes of Moshe Rabbeinu.

Moshe stands at the helm of this nation, just as he had stood there as a much younger man at Yam Suf, and as he looks back over a very long and exhausting road he perceives the development of each שבט, each family, each individual.

Sure, Moshe sees the leaders, Yehoshua, Kalev, Pinchas, as well as, yes, Korach, but being Moshe, who believes in leading כאשר ישא האומן את היונק, carrying every Jew in his arms, he also sees everyone in between.

Yehoshua, Kalev, Pinchas, Korach, those standout figures mentioned in each parshah are archetypes, individuals whose strong personalities and bold strokes of action represent the best and worst of the Jewish people, but among this nation of millions each and every life reflected mixtures of the writ-large traits of those leaders - and each of those lives evolved at אלוש, at מתקה, at לבנה, in ways that the biblical text could never have recorded but which those people, and their relatives, and their friends, knew quite well. Deaths, births, marriages, milestones of maturity, taking care of the animals, gathering the Mun and distributing it, engaging in Torah study and Mishkan labor and community tasks, all of these altered people’s lives, and helped them grow and change and develop.

The listing of each place name in the Torah is shorthand for those changes, a reminder for the people who had experienced them. When Moshe said, “We traveled from בני יעקן and camped at חר הגדגד,” Shmuel from the tribe of Dan nodded his head, remembering the crisis he had weathered there, in his own family. When Moshe said, “We traveled from חר הגדגד and camped at יטבתה,” Sarah from the tribe of Yissachar thought about the passing of her mother at that spot, and the way she had taken over a matriarchal role in the clan. And so on, and so on, for millions of people.

It was important for the Jews, parked at the entrance to Israel - to a new identity, to a new form of living, to a new relationship with HaShem - to take stock and remember where they had been, whom they had been, and where they were now, and whom they had become.

Arriving at the destination may have been their moment’s satisfaction, but travelling the journey was their life’s education.


The same lesson holds true for us, in our own lives.

The gemara reminds us that אגרא דפרקא ריהטא, the reward for learning Torah is in the journey to the shiur, the trip we take to get there - even if we will not fully understand the shiur, even if we will fail in our attempt to remember what we learned. It’s the journey.

Rabbi Tarfon said, לא עליך המלאכה לגמור, the key is not in completing tasks. Rather, it’s in our engagement, the journey, itself.

To quote Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, “It is important for a person to plan his future, but not to the extent that he perceives the present as purely a means to that end.” The present possesses its own value - as Moshe demonstrated in enumerating the 42 “presents” the Jews had experienced.


R’ Avraham Gombiner, in his halachic work Magen Avraham, recorded a practice of reading all 42 stages of the Jews’ trip together, without any interruption. The usual explanation for this practice is that the 42 stages represent a special, mystical, indivisible 42-letter name of Gd. But there is another explanation:

R’ Yitzchak Zimmer wrote that these 42 stages are a שירה, a biblical poem, a song like the Az Yashir song of thanks with which the Jews serenaded Gd after crossing the Sea, and like Devorah’s song of thanks after HaShem saved us from Sisra and the Canaanites.

I understand R’ Zimmer to mean that these 42 stages, recording as they do the Divinely-guided growth of each Jewish life along the way, are a hymn of thanks to Gd for the 40 years’ journey - for all of the challenges and obstacles as well as assistance, for everything Gd had done to help us grow.

Like my friend in the hospital, Moshe and the Jews were now able to look back at the border of Israel, to contemplate each stage they had endured, to feel satisfied, and to turn to HaShem, and say, “Thank You.”

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Notes:
1. Rav Aharon Lichtenstein's shiur is summarized here. He takes it in a direction from the one I did. He also sees this message in Rashi at the start of the parshah, but I'm not sure that's what Rashi meant in the midrash he cited.

2. Of course, much of this derashah reminds me of the famous "hyphen on the tombstone" idea, but it didn't really fit the derashah. Especially because we have a baby-naming this Shabbat, and I don't want to introduce unnecessary funeral themes; the dvar torah already lends itself to the Torah-Chuppah-Maasim Tovim journey.

3. The אגרא דפרקא ריהטא line is Berachot 7b or so, as I recall. R' Tarfon is in Pirkei Avot. The Magen Avraham is 428:8; see also Aruch haShulchan Orach Chaim 428:6.

4. R' Zimmer's line about the מסעות as a שירה, which he does not explain, is in an article from Sinai #68, found on-line here. This thought was really the inspiration for the entire derashah.

5. Of course, I am troubled by the fact that the whole 40-year trek was unnecessary, and really shouldn't be seen fondly at all... other than, perhaps, through the idea of making the best of what we have?