AND THE LORD SPOKE TO MOSES, SAYING: DO NOT ON ANY ACCOUNT ENROLL THE TRIBE OF LEVI NOR TAKE A CENSUS OF THEM WITH THE ISRAELITES.

(Bamidbar 1:48-49)

 

Do not on any account enroll the tribe of Levi

When God told Moses, "Do not on any account enroll the tribe of Levi...," Moses was worried and said, "Could it be that there is something wrong with my tribe, that God does not want to count it?"

God told Moses: "I did not tell you that. Rather, it is in order to exclude them from the decree [of punishment], so that they shall not die with them, as it is written, nor take a census of them with the Israelites. Why is this? Because the Levites are Mine, and the Levites shall be Mine: everyone who brings Me closer - I bring closer. They drew themselves near to Me, for it is said, And Moses said: "Whoever is for the Lord, come to Me!" And all the sons of Levi joined him (Shemot 32) - They brought Me close, so I bring them close, and the Levites shall be Mine. It is only because they were found to be loyal to Me in that they observed My warning, You shall have no other god... (Shemot 20). That is why they merited to be the trusted of My house: And you shall put the Levites in charge.

(Bamidbar Rabbah 1:12)

 

At that very hour [while the Israelites worshipped the calf], only one tribe remained loyal to the Lord and His Torah. They protected the character of the Torah; that it is beyond human control. It saved them from the people, protecting even from those close to it. That tribe was the tribe of Levy, now appointed as the Torah’s "guardian," and distinguished from the people for that purpose. It was not part of the eidah [community], but rather sanctified for eidut [a testament] which was the community’s ruling soul. That is why they were not counted amongst the Israelites.

(Rabbi S.R. Hirsch on Bamidbar 1:48 following Levy translation)

 

 

YOUR FOLLOWING ME IN THE DESERT

THE FORMATIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF ISRAEL'S DEVELOPMENT IN THE DESERT

Gili Zivan

The Parasha of Bamidbar, which opens the Book of Bamidbar, provides a propitious pretext for examining the significance which various thinkers assigned to the story of Israel's formation in the desert. What is the meaning of forty years of wanderings in the desert prior to the entry into an inhabited land? Desert is the antithesis of an inhabited land, the opposite of civilization. It is a place where man is dependant upon God's beneficence, no less than upon man's favors. Is it a place of freedom, or a place of fear?

Shulamit Hareven masterfully described the atmosphere of that desert experience, capturing something of the feelings of the Hebrews fleeing their Egyptian masters into the great desert:

Tremendous freedom, vast, larger than the measure of man, stood in the air. There was no scheduled order of the day, it seemed as there was no longer any order in the world... there was neither master nor slave. There was unthreatening desert, and crevices... the silence could be felt. Infinite skies...

There were no sounds. A few bleats of a flock, a few human voices in a crevice and by the water... here and there the sharp screech of a desert bird. Their ears were cleansed of all sounds of a settled land, of the shouts of the taskmasters . (From the trilogy "Thirst" - "The Hater of Miracles")

What is the function of the desert? Freedom from the sounds of Egypt? From the voices of the master and the slave? From the noises of the Nile and its magicians? What is the import of the fact that that the first moments of Israel's formation were not in its own land?

We shall examine this problem through the eyes of three modern thinkers: Erich Fromm, Franz Rosenzweig, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

The psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm (born in Germany in 1900, moved to the USA in 1933) saw in the wanderings of Israel in the dawn of Jewish history evidence of Judaism's struggle against the god of acquisitiveness. The forty years of desert wanderings are forty years of being, of human existence which does not seek to define itself through ownership. This is the period during which the slaves of yesterday become aware of the development of a different sort of relationship, human relations which are not founded upon relations of ownership and acquisitiveness. The desert is the most important symbol of liberation from the definition of 'self' by property:

The desert is not a home. There are no cities. There is no property. It is the place of nomads who have that which they need, and all that they need is life's essentials, not belongings... life in the desert as preparation for a life of freedom. (Erich From, Ownership or Self-Realization, p. 59, emphasis mine - G. Z.)

They gathered as much as they needed to eat" (Shemot 16:18), the Children of Israel were not allowed to hoard food:

Here, for the first time, is a formulation of the principle promulgated by Marx: "Each according to his needs." The right to receive food is determined without limit... the second command is against hoarding, covetousness, and acquisitiveness. The Children of Israel are forbidden to hoard anything until morning. (Fromm, ibid., p. 60)

The struggle against acquisitiveness, then, is expressed through the restriction against gathering on the Shabbat and by the command to gather a double portion on the Sixth Day, for the Sixth Day and for the Shabbat. According to Fromm, the Sabbath is not only a day of rest; it is an expression of life without acquisitiveness, without transfer of objects from domain to domain, without purchase or giving over of property, without transfer of ownership.

On the Sabbath Day, one lives as though he possesses nothing, he is engaged in simply being, that is to say, in expression of his essential abilities; praying, study, eating, drinking, singing, and loving.  (Fromm, ibid., p.61, emphasis in the original - G. Z.)

This basic element of the Shabbat was emphasized by the philosopher and theologian, Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, in his book The Sabbath - Its Meaning for Man Today. In his view, the Shabbat is a kind of freeze of the race for the material; it is the "Sanctuary in time" which is erected not by "aggregation of that which is," but by enrichment of being. "Not everyone who increases possessions increases individuality." (Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, The Sabbath, p. 11 of Hebrew edition, emphasis in the original - G.Z.)

The wanderings in the desert, like the Shabbat, are an unusual way of life, devoid of possessions and ownership of land. Their goal is the internalization of the idea that man is defined not only by his possessions; in the words of Fromm, "man is what he is, not what he has."

Did the nation of slaves succeed in shedding their attitudes towards ownership and acquisitiveness in the desert? It seems that "the Children of Israel cannot live without ownership" (Fromm, ibid., p. 62). The failure of the revolution is also evident in the light of the behavior of the tribes entering Eretz Yisrael, and in light of the development of Israeli monarchy. In contrast, the prophets and the sages of the Talmud, in Fromm’s opinion, continued the struggle against the sanctification of place and property.

A different approach to the significance of Israel's formation in the deserts of Sinai is offered by the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), author of The Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig develops a unique historiosophy in his attempt to understand the uniqueness of the Jewish nation in relation to the rest of the world: the Jewish people is distinct from the nations in that "blood kinship" suffices, it does not need land, earth, in order to express its eternal message. The Jewish nation's religious peculiarity obliges it to rise above settlement of land, because, although "it nourishes... it also chains." The Jewish people, which lives in "eternity", not in "history", must overcome the nationalist, enslaving, chains, and to give itself over to the life of eternal faith.

The nations of the world... they sink their roots into the night of the earth, which is in itself dead but life-giving, and from its long existence, they draw guarantees of their own longevity. (Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, p.324 in Hebrew edition).

However, he adds that the danger lies where "a nation loves its homeland more than it loves its life"; "If nine times this love saves the homeland from the hand of the enemy... on the tenth time, there will remain only the most beloved, the land, but the life of the nation itself will come to an end" (ibid., emphasis mine - G. Z.). This devotion, argues Rosenzweig, is liable to bring about the nation's end.

It seems that two stories provide the background for Rosenzweig's harsh vision of the land shackling its defenders to death, to the oblivion of the nation: the story of German nationalism and its victims, as was revealed to soldier Franz Rosenzweig, the young German-Jew stationed in the Balkans during the First World War, and in contrast, the Biblical story of the birth of the Jewish people, a story with a totally different message.

The story of the Jewish people begins with the father of the nation, Avraham, who came from afar in obedience to the divine order to leave his land and birthplace for a land which the Lord was to show him. Further on in the story, we meet the Jewish nation for the first time, as it departs Egypt for the great desert. These narratives of our genesis express, according to Rosenzweig, Israel's non-dependence upon territory, the a-historical message and the non-nationalistic character of this people.

It is made into a nation... in exile, first in Egypt, and later in Babylon... It always preserves the non-dependence of a traveling knight, and as he roams in faraway places... and longs for the native land which he left behind, he is more loyal to his land than he was when he dwelt in it.  (Ibid, p. 324)

Rosenzweig compares Judaism with Christianity, and claims that Judaism is comparable to fire and has already reached the eternal, in contrast to Christianity which is comparable to the ray of light and is charged with the mission of spreading the truth. Therefore Christianity struggles, battles, conquers, and lives in history. Judaism, on the other hand, having already reached the eternal, realizes itself by its very existence. Christianity is the path of the eternal; Judaism is the life of the eternal. Thus, Zionism is conceived by Rosenzweig to be a dangerous striving for normalization. An abnormal nation cannot solve its problems in a normal fashion (i.e., with the aid of territory). The Jewish nation must build Jewish spiritual organizations, and not a Jewish state.

The last thinker, whose views on the formation of Israel in the desert I wish to mention, is Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He, too, notes that "the Torah was not given in the land of its mission". (Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Seven Years of Discussions on the Weekly Parasha, p. 291) The observance of the Torah is not dependent upon a specific land. The Torah, in the words of the Midrash, was given "in public domain", a place not subject to private ownership, a place belonging to all. "Whoever wishes to take [it], let him come and take [it]." Or, in the words of another Midrash: "Just as the desert is ownerless property [hefker], so are the words of Torah hefker, free for all to take." The aim of the Midrash, says Leibowitz, is:

To dissuade those who think that the worship of God is contingent upon Eretz Yisrael... The Torah was given to man as man, and not to a native of Eretz Yisrael or any other place. Eretz Yisrael is the framework determined for the existence of the Jewish people... but in no way are the mitzvoth and the validity of Torah tied to territory... This must be stated in sharpest terms in opposition to all those many good Jews, who, in their innocence, invest effort to transform the nation of God ["Am HaShem"] into the nation of the Land ["Am HaAretz"]. (Ibid, p. 291-292, emphasis in the original).

In his acute style, Leibowitz, the Zionist, living in the sovereign Jewish State, points out the danger latent in sanctification of the land. It seems that, even without adopting Rosenzweig's existential-mystical conception of the Jewish people, he echoes the fear of transforming territory from means to an end.

If, despite the historical distance of Rosenzweig's words (who knows? Would he have revised his approach had he lived until the Shoah?) and their naïveté, their implied warning for a nation which has long forgotten the desert experience remains valid: The warning not to sanctify dead earth to the point of the extinction of those who dwell upon it.

Fromm's warning also takes on significance with our taking root in the land, becoming a society with possessions and acquisition. Every affluent society is liable to fall into the jaws of the golden calf. Definition of 'self' or 'the other' by means of property and ownership is a natural tendency for a human consumer society, but in the desert narrative - as in the concept of Shabbat - lies latent the challenge of a different self-definition.

In conclusion, I wish to mention another midrash in the spirit of Fromm's words, one which sees the desert as a spiritual state, one emptied of self-esteem, a state of total attention to the voice of the 'other' (the transcendental, or the one who is nearby).

And God said to Moshe in the Desert Sinai - Whoever does not make himself as an ownerless desert, cannot acquire wisdom and Torah, therefore those it say In the Desert Sinai. (Bamidbar Rabbah Parasha 1)

Only one capable of making himself 'as a desert' to listen to others and to the wisdom of 'the other' can - as did Moshe - hear the voice of God speaking to him at the Desert of Sinai: "And the Lord spoke to Moshe in the Desert Sinai..."

Dr. Gili Zivan is the director of the Ya’akov Herzog Center for Jewish Studies on Kibbutz Ein Tzurim.

Editor’s note: Dr. Zivan’s article was published in an earlier edition of Shabbat Shalom (238), but since it remains relevant, we have chosen to reprint it.

 

 

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may those who love you be at peace

And Rabbi Yohanan said: God said: I shall no enter the heavenly Jerusalem until I enter the earthly Jerusalem. But is there a heavenly Jerusalem? There is, for it is written, As a city joined together [i.e., of two parts]

(Tehillim 122).

 

As a city joined together - Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: A city that makes all Israel comrades.

(Yalkut Shimoni Tehillim 879)

 

In the world to come, when The Holy One, Blessed Be He will bring the exiles back to Yerushalayim, He will return them in peace, as is written, "Pray for the well-being of Yerushalayim; May those who love you be at peace" (Psalms 122:6). And it is also written, "I will extend to her peace like a stream" (Isaiah 66:12).

(Midrash Tanhuma Tzav, 7)

 

Peace is not just a matter of an ethical tendency. Working for peace is a constant cultural effort, sublime and powerful, work towards which all the most productive forces of the nation should be directed. We must consider: What will be the end result of all the ever-increasing divisions - the parties, the federations and the factions, the organization and the minyanim, the ideological streams and the platforms - if we do not find a single Tel-Talpiyot [Mound of trophies - a poetic reference to Yerushalayim] which will hold high the banner of all the people, and which will unceasingly and effectively promote the unity of the nation, smoothing out of the rifts, and the bonding of aspirations. Just as we recognize and believe that the salvation of Israel will come through beginning the overt end, - which will be done by us, with the strength which God has given us to succeed - to purchase the land, to redeem it, to work it and build it up, to conquer it with cultural and practical conquests. So must we become more and more aware that the spirit of God which was upon Eliyahu, "to reconcile parents with children and children with their parents", to make peace in the world, to resolve all controversies - of which must be revealed also in our spiritual action, action of the entire nation, by its finest forces, scholars who increase peace in the world.

(From a letter to the representatives of the Mizrachi to the Zionist Congress, Iggrot HaRAYaH of Rav Kook, zt"l, letter 671)

 

 

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