THE LORD SPOKE TO MOSES IN THE PLAINS OF MOAB, BY THE JORDAN AT JERICHO SAYING: COMMAND THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL THAT THEY SHALL GIVE TO THE LEVITES FROM THEIR HEREDITARY POSSESSION CITIES IN WHICH TO DWELL, AND YOU SHALL GIVE THE LEVITES OPEN SPACES AROUND THE CITIES. THESE CITIES SHALL BE THEIRS FOR DWELLING, AND THEIR OPEN SPACES SHALL BE FOR THEIR CATTLE, THEIR PROPERTY, AND FOR ALL THEIR NEEDS. THE AREAS OF OPEN SPACE FOR THE CITIES WHICH YOU SHALL GIVE TO THE LEVITES SHALL EXTEND FROM THE WALL OF THE CITY OUTWARD, ONE THOUSAND CUBITS ALL AROUND. YOU SHALL MEASURE FROM OUTSIDE THE CITY, TWO THOUSAND CUBITS ON THE EASTERN SIDE, TWO THOUSAND CUBITS ON THE SOUTHERN SIDE, TWO THOUSAND CUBITS ON THE WESTERN SIDE, AND TWO THOUSAND CUBITS ON THE NORTHERN SIDE, WITH THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE; THIS SHALL BE YOUR CITIES' OPEN SPACES.

(Bamidbar 35:1-5)

 

That the Israelites were commanded to give the Levite tribe cities in which to dwell, since they had no portion in the land, as it is said, Command the children of Israel that they shall give to the Levites from their hereditary possession cities in which to dwell...

The rationale of this commandment is well known, that the tribe of Levi is the most choice of the tribes and the best prepared to serve in the Lord's House. They had no portion with Israel of inherited fields and vineyards, but in any event they needed towns in which they and their children and infants and all their animals could dwell. Thanks to their high station, their able deeds, and their worthiness, their land was chosen over the lands of all the other tribes to shelter those who committed accidental manslaughter, since perhaps their land, which was sanctified with their sanctity, could grant atonement. There is another rationale for this matter, that since they were men of good heart and knowledgeable in the higher virtues and the honored forms of wisdom, everyone knew that they would not despise the murderer seeking refuge with them, nor would they touch him, even if he had killed someone beloved of them or someone from among their redeemers, since he killed them suddenly and without malice. It was said concerning this chosen tribe: Who says of his father and mother, "I did not see him" - that is to say: they will never do anything that is not on the straight path and intending towards truth; their hearts will not be inclined by love of persons, even love of father and mother and brothers and children (love of whom is demanded and made necessary by nature), all the more so [they would not be swayed by] the love of other, unrelated, people.

(Sefer HaHinukh Commandment 408)

 

These are the marches - What is Worth Remembering?

Debbie Weissman

In fond memory of our dear friend,

Gerald Cromer, z"l

Whose life's journey was cut off in its prime

Until a year ago I thought, in my innocence, that I understood Rashi's famous comment on the beginning of our parasha:

These are the marches... It is analogous to a king whose son became sick, so he took him to a far away place to have him healed. On the way back, the father began citing all the stages of their journey, saying to him, "Here we slept, here we were cold, here you had a headache etc."

I thought that it was out of love that the father (or, in analogy, God) wants to remind his son of the various stations of the journey, perhaps in the spirit of, I recalled the kindness of your youth, how you walked after me through the wilderness.

Last year I happened to spend Shabbat Parashat Massei in Sydney, Australia. I prayed with Kehillat Masada, which is served by a young rabbi of South African extraction named Gad Krebs. Rabbi Krebs quoted a text with which I was not yet familiar - the book Ma'ayan Beit HaSho'eva, which appeared in 1994. It was written by a Torah scholar who had lived in the United States, Rabbi Shimon Schwab (1908-1993). Rabbi Schwab was originally from the Torah im Derekh Eretz community in Germany on the eve of the Second World War.

Commenting on parashat Massei, Rabbi Schwab writes: "...we must pay attention to how the list of marches skips the great events of the Jewish People such as the splitting of the Red Sea, the Manna from Heaven, the miracle at Mara, the giving of the Torah, the building of the Tabernacle, and more, while mentioning some things that do not seem to be essential..."

He says that these apparently inessential items include, among other examples, and the Egyptians were burying in verse 4, and how they camped in the mountains of Abarim, in front of Nebo (verse 47). "It seems," writes Rabbi Schwab, "that it does not come to list all of the events the Israelites experienced in their journey, but rather it comes to point out those places where it would have been appropriate for the Jewish People to undergo an awakening, but they did not awaken."

As the midrash states in Bamidbar Rabbah 23:3: "He listed for them all the places where they angered Me."

Again, we find Rabbi Schwab writing in his commentary: "That is, "Here we slept" and did not awaken to consider God's miracles and wonders, "here we were cold," that their earlier enthusiasm was not tended and it grew cold... "here you had a headache" when the Israelites lost their shepherds and remained without a head... "

In other words, far from listing the high points of Israelite faith, the stations listed here mark the "fashlot" [Israeli slang for "fiascoes"] that befell the Israelites on their journey. The first fashla involved their not recognizing God's miracles, the second was their loss of enthusiasm, the third their lack of leadership.

Instead of continuing to use the slang term fashla, I will use an especially meaningful Hebrew term: hahmatza [the wasting of an opportunity]. This past Passover I was wondering about the connection between the Song of Songs and the holiday during which it is read. The Song of Songs does not speak of a consummated love, but rather of a missed opportunity for love. One of its central motifs is that of, My beloved slipped away...I asked for him but did not find him. Does the notion of hahmatza in its deeper sense serve as a link between the Song of Songs and Passover? That is an important and interesting question that would take us beyond the framework of the present article.

We, as the heirs of the Israelites who crossed the wilderness, have also inherited their propensity for wasting important opportunities. How many opportunities for promoting peace and social justice have we wasted over the past sixty years of the State of Israel's existence? It seems that this year we again missed an opportunity to transform the Sabbatical year from a time for wars between different kashrut certifications into an education-normative experience of the highest order.

Let us return to Rabbi Schwab's three explanations and examine them in the light (or perhaps the shadow) of our present situation.

a) Failure to recognize miracles. It would be too easy to repeat the (to my mind justified) criticism made by religious Zionism against the Ultra-Orthodox, most of whom do not recognize the miracle of our people's return to the Land of Israel and the ingathering of the exiles. With all of the qualms that some of us have regarding Israeli government policies, the existence of the State of Israel, in which we speak Hebrew and organize our lives around the Hebrew calendar, constitutes a manifest miracle, especially since it was established just a few years after the Holocaust. Be that as it may, I would like to mention two other twentieth century revolutions that perhaps should also be viewed as miraculous. The first is the feminist revolution, which empowered women in general and Jewish women in particular. Thank God we have been privileged to see a generation of Jewish women who are learned in Torah. May the Jewish community learn to avail itself of the power and talent of women! The other revolution took place within a significant segment of Christianity in its relation to the Jewish People and tradition. True, there have been pitfalls along the way, but it is impossible to deny the fact that there have also been successes. For more than sixty years, organizations such as the International Conference of Christians and Jews have sponsored welcome cooperation between members of different faiths across the world. The "Keshet" club, a group devoted to study and dialogue between Jews and Christians, has existed in Jerusalem for about forty years. Many Christians come here to learn about Judaism in the Land of the Bible. The heads of many churches are officially engaged in fighting manifestations of anti-Semitism.

b) "Cooling down." It is true that our messages are complex and not prone to being formulated in facile slogans, but it is a real shame that political "moderation" and religious tolerance and openness are seen as signaling a lack of enthusiasm and even as involving a kind of coldness. For example, there is in Israel an organizational framework sponsoring dialogue between rabbis, ministers, and imams. That organization is called "Kedem." At first the word Kedem was understood as an acronym for Kol Dati Matun ["a moderate religious voice"]. At one point the participants themselves exclaimed, "We are not religious moderates, we are firebrands!" The name was reinterpreted as Kol Dati Mefayes ["a reconciling religious voice"].

It is told of R. Haim of Brisk that his students once saw him traveling in a coach through the streets of the town on Shabbat, a bent-over man sitting by his side. The next day a student asked him, "Honored Rabbi, I did not know that you were lenient regarding the laws of Shabbat!" The rabbi replied, "I am not lenient regarding the laws of Shabbat, I am strict regarding the laws of danger to life [pikuah nefesh]. The man who sat next to me was ill and I brought him to a doctor." We must actually possess religious passion and enthusiasm - only of a more humanist bent - and we must give that enthusiasm outward expression. We are strict when it comes to the laws of human rights and human dignity.

c) Lack of leadership. The contemporary application is so obvious that there is no need to waste words on it. Perhaps we have the leaders we deserve but we certainly do not have the leaders we need. Given what I wrote above in connection with the feminist revolution, one would have hoped the situation would be different. Today an additional fifty percent of our people have joined the pool of potential leaders, thus increasing the chances of our finding deserving leaders. This does not seem to have happened in reality; perhaps we have yet to find ways to locate the appropriate women - or their appropriate male colleagues.

Dr. Debbie Weissman, a founder of Kehillat Yedidya, is an educator.

 

The Israelites' Marches: a Privilege, a Deterioration of Faith, or an Atonement?

These are the marches - The Holy One, Blessed Be He, desired that the stations of Israel's trek be recorded in order to publicize Israel's merit in following Him in the desert, a land unsowed, so that they be worthy of entry into the Land.

(Seforno ad loc)

 

These are the marches of the Israelites - Because they sinned when they said, These are your gods, Israel, the Children of Israel will wander. From this we derive that all of man's journeys are a result of blemished faith, in the category of idolatry. If man were to believe with perfect faith that The Holy One, Blessed Be He can provide all his needs, he would never travel. So we see that journeys indicate imperfect faith, similar to idolatry.

(Likutei MoHaRaN [Rabbi Nahman of Breslav], 40)

 

These are the marches of Children of Israel - The midrash relates that the wanderings of the Children of Israel from place to place are atonement for, These are your gods, Israel, i.e., for the flaw of idolatry. Even when there is no [active] idolatry, there is still the flaw of idolatry, for flawed faith is also a form of idolatry, as is written (in the name of the Baal Shem Tov) on the passage, and you shall go astray and worship other gods. Immediately upon going astray from The Holy One, Blessed Be He, one is guilty of idolatry, and one achieves expiation through wanderings. "As long as there is idolatry in the world, there is wrath in the world." (Sifrei Re'ei, quoted in Rashi). So we learn that when there is atonement for the blemish of idolatry, the wrath is erased, and the continuation is mercy, and the basis of mercy is in the category of, And El-Shaddai will give you mercy - "you" - the emphasis is upon "you". The Holy One, Blessed Be He, puts his mercy into our hands; for it may be that, from His perspective, even great suffering and ailments are expressions of His mercy, for all that The Holy One, Blessed Be He, brings upon man - even great suffering - are reflections of His mercy. But we ask that He give His mercy over to us, for we cannot understand His mercy, and we are unable to accept His mercy. Let Him give His mercy over to us, that we have pity upon ourselves, and according to our understanding, the simple meaning of mercy is that we be cured of our ailments, etc.

(Likutei MoHaRaN T'nina, 62)

 

Moses commanded the children of Israel according to the word of the Lord, saying, "The tribe of Joseph's descendants speak justly. This is the word that the Lord has commanded regarding Zelafhad's daughters. Let them marry whomever they please, but they shall marry only to the family of their father's tribe.

(Bamidbar 36:5-6)

 

whomever they please - This means to say: they shall choose those who seem good and upright to them from among [the men of] their father's tribe, as it is written, but they shall marry only to the family of their father's tribe. The end of the verse commanded them to marry specifically into their father's clan. It may have been the case that those men of the sons of Gilead who brought up the issue with Moses very much wanted to marry Zelafhad's daughters themselves, either because of their good qualities that were mentioned by the Sages, or in order to gain their portion of land - that is why they made such a fuss about the matter. However, the daughters did not want to marry them in particular, and so Moses told them: "I am not going to force you to marry these men. Rather, I will permit you to chose whom you please, only marry into your father's clan." This is demonstrated by the end of the story in which it is written that they married their cousins (verse 11) and no further mention is made of the sons of Gilead, because they had chosen for themselves husbands from the other children of their uncle Machir and did not want the sons of Gilead. From this we understand what Moses meant when he said, according to the word of the Lord, and The tribe of Joseph's descendants speak justly, but did not say "the sons of Machir speak justly." That is to say, the complaint made by the tribe in general, that the inherited parcel of land should not be transferred, was good and correct, while the particular request made by the sons of Gilead to take Zelafhad's daughters as wives was not good, since it is not proper to force them [the daughters] in this against their will.

(Rabbi Yitzhak Shemuel Reggio on Bamidbar 36:5-6)

 

There were no days better for Israel than the fifteenth of Av...

(Mishnah Ta'anit 4:8)

 

What is the fifteenth of Av? R. Yehudah said in the name of Shemuel: It is the day when the tribes were allowed to intermarry. How is this derived from Scripture? This is what the Lord has commanded concerning the Daughters of Zelafhad (Bamidbar 36) - this will only be observed in the present generation.

(Ta'anit 30b)

 

 

 

 

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