“These were the marches of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron. Moses recorded the starting points of their various marches as directed by God. Their marches, by starting points, were as follows…” (Numbers 33:1-2)
What comes next in this week's Torah reading is a list of 42 different places where the Israelites traveled while they were in the desert. It has places they stayed in for a long time and places that were short-term campgrounds. We often talk about the 40 years that our ancestors wandered in the desert, but this depiction of their journey gives those years more texture. The text reads like a map, and we don’t learn much about their experiences in each of those places.
The commentator Shimshon Rafael Hirsch writes: One can surmise how many other traces of the wanderings and sojournings of our ancestors may have been preserved in these places in the wilderness for the immediate and more distant future, and what opportunities these could have offered to the children and the grand-children of the generation of the wilderness to visit the places where God revealed Godself in God’s wondrous guidance. Visiting these places, future generations could contemplate the authenticity of God’s presence on earth so eloquently expressed in the history of their forebears. The very barrenness and aridity of these localities in the wilderness, a desert so vast that even a caravan must carefully count the days in order to make its provisions hold out, a desert in which an entire people, at least two and a half million souls, lived for forty years - the very sight of these places in the wilderness provides ample documentation of the Divine nature of the history of Israel’s establishment.
Hirsch asks me to think, in hearing the list of places our ancestors journeyed through, what about their experiences might be encoded into the physicality of that place. In each of those places, what did they cook? Did they cry there? Laugh? Did their children play? What conversations took place? Hirsch reminds us to draw on the strength of our ancestors, to connect to their fortitude and resilience and their ability to uncover God in each of those places.
Our experiences as a people - rewarding, painful, transformative - are preserved in places, and the wilderness our ancestors traversed through simultaneously holds the grief they endured and the divine sustenance that brought them through. More specifically, this reminder of God sustaining us and leading our ancestors through the wilderness feels emotional and reassuring in this particular wilderness time now.
We don’t make our way from A to B overnight or in one fell swoop. Journeys have destinations but they, of course, have many stops along the way. Unexpected turns, road blocks, surprises. Wherever we are in our journey - one of pain, one of growth, one of healing, one of building - I hope we are able to uncover a sense of holiness. I pray that we are buoyed by the strength of our ancestors and by the Divinity that sustained them on their journeys.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
We will NOT be having services at shul this Shabbat. I hope you will join Abe and me for Hachanah l’Shabbat (Preparing for Shabbat at 6:30PM this evening). Click that link to connect on Zoom!
Please click here for the Youtube playlist with davening and teaching I’ve prepared for this Shabbat (it will be uploaded before Shabbat).
Please check out our website for some Shabbat-related learning resources.
