Dvar Torah Matot-Masei
In November 1980, the country singer Willie Nelson composed a number 1 hit single. Some you may remember this popular song:
On the road again – Goin' places that I've never been. Seein' things that I may never see again And I can't wait to get on the road again.
“On the road again”—seems to summarize the first chapter of B’midbar’s final parasha. The second of our two concluding Torah portions Masei begins with a travelogue listing every stop of the Israelites. The trip begins with Yetziat Miztrayim, the Exodus from Egypt.
The name Exoduscomes from the Greek: ex - out of and hodos meaning road. Making individual physical journeys for spiritual and moral enlightenment is common in many religious traditions. In our tradition Avraham is the first to take such a lengthy journey, and there are many others (such as Siddhartha in the Buddhist tradition, made famous by the German novelist Hermann Hesse).
But it is unusual for an entire population to take a 40 yearspiritual trek! But Jews have never been known as a typical people.
Still, you do have to wonder why we need to have a detailed copy of the itinerary, why we need to have a list of all 42 pit stops that the Israelites made.As the Slonimer rebbe points out, the Torah is a document for the eternities—the teachings of the Torah are supposed to be for all generations.The travelogue seems to be really only of interest to those who went on the trip.Why should the rest of us care?
The Midrash sees God as being nostalgic, wanting to recall “the good old days.” The Midrash says it’s like the case of a king whose son was sick. He took him to a certain place to be cured. On the way home, the father recounts the journey: here we slept, here we cooled ourselves, here you had a headache. So God told Moshe to recount all the places they went.
It is nice idea, but somehow I don’t see the Torah as God’s trip down memory lane. Rather, the Torah's insistence on the journey, of even including a lengthy itinerary, I believe teaches a different and hopefully more profound lesson.
Although it is a cliché, perhaps the Torah wants to impress upon us that the point of any journey is the travel itself. The Torah commands us to remember the Israelites' travels because the journey is also a metaphor for our lives, as all of us are 'on our way.' The 'way' is a common religious metaphor: Halacha, the system of Jewish law literally means 'the way,' and the Torah is referred to as a pleasant path: (when we return the Torah to the Ark, we sing: "d'racheha darchei noam- its paths are pleasant, and all its ways are peace."
This is what theBa'al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, saw in this section of Torah. For him this wasn’t really a travelogue, but a symbolic description of the individual on his or her life journey:
Eleh masei v’nai Yisrael,"These are the journeys of the Israelites. . . "All of the travels added up to 42,and these are also [the journeys] of every individual from the day of his birth until he returns to Eternity. Understand this: that the day of birth is like the leaving of Egypt, and after that one goes from journey to journey, until you reach the place of supreme life. This is theway to go from [katnut]—a constricted state of mind to [gadlut]—astate of expanded consciousness.
Where does the journey of the Jewish people start? It starts in Mitzrayim, in Egypt. Mitzrayim literally means a constricted or narrow place…similarly our lives start when we come out from the womb, through the Mitzrayim, the narrow place of the birth canal.
And where does the journey lead? For the Israelites in this week’s parasha, the recounting of places ends with a set of instructions for what to do after crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land. And where does the journey of our lives lead, but to the spiritual Promised Land, Olam HaBa - the World to Come.
As the Ba’al Shem Tov teaches, it’s not just the beginning and the end that are significant. When someone passes away, if I gave a eulogy which said nothing more than “she was born July 6, 1893 and she died July 6, 2013,” no one would be very happy with it. Well, other than the fact that people might be blown away by the fact that she lived 120 years, we still want to know what she did with those 120 years.
The destination is NOT the only thing that’s important. The journey itself is of deep spiritual significance.
However, we sometimes think, "If we could only short-cut the process, and get 'there' without the long-journey, that would be the greatest."But sometimes the destinations we set out for don't turn out to be the places we want to be, maybe even because the trip itself changed us.It is easy to forget that it is not only the destination that is of value, but the process as well. It is sometimes the process that allows us to go from “katnut”a constricted state of mind to [gadlut]—a state of expanded understanding and wisdom.
As it says earlier in book of B’midbar,"By the word of the God they camped and by the word of the God they journeyed" (9:20). The kabbalist Isaiah Horowitz teaches that just as the Israelites had to experience slavery in Egypt, they also had to undergo a parallel physical &spiritualtrek to really understand what it means to be an am hofshi-a free people.He suggests that we too, must embark on a spiritualjourney in order to really understand who we really are. This insight, he says is expressed in a traditional phrase we use:Tzae ul’mad—Go forth and learn (not sit and learn).
Perhaps, then, it is not an accident, that our parasha lists42 stops on the route from, Mitzrayim, “the narrow place” to the Promised Land.
The V’ahavtah paragraph of the Shema consists of 42 words in which we pray that our lives [at least some of the time] be infused with “Gadlut” expanded consciousness, spiritual vitality, and sense of God’s loving presence whether we aresheevtkha b’vaytekha, whether we are at home orlekh’tkha va-derekh – or whether we are traveling the world. Just as Israelites hoped and prayed when they were in their encampments and when they were traveling through the wilderness.
For me, it feels bershert that my first official Shabbat with you starts with the completion of Sefer B’midbar. We are both completing our own respective journeys and beginning a new one together.
As we just experienceda few minutes ago, the custom for completing a book of Torah is to congratulate one another with special words of blessing. I kindly request that everyone rise and say with methe words of that blessing: chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek- Be strong! Be strong! And may we strengthened!
May these words remind us: just as we have had the strength to come this far on our respective journeys. May we have the strength to travel farther together.
Shabbat Shalom
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