"The Journeys" In Parshat "Masei," the Torah goes into great detail in its description of the travels of the Jewish People in the desert. All forty stops are listed, many events are described; yet, it is very difficult for us to identify with these people, who were our ancestors. For their experiences were of such an extreme nature, that they dwarf anything in our own experience. As slaves in Egypt, they learned what it meant to be on the very bottom (although it is, in fact, hard to imagine anything more physically horrible and spiritually degrading, at least according to the wishes of the accursed Nazis, than the Holocaust Experience). But for some two hundred ten years, the Jewish People suffered physical and moral abuse until they reached the point where even the Angels could not tell them apart from those who enslaved them. "These are idol worshippers, and these as well are idol worshippers." The Jews had descended to the forty ninth level (of fifty) of spiritual uncleanness. Had they not been redeemed then, they would have been sucked into the depraved sands of Egyptian so-called "Culture." Yet, because they held onto their names, the special clothing which identified them as Jews, and the Hebrew Language, they preserved their spark of Jewishness and the Master of the Universe was able to discern them from their Egyptian "hosts." They also knew what it was like to be at the very top. They witnessed G-d’s miracles in Egypt, the Splitting of the Red Sea, about which it is written that the Jewish handmaiden saw more of the Divine Chariot than did the Prophet Yechezkel in his vision in Babylon. They rose then to great spiritual heights, to the level of "And they believed in Hashem and in Moshe, His servant." (Shemot 14:31) Some six weeks later, they were eye-witnesses to the direct intervention of Hashem in human history, when He appeared in His glory to them at Mt. Sinai, and spoke to them, amidst thunder and lightning and the call of the Shofar, and gave to them the Torah, the foundation of morality for all of civilization. But their Egyptian experience, and their absorption of a large group of Egyptian converts, dragged them down from these heights and they betrayed Hashem at the foot of Sinai, by worshipping the Golden Calf, as a "dismal bride who commits adultery while yet under her bridal canopy." They said of that calf "These are your gods, O Israel, who took you forth from the Land of Egypt." (Shemot 32:8) And when the Spies delivered their unfaithful report concerning the Land of Israel, they rebelled against G-d and said, "Let us turn around and return to Egypt." (BaMidbar 14:4) For that act of rebellion, they were told that all the adults among them would die in the desert during the next forty years, and they would, indeed, not enter the Promised Land, but their children would enter it. Thus, they knew by when they would die, and this must have caused such melancholia and depression that we can visualize the Midrash which speaks of the Jews digging their own graves on the night of Tishah B’Av, and lying in them, in anticipation of the Angel of Death. Yet, with and despite that knowledge, they continued to experience the Presence of Hashem in their daily lives, through the Mishkan, the "mohn" from Heaven, the Well of Miriam and the Clouds of Glory! Perhaps that generation, called the "Generation of Knowledge (of G-d)," represented the boundary conditions of human life, the great heights to which human beings can rise, as when they say, "We will accept Your commands before we understand them!" and when they show the faith of love, "following Me into the desert, into a land which was not sown." And the depths of rebellion and betrayal to which it can fall, G-d Forbid, as at the scenes of the Golden Calf and the Spies. But we, their descendants, who spend most of our lives somewhere between those extremes, are nevertheless duty-bound to strive for the heights of faith that our ancestors, at their best, reached. We must hope, with optimism, that Hashem will finally end the Exile in which we have "wandered" to far more than forty places, for nearly two millenia, and let the final one of our "journeys" be as One People led by Pillars of Fire and of Cloud to the Land of Israel. Rabbi Pinchas Frankel Rabbi Frankel is an Educational Coordinator at the OU |
