{"id":13145,"date":"2010-07-08T16:19:21","date_gmt":"2010-07-08T16:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/production.ou.org\/life\/other\/masei_names_on_a_list\/"},"modified":"2015-11-01T11:45:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-01T16:45:01","slug":"masei_names_on_a_list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/torah\/masei_names_on_a_list\/","title":{"rendered":"Masei: Names on a List"},"content":{"rendered":"

When my children grow up, I imagine that one day we\u2019ll look at the old photos and tell them about the places where we lived.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, we got married and lived in the Washington Heights. Then we moved to Linden, NJ, and then to West Hartford, CT. From there we moved to Oak Park, MI (We moved around a lot.). Then we made aliyah to Yad Binyamin.\u201d<\/p>\n

What will my children think about these different places? What could Linden, N.J.,or a small city in Connecticut mean to them? What about their children? To us, the names of these cities bring back memories of small homes, early married life, friends and relationships from an earlier time in our lives. But to our children \u2013 and especially to their children (God willing!) the names of these places will probably mean nothing. They\u2019re just names of places, no different than any other place to which they\u2019ve never been and will probably never visit.<\/p>\n

I think about these names of places when I read the first section of Parashat Masei. The first section of the parashah lists a number of places, most of which we\u2019ve never heard of and could never locate on a map. Did you know that the Jewish people traveled from Livnah to Risah to Keheilatah to Har Shafer? It\u2019s right there in the Chumash; (33:21-23) the list goes on and on, a litany of places that I neither remember nor care about.<\/p>\n

Chazal too wondered about this long list of names. Rashi and Ramban suggest that the list is surprisingly short to teach us just how much God loved the Jewish people. He loved them so much that He only forced them to uproot the camp a relatively small number of times over a forty-year period. Ramban also quotes Rambam who suggests in Moreh Nevuchim that one day people might claim that the Jews never really traveled in the desert. (Can you imagine?) Therefore, the Torah meticulously chronicles their travels to affirm that the nation really did survive miraculously in the desert. Yet, even after quoting Rambam\u2019s long explanation, Ramban adds,<\/p>\n

\n

\u05d5\u05d4\u05e0\u05d4 \u05de\u05db\u05ea\u05d1 \u05d4\u05de\u05e1\u05e2\u05d5\u05ea \u05de\u05e6\u05d5\u05ea \u05d4’ \u05d4\u05d9\u05d0 \u05de\u05df \u05d4\u05d8\u05e2\u05de\u05d9\u05dd \u05d4\u05e0\u05d6\u05db\u05e8\u05d9\u05dd \u05d0\u05d5 \u05de\u05d6\u05d5\u05dc\u05ea\u05df, \u05e2\u05e0\u05d9\u05df \u05dc\u05d0 \u05e0\u05ea\u05d2\u05dc\u05d4 \u05dc\u05e0\u05d5 \u05e1\u05d5\u05d3\u05d5…<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Behold, the writing of these travels is a commandment of God, either due to the reasons mentioned or without them; this is a matter whose secret is not revealed to us\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

In essence, says Ramban, we don\u2019t know why Moshe wrote down the names of the places, other than the fact that God commanded him to do so. God wanted us to have this long list, and didn\u2019t tell us why.<\/p>\n

Yet, while I don\u2019t know precisely why God commanded Moshe to record the list, I can tell you how reading the list of these places makes me feel: I feel like I\u2019m reading a list of Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Have you ever tried to look at map of Jewish Poland, and just read through the names of the communities? Just Google \u201cshtetels in Poland\u201d. I recognized perhaps five \u2013 of more than fifty! The names are foreign, strange. Have you ever heard of Kanczuga, Kiernozia, Kleczew, Konin, Korczyna, Krasnosielc, or Kurzelow? And those are just the K\u2019s that have websites. Have you ever visited the Valley of Communities at Yad Vashem? It\u2019s a haunting canyon that simply lists the names of destroyed Jewish communities during the Holocaust. If I would ask you how many communities are on the list, how many would you guess? 500? 1,000? Would you believe that over 5,000 names of communities are engraved on the walls of the Valley of Communities?<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t even feel real to me. And despite this feeling I know that each name not represents not just a place, but tens or hundreds or thousands of Jews who built families, communities, shuls and schools. And now they\u2019re gone. How many thriving Jewish communities from Northern Africa are now just names on a list? What about the former Soviet Union? Ukraine? The Middle East? The list goes on and on.<\/p>\n

This is the mournful message of Maasei. The travels of the Jewish people outside the land of Israel are fleeting, temporary, and anonymous. We might stop at one location for a shorter time, and another for longer \u2013 perhaps much longer. But in the end, each place will be forgotten, just a memory of its former self, a name on a list, but nothing more.<\/p>\n

Can it be a coincidence that we always read Maasei during the Three Weeks, the period of time when we recall the destruction of Jewish communities from around the world? We know that as they traveled through the desert, the Midrash teaches us that each Tisha B\u2019av, every Jew who reached the age of sixty that year died. How many Jewish graveyards were lost in the sands of the Sinai desert? Maybe this list is both a lament and a foreshadowing; a kinah of God for the lost time and the destroyed Jewish community which perished in the desert – a lamentation for the tens of thousands of Jews who died needlessly in the desert, and the tens of millions who would perish after them in the desert of the exile.<\/p>\n

And what about America? To me names like Baltimore and Akron and St. Louis and Lawrence and Oceanside and Brooklyn seem natural. I\u2019ve been to those places. I know people who live there. But do we have any illusion that they will always be known as Jewish places? (Is that something we even want?) How long will it be before those cities also become anonymous names on a meaningless list, foreign and alien and hard to imagine?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry to be so depressing. Tisha B\u2019av is coming.<\/p>\n

\n

Rabbi Reuven Spolter is the Director of Recruiting and Special Projects at the Orot College of Education in Elkana, Israel. For more articles and Torah audio, visit his website, www.spolter.net<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my children grow up, I imagine that one day we\u2019ll look at the old photos and tell them about the places where we lived. \u201cWell, we got married and lived in the Washington Heights. Then we moved to Linden, NJ, and then to West Hartford, CT. From there we moved to Oak Park, MI<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":322,"featured_media":47372,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-torah"],"yoast_head":"\nMasei: Names on a List - OU Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The mournful message of Maasei is that the travels of the Jewish people outside the land of Israel are fleeting, temporary, and anonymous\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/torah\/masei_names_on_a_list\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Masei: Names on a List - 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