PARASHAT Beha’alotcha — Numbers 8:1 – 12:16

When in a position of leadership, how would you say you deal with chaos? Do you get angry and lash out at people? Do you retreat and ignore the chaos? If there’s a lot of complaining, do you give in to demands and give people what they want even if doing so might be impractical, costly or unwise? In truth, exhibiting leadership in hard times is always a challenge.

This week’s parashah comes along to offer us guidance. In Beha’alotcha, we encounter Moses at his wit’s end, dealing with a restless, hungry, grumbling populace. All they’ve had to eat in the wilderness for two years has been manna, a dew-like substance. They are tired of manna and long for meat. They wax nostalgic for all the foods they ate while slaves in Egypt. In his appeal to God for relief, Moses cries out: I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness!” (Numbers 11:14-15).

God’s response to Moses is twofold. One response is to attempt to put an end to the people’s whining about meat once and for all. God instructs Moses to say to the people: The Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you (11:18:20). After God makes good on this promise/threat, God then inflicts the people with a severe plague.

It is clear from God’s outburst that God is every bit as fed up as Moses! Tempers are flaring all around.

God’s other response is more measured and provides a lesson about leadership. To Moses’ credit, he admitted to God that “I cannot carry all his people by myself.” Thus, God instructs Moses to enlist others to help share the burden of leadership: Gather for Me seventy of Israel’s elders of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people, and bring them to the Tent of Meeting and let them take their place there with you. I will come down and speak with you there, and I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and put it upon them; they shall share the burden of the people with you, and you shall not bear it alone (11:16-17).

Though expressed in desperate terms, Moses’ appeal for help is in and of itself exemplary. He noticed his limitations and knew that alone he would not be able to continue to lead in any responsible way. The job of leading Israel was wearing on Moses and he was feeling inadequate to the point of wishing for death. Yet, he had the clarity of mind to believe he could continue if only God would lend a hand.

God did, indeed, lend a hand, but rather than simply intervene by providing quail to the Israelites, God also gave Moses a good piece of advice: share the task of leadership with others. Moses had done this earlier at the suggestion of his father-in-law Jethro (Exodus 14:16-18), but for whatever reasons God perceived that it was time for a new or, perhaps, an additional, leadership team.

What made this leadership team distinctive was that all the elders received the gift of prophecy, i.e. they could hear God directly and speak on God’s behalf. This gift had previously been reserved for Moses. With the elders joining Moses in speaking on behalf of God, Moses was no longer perceived as an autocrat by the people, God’s word attained a new level of Truth because it wasn’t coming from the mouth of one man, and the people now had others they could talk to about their problems, knowing that these were already well-respected leaders within each tribe. With this leadership team in place, Moses was more easily able to manage the chaos and discontentment among the masses.

Meanwhile, two other elders by the names of Eldad and Medad, who were not in the Tent of Meeting with the other seventy, also received the gift of prophecy and began to prophesize in the camp (Numbers 11:24-26).  Rather than restrain Eldad and Medad, as Joshua urged him (11:28), Moses embraced the idea of having additional leaders prophesying among the people. Moses had already demonstrated his willingness to share authority with the seventy elders in the Tent of Meeting. Now he was showing an even greater generosity of spirit. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord put His spirit upon them!” he said (11:29).

From Moses’ example, we learn the importance of sharing responsibility with others. It often takes a team of leaders to tackle big challenges. Moreover, allowing people outside the immediate leadership circle to assume the mantel of leadership serves to empower the people to take responsibility for themselves and not rely only on others to solve their problems for them. Like a candle’s flame that is not diminished when it ignites another candle, Moses was not less of a leader or prophet because he dared to share authority with others. On the contrary, Moses’ status as a great leader is significantly bolstered by the generosity, humility, confidence and wisdom he exhibited not only in accepting God’s direction regarding the elders but also in his decision to allow others beyond an elite group to assume authority as well.

The next time we are faced with a challenging situation that requires level-headed leadership, may we recall this moment of brilliance in which Moses reached out for help and lovingly embraced the leadership of all those whom God endowed with the will and ability to lead.

 

Parashat Bemidbar: Numbers 1:1 – 4:20

With this week’s Torah portion, Bemidbar, we begin a new book of the Torah, also named Bemidbar. Bemidbar depicts Israel’s trials during the 40 years of wandering “in the wilderness” (bemidbar, in Hebrew) following their exodus from Egypt. The book also contains multiple censuses of the Israelites. Reflecting this latter focus on counting people, the English title for Bemidbar is Numbers. The relationship between these two themes — the wilderness and the censuses — is full of meaning.

The reading begins:

1 On the first day of the second month, in the second year following the exodus from the land of Egypt, the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, saying…

The French medieval commentator Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam, 1085-1174) asks why the Torah here specifies where God spoke to Moses. He posits that the location of God’s speech adds clarity. After all, God had spoken to Moses and Israel elsewhere just a year earlier: “All of the divine utterances that were spoken during the first year, before the Tabernacle was set up, are labeled as having been spoken ‘on Mount Sinai.’ But once the Tabernacle was set up, on the 1st of Nisan of the second year, we find not ‘on Mount Sinai’ but ‘in the wilderness of Sinai in the Tent of Meeting.’”^[1] In other words, now that Israel has the Tabernacle, God can speak to them as they wander through the wilderness. Beforehand God could only be present at Mount Sinai. God is now portable.

But why the emphasis on the midbar, wilderness, itself? Of the many explanations for this, I am drawn to two in particular. One sees the wilderness, both a challenging place for human survival and a spectacular show of nature, as the perfect crucible for Israel’s maturation. The Israeli historian Nachman Ran imagines that after Israel’s centuries-long period of enslavement in Egypt, they needed to gel as a nation and to grow spiritually. “To a people whose entire living generation had seen only the level lands of Egypt, the Israelite march into this region of mountain magnificence, with its sharp and splintered peaks and profound valleys, must have been a perpetual source of astonishment and awe. No nobler school could have been conceived for training a nation of slaves into a nation of freemen or weaning a people from the grossness of idolatry to a sense of grandeur and power of the God alike of Nature and Mind.” Indeed, “in the midbar they become free human beings responsible to God and to themselves for every choice they make.”^[2]

Another interpretation likens the landscape of the midbar to “the psychological and spiritual realms of human existence.” The 20th century Israeli scholar and poet Pinhas Peli believes there is a “‘wilderness’ within each person, a ‘desert’ where selfish desires rule, where one looks out only for one’s needs. No person is ever satisfied in the desert. There is constant complaining about lack of food and water, the scorching hot days and bitter cold nights. Anger, frustration, disagreements, and hunger prevail… The Torah is given in the desert… ‘to conquer and curb the demonic wilderness within human beings.’… The lesson here is that, ‘if human beings do not conquer the desert, it may eventually conquer them. There is no peaceful coexistence between the two.’”^[3]

These understandings of the midbar first as Israel’s training ground to serve as God’s “chosen people” and next as a symbol of the treacherous landscape within each of us, leads me to the next verses in our reading:

2 Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head. 3 You and Aaron shall record them by their groups, from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms.

What emerges from the census, we learn later, is the creation of an army, on one hand, and a workforce to tend to the Tabernacle, on the other hand. God, thus, provides Israel with a mechanism literally to put its camp in order so that it can survive the tough trek ahead. With no such order, the nation and its connection to God would be doomed.

On a symbolic level, the census represents the moral, spiritual and physical preparation necessary to be able to make something of God’s revelation. Without some kind of ordered society, without a higher purpose, and without personal accountability, Israel would not have been able to actualize the lessons of Torah. They would have been too divided, distracted, and self-interested to build the kind of caring world that God envisioned. What kind of “light unto the nations” would Israel have been if it was at war with itself, unable to know right from wrong?

What we learn from this week’s Torah portion is that in order to bring calm to a world in chaos, we must first take care of business at home and within. Judaism places a premium on shalom bayit, family harmony, partly because it recognizes that the family is fertile ground for sowing the values of Torah and Jewish peoplehood. But family isn’t the only fertile ground. Individual souls and communities, too, are places where values must be allowed to flourish. Without tilling the soil, without bringing order to it, nothing except weeds and wildflowers will grow. Under such circumstances, beauty is left to chance. We can’t leave the creation of a just, compassionate world to chance, however. Instead, let us strive to bring order to the wilderness.

©Rabbi Daniel Aronson, 2014

 

^[1] Michael Carasik, The Commentator’s Bible: Numbers, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2011), p. 3.

^[2] From Harvey J. Fields, A Torah Commentary for Our Times: Volume 3 Numbers and Deuteronomy, (New York: UAHC Press, 1993), pp. 9-10.

^[3] Ibid., pp. 11-12.

Parashat Bechukotai: Leviticus 26:3 – 27:34

This week’s Torah reading brings the Book of Leviticus to a close. The reading begins with 13 verses in which God promises to bless the people of Israel if they follow God’s laws (chukot) and observe God’s commandments. What follows, however, is a series of seven increasingly harsh curses that God will set upon the people if they spurn God’s laws and commandments. These curses contain some of the harshest punishments against Israel in the entire Torah. The reading concludes on a mellower note with a set of measures aimed at raising the necessary funds to maintain the Sanctuary.

My colleague Rabbi Shai Held, Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar (mechonhadar.org), in his weekly teaching hones in on the very last verse among the blessings (Lev. 26:13) and finds there meaning that would allude most readers. Rabbi Held’s message of serving God with our heads held high as opposed to bowed over in submission is a powerful one that I am pleased to share with you this week. Please click here to read Rabbi Held’s teaching: http://goo.gl/fREnzm.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Dan