This past Shabbat we studied Parashat Masei, which means something like “travels” or “stages”. It is the last portion in the Sefer Bamidbar, the Book of Numbers, the fourth of five books of the Torah.
In it, the “travels” being referred to comprise a deliberate and thorough recounting of all of the geographical stages the Israelites have been through in their forty years of journeying — from the narrow, constricted place of Egypt to being on the brink of entering the expansive Promised Land of Eretz Yisrael (The fifth of five books of the Torah, Deuteronomy, barely advances the narrative arc; it is composed, rather, of a series of speeches from Moses to the people before they enter the Promised Land, so the end of the Book of Numbers really serves as the end of the narrative of the Torah).
“These were the Masei, the journeys, of the Israelites,” the Parshah begins “who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron. The Israelites set out from Rameses and encamped at Succoth. They set out from Succoth and encamped at Etham, which is on the edge of the wilderness. They set out from Etham and turned about toward Pi-hahiroth, which faces Baal-zephon, and they encamped before Migdol. They set out from Pene-hahiroth and passed through the sea into the wilderness; and they made a three-days’ journey in the wilderness of Etham and encamped at Marah. They set out from Marah…” and so forth. For 39 more verses, and 42 total locations.
Why — we posed the question to the congregation — would the Torah so painstakingly, and, seemingly so monotonously, recount the stages of the Israelites’ journey?
For a number of reasons, the congregation told us. For starters, not everyone had been present for the beginning of the journey. Over the course of those forty years, a number of the Israelites had died off, and a number had been born anew. And yet the story would pass from one generation to the next. Each was a trustee of the story in order to preserve it, to sustain it, to learn from it going forward. It needed to be recounted in order to ensure that there was a shared understanding of the story.
Further, as Rabbi Shefa Gold observes, citing The Ba’al Shem Tov, “Whatever happened to the people as a whole will happen to each individual. All the forty-two journeys of the children of Israel will occur to each person between the time he is born and the time he dies.”
Psychological insights gleaned over the ages teach us that as we reach a certain point in life, perhaps a later stage of our journey, it’s important to look back and to make peace with the journey we’ve been on, seeing all of our wanderings from a new vantage point, perhaps what we then saw as detours or missteps, we now see as part of a greater whole. Or alternatively, celebrating anew moments of triumph or satisfaction, inviting ourselves to experience our journey as meaningful.
As one participant shared with me after the service, this kind of taking stock can be valuable on something like an annual basis as well. We’re often so hard on ourselves. Can we look back over the past year at our journeys and identify all the stages we reached, all the contributions we made to the world, subtle as they might have been? Can we give ourselves credit for our accumulated contributions every once and a while, even if we know we can and should do more? Making a list in this way, as the Israelites did, can be profound.
The Israelites were moving on to the Promised Land. They had a new stage in their journey to enter. But they also invited themselves to experience a sense of how far they’d come and how, what at one point seemed like meanderings, comprised the wholeness of a journey.
The Ongoing Conflict in the Middle East
I also write this as the entirety of the Middle East remains on a war footing. Israel remains under attack from essentially every compass point — still from Hamas to the southwest, Hezbollah to the north, the Houthis to the southeast, and Iran to the east and northeast. In fact, Iran supports each and every one of these fronts.
Israel, meanwhile, strikes out in return, targeting militant leaders of Hezbollah in Lebanon and, though unconfirmed, likely of a Hamas leader traveling in Iran.
Condemnations of Israel rang out in response to these Israeli actions, too. The challenge for me here is to ask, from the perspective of Israel’s critics, is there ever an appropriate military response when Israel is under threat from militant actors like Hamas and Hezbollah, each of whose goals explicitly includes the destruction of Israel, no matter its conduct?
All out war in Gaza has been widely condemned by Israel’s critics. War is heartbreaking. We never want to see it and the toll on civilians is devastating. Yet Israel has a responsibility to protect its citizens, too. And here we see even more limited use of force on the part of Israel, targeted to kill the masterminds of the killing of Israeli civilians, and those efforts, too, are condemned—more limited targeted strikes, that, too, is condemned. Where is Israel’s space to maneuver to protect its citizens? I wish we lived in a world where no one used force to cause harm to anyone else. That is not the world we live in, and to remove every tool from Israel’s arsenal to combat groups that are bent on its destruction is unjust, and it’s reasonable to question where that motive comes from.
Still, this does not mean Israel is beyond reproach. In an utterly shameful development, in an effort to disrupt legal proceedings against soldiers accused of grossly abusing Palestinian prisoners, right-wing Israeli vigilante activists, in events that echoed the experience of the attack on the Capitol here in the United States on January 6, broke into facilities where the soldiers were being lawfully detained.
It should be a point of pride that Israel takes upon itself the responsibility to criminally prosecute Israeli criminal abuses of power against Palestinians. Seeking to consider its citizens and soldiers above the law would be tribalism to the extreme, to the perversion of all other values.
I find myself of two minds: on the one hand, I generally consider much of the world’s criticism of Israel to be detached from the realities of the responsibilities of keeping its nearly 10 million residents safe from the multiple external threats — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Militias in Syria and Iraq, and Iran itself — it faces. Many of these actors regularly base themselves in civilian compounds — schools, mosques, hospitals — in an effort to attack Israeli civilians with impunity.
This doesn’t mean Israel has no responsibility, and blame to share, when it comes to minimizing civilian suffering, but it often feels as though criticism of Israel ignores the genuine threat these actors pose to Israel; feels as though it ignores the unambiguous declarations on the part of these actors that their goals are to destroy the Jewish state no matter how it conducts itself.
To me, treatment of Palestinians, and policy towards the West Bank, who are under Israeli control, is a different story. I won’t pretend there aren’t West Bank residents who similarly pray for, and act towards, the destruction of Israel, but there are also many who do not. There are seven million Palestinians who live in what is sometimes known as “Greater Israel,” i.e., Israel proper plus the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many are simply looking to live lives of dignity, freedom, and national autonomy, just as Israeli Jews are.
In the same way that I wish the world would embrace the fact that Israel as a Jewish state is here to stay, and deserves to live in freedom and prosperity, as a safe harbor for a people with multigenerational ties to the land, I pray for a time when Israel can do so peacefully alongside Palestinians, who also yearn for their own sense of peace, security, dignity and prosperity.