Dvar Torah on Parshat Bamidbar

This week we begin the fourth of the five books of the Torah - Bamidbar, called Numbers in English. Bamidbar means "in the desert", which is where the entire book takes place. The name Numbers comes from the fact that the book begins with, and again later on contains, a lot of counting of the Jewish people. In Bamidbar, the Nation of Israel readies itself to enter the Land of Israel. Just before actually doing so, in the portion of Shlach, which we will read in a few weeks, spies are sent to investigate the situation in Canaan. They return with the pessimistic message that the land is impregnable. The Jews decide to go back to Egypt, and are punished for their faithlessness with the decree that they will die over a forty year period of wandering in the desert, and only then will their children enter the land.

In this week's parsha, at the opening of the book, God commands Moshe, in the Sinai desert, to number the Jewish people. Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno (Italy, c.1470-c.1550) has an interesting take on this process. He says the following: "[Moshe was commanded to count the Jewish people] in order to arrange them so that they might enter the Land immediately, each man under his banner, without any fighting; rather, the [Canaanite] nations would leave of their own free will, as some of them eventually did.... It was the sin of the spies which enabled the seven [Canaanite] nations to do evil for forty more years, which necessitated their destruction. [The Torah commands Moshe] to count Jews by name because in those days each person of that generation was counted by his name, which indicated his individual nature, due to their exalted status... This was not the case [forty years later] with those who actually entered the Land, which is why they were not specifically mentioned by name when counted; only the head of each family and the general number were mentioned. This indicates that the original intention was that every single member of the nation would have entered and inherited the Land, and not one of them would have been missing."

There are a number of interesting themes at work in this Sforno. The difference between the situations before and after the sin of the spies - originally, in our parsha at the beginning of the book, when counted, everyone is named; subsequently, at the end of the forty year, they are not - would seem to indicate some sort of loss of individuality or identity. It would seem that before the sin, every member of the nation was a unique individual, with unique, nameable characteristics, which made him or her personally fit and eligible to inherit his or her share of the Jewish homeland. After the sin, this was not the case; the Land is conquered by an undifferentiated collective, rather than by separate, named individuals. At the same time, the sin of the spies will produce another important change: originally, the Canaanite nations were going to simply evacuate the country, apparently out of fear of and respect for the Israelites and their God, and a recognition of the rightness of their claim to the Land. During the forty years in the desert, the Canaanites, whose corrupt lifestyle the Torah, again and again, holds up as a negative model, will sin so much that they will "deserve" to be, and will have to be, forcibly evicted from Israel. At the same time, the Jews will have lost their edge, and, rather than simply frightening or impressing their enemies away, they will have to fight them, and sustain losses; not all of them would live to take possession of the Land. What connects these apparently disparate themes? How did the sin of the spies cause the Jews to lose the individuality indicated by their naming here, in our parsha, and become an undifferentiated herd? How are the Canaanites - their behavior and the subsequent war against them - connected to this dynamic?

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1859) was one of the most interesting and challenging of the great Chassidic masters. He demanded an uncompromising, absolute, personal search for the truth. One of his best-known teachings goes like this: "If I am me because you are you, and you are you because I am me, then I am not me and you are not you. But if I am me because I am me, and you are you because you are you, then I am me and you are you." The Jewish people, after receiving the Torah and starting their theoretically short journey to the Land of Israel, were exactly who they were supposed to be. Alone, in the desert, they had achieved what is understood in Jewish tradition to be the ultimate expression of themselves as individuals and as a people: communing with God, receiving the Torah, and making their way to their ancestral homeland. When, a little later on, the spies failed to grasp the mission, failed to understand the Jewish project of settling the homeland, and came back to Moshe and the people with a negative report, which the people accepted, they were being untrue to their authentic nature. They allowed their fear of the Canaanites and their lack of faith in their mission to cause them, along with the entire nation, to fail to be who they could and should really be. This turned them into something dependant, rather than independent. Their relationship to the Land of Israel, and, with it, their autonomy as a free, sovereign nation, was now no longer in their hands; the Canaanites needed to be factored in. Where, previously, the Canaanites were not really much of a consideration in the definition of Jewish peoplehood - they would simply and peacefully leave in the face of the obvious rightness of the Jews being in Israel and the obvious wrongness of their being there - they now were a crucial part of the Jewish equation: only once they had sinned enough to warrant destruction could the Israelites conquer the Land from them and settle it.

With the sin of the spies, the Jewish people had become a nation defined by the Canaanite nation, and had lost their true, unique, identity. The Sforno is telling us that forty years after the opening of the Book of Numbers, when the sin of the spies had been expiated, the Jews who enter Israel will not be the same nation they had once been. Their fate and destiny determined by the Canaanites whom the spies of the previous generation so feared, they will enter the Land as a collective: specific, named individuals will not be counted by Moshe at the end of the Book of Bamidbar, as he prepares the people to enter Israel and engage in battle with its inhabitants. Apparently, with the spies' failure, the Israelites became an average, run of the mill nation. Defined by their fear of others, using warfare (a definitively collective rather than individual activity) to achieve their goals, they are light years away - well, forty years away, to be precise - from the unique collection of individuals who stood at Mount Sinai, received the Torah, and walked off to proudly and peacefully claim what was rightfully theirs. They had become heirs to all of the negative attributes of nationhood: group-think, lack of individualism, xenophobia, militarism, and the cycle of fear and loathing of the other. The Canaanites too, were effected by this dynamic. The authenticity of Jewish behavior before the sin of the spies was meant to engender in the Canaanites a reciprocal behavior: peaceful recognition of who they were and who the Jewish people were, an intuitive understanding of what their role as a nation should be. The failure of the Israelites to be who they were meant to be led to a concomitant failure on the part of the Canaanites, and, inexorably, to sin, corruption, and, ultimately, bloody, prolonged warfare between these two inauthentic, yet so typical, nations.

Whatever parallels there might or might not be between the tragic dynamic described above and contemporary Jewish life are, as always, yours for the drawing.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix