Shabbat B’Midbar
It’s been more than a year now and the future looks bleakly uncertain. Can Israel’s leaders really be trusted? They seem so certain of themselves, so assured they know what is best for the people, they are so proficient at issuing orders, and so reluctant to hear the people’s complaints. Memories of how it used to be are rapidly fading because every day the people have to wake up and face the uncertainty of what lies ahead; they are armed and ready but they have no idea how long it is going to take or who they are going to have to fight. To make matters worse, they don’t have any idea where they are going. What is the destination? Why can’t anyone tell them what the hardships are for, what the purpose is of the traumas they have faced, and are facing? Is the aim now just physical survival, to get through each day unscathed, survival for its own sake?
It all comes down to trust. And leadership. And whether you can put your faith in a man who claims to know all the answers. And who, if memory serves, has blood on his hands.
Are you feeling confused? Maybe I should check you know what I am talking about?
Is he talking about Israel now? Or is he talking about the Biblical story we read? The past or the present? it’s understandable to be confused. Nothing I’ve said about the Torah portion isn’t also addressing our current moment. Everything I said describes both the situation of the Israelites in the wilderness as the book of Numbers, B’midbar, begins - and the situation of the people of Israel today: questions of leadership, of direction, of purpose, of hardships, of fear, of uncertainty about what it is all for and where they are headed. Then – and now.
That’s what happens – it’s wondrous in a way – when one engages with a timeless, archetypal text. The Torah is rooted in a strange dimension of reality – it is immersed in its own time and its own worldview, it has its own preoccupations - while at the same time it is signposting themes and situations and dilemmas which are absolutely of the moment. Our daily news, our daily reality. Greek mythology does this, and Shakespeare too, of course. But we have the Torah.
One of the things we always need to keep in mind when we read the stories of the wilderness years is that the people didn’t know how long the journey would last. Can you imagine that? Can you suspend your knowledge of the story and its legendary 40 years, and place yourself into the mental world of its participants and an apparently endless wandering through an arid wilderness? Yes, we have the manna every day, the daily miracle of being alive and provided for – but how long can this go on, the uncertainty, the aimlessness, the insecurity of a life lived between the horrors of the past and the wished-for settledness of a patch of land we can call our own?
The Israelites were carrying a promise: at some stage, they had been told, they will arrive at a so-called ‘promised land’, a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’, a fantasy land where the people can live at peace, in security, and with all the blessings of material wellbeing. So the promise for that exodus generation is hardship now, but jam tomorrow. (Thank you Lewis Carroll: the White Queen explains to Alice with Talmudic logic that what is on offer is ‘jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today’. That’s because, in the story, jam is available ‘Every Other Day’. Which of course is never ‘today’. Each day it’s ‘jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today’).
Victory tomorrow, hostages released tomorrow, ceasefire tomorrow. Moses and Netanyahu – the White Queens of Jewish history. Unalike in so many ways, this is something they share – the ability to dangle hope for jam tomorrow in front of a traumatized people desperate for an end to the perils and uncertainties of an endless journey.
So we need to keep in mind the internal drama of the Torah’s fourth book, B’midbar, its radical uncertainty about what is going on and how long it will continue, but we also need to recognize the way the story unfolds into a collective tragedy. And the tragedy is that the people who left Egypt with such high hopes, such drama and excitement and sense of wonder at a miraculous survival, this people, this group of survivors of degradation and enslavement and persecution, this people whose identity is branded by the experience of both liberation and revelation, this people promised a great future with a vision to enact – those people all die out on the never-ending journey: the wilderness takes its toll, the wilderness claims its victims, the people numbered in such obsessive detail as Numbers chapter 1 opens -
they never reach their promised land. (The exceptions are Joshua and Caleb, the outliers in this tragedy).
So this story contains tragedy – if we read attentively we can feel it. But if, classically, tragedy also has elements of catharsis, the purging of the feelings of pity and fear, is there catharsis in the Torah’s dark drama? Perhaps what keeps us reading and not despairing is the way the storytellers allow us to hope that the next generation will carry the vision, and take the story forward, that they will reach the so-called ‘promised land’. The whole of the book of Deuteronomy is a resumé by Moses of the history of what the Israelites went through in the wilderness years. ‘And you shall teach it to your children…’ So the story will go on, beyond the tragedy. And this has been Jewish history, over and over again.
Yet it is one of the deepest truths of the Jewish story, as we retell it year by year, that in a fundamental way, a spiritual and psychological and existential way, we the Jewish people never do enter the promised land. We come to the end of Deuteronomy and ascend Mount Nevo with Moses and are vouchsafed a look at the promised land. But a glimpse is all we get. Then Moses dies and we start again, from the beginning, the cycle of Torah readings returns us to the story of how life came into being and a special people came into being with an identity rooted in a form of timelessness.
The journey is endless (as Kafka knew and wrote about in his famous parable) and the promised land is not geographical but a metaphor: it’s an image of deferred hope, it’s the spur for survival, it’s what enables a people to bear the vicissitudes of history, the defeats, the disappointments; and to keep on going with the hope – grandiose, seductive, unachievable, and yet devoutly wished-for and prayed-for (by some) – the hope that history and the story of humankind can be transformed for the better; that the Judaic vision of how relationships between people should be, how the relationship between societies and peoples can be, how the relationship with the natural world can be - that this Jewish vision can make a difference to the fate of life on earth. This is the absurd hope, endlessly deferred, of the Jewish story. This is the endlessly awaited promised land, the destination of the never-ending Jewish journey.
My Jewishness is a Jewishness rooted in story and storytelling, and how that story, or set of stories intersects with history. Some Jews, many Jews, reject the story and only want to live in day-to-day history: they are the out and out secularists, and the nationalists, and those religious who have made a Golden Calf out of possession of the land. This is what modernity made possible: Jews who relegated their mythic and archetypal and spiritual story, the story incarnated in the sacred scriptures, relegated it to the realms of nostalgia or outworn superstition, or condemned it as coercive indoctrination, or made it into a solely political project.
Some Jews – a small minority – did things the other way round: they rejected history and only wanted to live in the story (they are the original anti-Zionists who rejected the establishment of the State, and reject it still, because the Messiah had not yet come to declare it). I try and hold on to both story and history – to a story which is still alive, and a history in which it is embedded, and I wrestle with the creative tension this involves, the dialectic between history and story.
But holding on to both, for me, means reading history - the day to day reality of a nation struggling in real time – reading that history in the light of the story: judging the temporal, the everyday, in the light of the timelessness of the story and the vision it incarnates - a vision in which justice and compassion are God’s presence within the story and justice and compassion are the divine attributes that the Jewish people have to enact as they live in history.
Sorry to wander into theology, into speaking of justice and compassion as God’s signature in the world, but if you abandon theology then you end up with a pariah state: you end up starving civilians, and in the words of Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s opposition Democratic party “ kill[ing] babies as a hobby…and expelling populations”, or in the words this week of Ehud Olmert, former prime minister of Israel, you end up with “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians…war crimes.”
There is nothing in our sacred story that justifies this, although you still hear it being justified both by the secular nationalists and the religious nationalists, in Israel and here. This is what one can truly call a ‘Hillul Ha-Shem’ - a ‘desecration of God’s name’ – in other words actions which cause people to have contempt for Judaism and for the God of Jewish tradition who is the God of all humankind.
We just cannot allow this to happen without comment. We are not a people renowned for our silence, our inability to put into words what matters. And what matters now is to put into words our thoughts about the moral turpitude of what we have seen this past year and more, and continue to see unfolding before our eyes. As a people we are better than this – but we are still in the wilderness and we have no idea how long all this will take.
