BAMIDBAR 2020
Rabbi Stephen Weiss
On our journeys, We can become so impatient with ourselves in seeking to reach our goals that we try to take shortcuts that lead us astray that set us back instead of moving us forward.
Shabbat Shalom.
A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel, so the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday. His wife was flying down the following day.
The husband checked into the hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an email to his wife; however, in sending it, he accidentally left out one letter in her email address, and without realizing his error, he sent the email with the wrong address.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, Texas, a widow had just returned home from her husband’s funeral. The husband was a minister who was called home to Heaven following a heart attack. The widow decided to check her email, expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted. The widow’s son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the following email open on her computer screen:
To my loving wife.
Subject: I’ve arrived.
Date: January 19th, 2010.
“I know you’re surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now, and you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I’ve just arrived and have been checked in. I’ve seen that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then. Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine. P.S. It sure is freaking hot down here.”
Today, I want to talk to you about journeys. This Shabbat, we began reading the Book of Numbers. In Hebrew, the Book of Numbers is called Bamidbar, in the wilderness, but it really could be called the book of Journey. Bamidbar is all about the journey. It is not about our departure. We left Egypt long ago. It is not about our arrival. That story will not be told until the Book of Joshua.
Bamidbar focuses on our journey through the wilderness, the obstacles we faced, how they were overcome, our inner struggles with faith and hope, our moral and spiritual growth both as individuals and as a people, our striving and our impatient desire to reach our destination to find wholeness and home in a new land. It is about a journey of transformation. In the words of the sages, it is a story of the crucible in which a group of ragtag slaves became a holy covenanted people.
The journey of the Israelites in the wilderness serves as a metaphor for our own personal journeys. As through our ancestors, so too for us. We are imperfect beings in an imperfect world, longing for wholeness and completion. We struggle against the challenges in our lives. We strive to refine our abilities and our character. We seek to achieve our full potential to be the best that we can be.
It is our connection to God’s perfection and wholeness that arouses within us our desire for the same. In that sense, that push from within, that striving, that yearning to go farther, to reach higher, to do better, to reach our goal, to get to our destination, that can all be very elevating and even holy. Yet as we learned from the rebellions of the Israelites detailed in the Book of Bamidbar, that striving can also be debilitating.
We can become so impatient with ourselves in seeking to reach our goals that we try to take shortcuts that lead us astray that set us back instead of moving us forward. We may want to reach our goals so badly that we rush forward prematurely and unprepared, and our raised expectations that motivate us can also sometimes lead to debilitating disappointment.
The overarching lesson of the Book of Bamidbar is that in the journey of life, there will be highs along the way, times when we achieve tremendous growth and progress, but there will also be lows, obstacles, challenges, pitfalls, and setbacks. There were no shortcuts to the holy land for our ancestors. The Torah tells us they could have traveled from Egypt to the land of Canaan along the road of the Philistines along the coast. It was only a three-day journey, but God knew they needed to travel the longer way through the wilderness. When our Israelites were at the edge of the Promised Land and the 10 spies brought back the report demonstrating their lack of faith in God and in themselves, God knew that though we were only days journey from our destination, we would need another 40 years to prepare ourselves to reach it.
The same is true for us in our lives to think and hope that we are home when we are not is to invite frustration and disappointment. Success in life requires of us that we understand that we are still on the journey and that we embrace the journey, lift up, and celebrate the journey, that we know that there is no rush because, as we often say, “But it’s very true, the journey is as if not more important than the destination.”
The lesson of Bamidbar rings true as we journey through the wilderness of this pandemic together. We are so anxious to get back to normal, to get back to home. We want to be able to go outside to congregate in large numbers, to celebrate simchas, to eat out at restaurants, to listen to music, to shop without fear or concern, to hold and embrace our loved ones, to gather with our friends, to be, again, whole family together, whole community together, but we need to be careful not to overly focus on reaching that end destination and instead to focus on the journey to get there, to be careful that we take the right steps along the way, that we don’t rush, that we make sure that we are being safe, safe for ourselves and safe for others. Though it may seem like it is a long time that we are living with this pandemic and with all of its restrictions, the reality is that each of us can find beauty, unknown strengths, room for personal growth along the way.
I want to share with you a story that is also about journeys and about pandemics. The story is about the Bubonic Plague that swept through the Ottoman Empire. That plague broke out in Constantinople in July of 1812. It spread throughout the Middle East, Asia Minor, and Southern Europe. The plague was initially mild. By August, it had become severe. By September of that year, 2,000 people were dying each and every day. By the end of the pandemic in 1819, some 321,000 people had died, among them, 32,000 Jews.
That plague changed history in many ways. One of them relates directly to the holiday that we celebrated yesterday, Yom Yerushalayim, the celebration of the reunification of Jerusalem, our holy city, when it was recaptured and restorative Jewish hands during the six-day war. Our story of the Bubonic Plague begins just after that plague.
In 1808 and 1809, there were three waves of Jews, disciples of the Vilna Gaon and his family that made aliyah to Israel. In doing so, these 500 or so Jews were fulfilling the dream of their teacher who had died before he could make that journey. Their dream was to settle in Jerusalem, but they could not do that. You see, the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem at the time, which had been there since the 1600s, was saddled with enormous debt that had accrued because they lack the funds to support themselves. As a result, the Ottoman government had banned Ashkenazic Jews from living in the city.
These 500 disciples of the Vilna Gaon instead settled in the holy city of Safed. Then came the bubonic plague. It swept through the city of Safed, wiping out 80% of its Jewish community. One of the leaders of Vilna Gaon’s disciples, Rabbi Menachem Mendel and his followers decided it was time to go to Jerusalem, but they did not go straight to Jerusalem. Rather, over the next five years, Rabbi Menachem Mendel sent representatives to the Ottoman authorities and Constantinople negotiating with them and finally managing to convince them to cancel the debts of the Ashkenazim who had lived earlier in Jerusalem and receiving official permission to settle his community in the holy city.
This re-introduction of Ashkenazim into Jerusalem and the big bump it created in the city’s Jewish population created a viable community that set the stage for the tremendous growth of Jewish Jerusalem which followed right up until this very day. From around 2,000 Jews before the Vilna Gaon students to almost 5,000 after his students arrived to well over a half a million Jews today living in Jerusalem, half a million Jews in our sacred capital, the political and cultural and spiritual center of our people.
What an extraordinary journey it has been. The journey to a united Jerusalem under Jewish sovereignty was a Jewish majority, a large bursting population that celebrates the rhythm of Jewish life, that expresses the beauty of Jewish culture, that radiates with the spirit of God and the holiness of our tradition. Every one of us feels a tug and a pull to Jerusalem, a yearning to be there. It is, for us, home.
It took many years for Menachem Mendel and his disciples, the disciples of Vilna Gaon, to be able to arrive in Jerusalem in a way that would enable them to succeed, and many more years for Jerusalem to become the vibrant center that it is today. The lesson is that journeys take time, that we can’t rush them, that we have to go through them and experience them and learn from them and grow from them. When we embrace the journey, we can reach our destination. We can get home.
I’ll share with you an interesting footnote to the story of the disciples of the Vilna Gaon and the establishment of an Ashkenazi Jewish presence in Jerusalem. The current president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, is one of the descendants of those early Zionists who were the disciples of the Vilna Gaon. He has in his family a book. The book is somewhat controversial because its authenticity and its providence is not entirely clear. But the book purports that it had been passed down within the Rivlin family for generations before being published in the 20th century. It includes capitalistic teachings that are attributed to the Vilna Gaon and teachings relating to the Messianic Age.
In that book, there are two dates that the Vilna Gaon, if he is the author, identifies as having exceptional spiritual qualities, dates that he suggests are in some way related to the redemption of the Jewish people. The first of those dates was the 5th of Iyar, the day that we celebrate as Israel’s independence. The second date was the 27th of Iyar, the date on which at the height of the battle for Jerusalem in 1967 the decision was made to move forward and unify this city under Jewish sovereignty for the first time in two millennia.
I don’t know if the book is true and those words are prophetic or if the book is a forgery that was created after the state of Israel, Either way, I am touched by the sentiment that the Vilna Gaon had faith in the creating of a sovereign Jewish nation, no matter how long it would take, and that his disciples fulfilled. My prayer for all of us is that we keep our eye on the goals that are most important to us in life, whether it be supporting the state of Israel and unification of Jerusalem or the goals in our own lives.
Jerusalem today is not so completely unified. There were still great divisions in Jerusalem between Arab and Jew, religious and secular, Orthodox and liberal movements, and is a city that in many ways is torn apart by tensions, but I have faith, in the end, those tensions will be resolved, and Jerusalem will become the model of harmony and spiritual blessing that it was intended to be.
I have faith too that we will get through this coronavirus, move past this pandemic, that we will, again, be able to gather. I like to think that I have the ability to raise myself up and become the person I most desire to be, and so do you. So do you. But the journey requires patience and commitment. It requires that we don’t take the shortcuts but that we put our full selves, heart, mind, and soul, into the tasks that lie ahead of us.
May God grant us the strength of mind and heart, the calmness and patience that enables us to move forward in life, to be the best that we can, to overcome our challenges, to arrive home. And we say amen.