Beha'alotkha (Torah)

“And the People Murmured…”

The second section of the book of Bamidbar begins in the middle of this week’s portion, Beha’alotkha, which spans Numbers 8-12. Unlike the first part, which presents an idealized, formalized, schematic picture of the various components of the people (the twelve tribes; the Levites, both as a whole and divided by clans), interspersed with various laws, this section paints a realistic, even pessimistic picture of the Israelite people, showing them with a propensity to complain—perpetually dissatisfied, and unable to accept the leadership or guidance of Moses and Aaron. This entire central section of the book contains one incident after another in which the people murmur, complain, rebel, follow trouble-making demagogues, etc.

The first such incident, described here in Chapter 11, involves the most basic of human needs—food. But the cause for their complaint wasn’t really hunger at all; after all, God had provided them with the manna, described as a wondrous, heavenly food, which resembled coriander seed, and tasted like “crackers with honey” (Exod 16:31) or “cakes baked with oil” (Num 11:8): sweet, easily digested, requiring no preparation (but suitable for cooking or baking if they so wished) and, according to Rabbinic legend, having whatever taste people wanted. No, they did not complain about hunger, but about boredom. They missed the interesting, varied, spicy food they used to have in Egypt: the onions and garlic and fish and dill and avatiah (some kind of melon, though probably not the modern watermelon) and what not. Specifically, they wanted to sink their teeth into flesh: “Who will give us flesh to eat?!” (v. 4). They found the manna boring and tasteless; something like overly sweet, cloying, “kids’ food,” perhaps, suitable for angels but not for real people. (One is reminded of American Protestant jokes about heaven as a church service with a choir of fat middle-aged women singing God’s praises in rather watery, effete music, while “downstairs” there are card games, jazz music, boozing and girls.) On the face of it, the Israelites were merely displaying a more mature taste in food.

There is something very basic, even primal, about the desire to eat meat, and thus of the cry of the Israelites. (Deut 12:20 also talks about the “desire of your soul” to eat meat). Those who us who at one time or another have had to deal with chronic overeating will know that the real problem in dieting is not hunger per se, but the cravings for a particular food: its taste, texture, flavor, and the experience of eating as such. The people displayed such a craving: not an elevated spiritual response, but neither does it seem to be the grave sin it is made out to be here.

God reacted to this complaint by saying, as it were, “I’ll show them!,” sending them meat—quail, a typical desert bird—day after day “until it came out of their noses.” And then, to top it off, a plague that killed off many, or all, of the people who had the craving. Why was He so harsh? God seems to come across here as a super-strict Victorian father, dreaming up ingenious punishments by which to instill moral lessons. But why? Was it the ingratitude of the people for the gift of manna? Or their coming down from the high spiritual level on which they had presumably been throughout their stay next to Sinai? In either event, wasn’t He imposing an impossible, inhumanly high standard? True, the manna has been described as spiritual food; its very name is occasionally used to characterize that generation as “the generation of manna eaters,” enjoying an immediate, intimate relationship with God. But how long can an ordinary person transcend the everyday, mundane, material interests of most workaday human beings?

Let us step back for a moment and look at the interaction between Moses and the people. Throughout most of the Torah, one feels that Moses and the Israelites conduct a dialogue of the deaf, neither side understanding the other. The picture of “the people” is almost consistently negative. In Egypt, prior to the Exodus, they doubted Moses’ mission; when he first came to them, bringing his liberating message, they were full of sceptical questions: “Who is HVYH?… Aren’t you just making trouble for us? You have made us disgusting in the eyes of the Egyptians!” Only for one brief moment, when they crossed the Sea and stood together singing the great Song of Praise to God were they briefly united in a moment of elevated consciousness. But then came the Golden Calf, and later on this series of incidents.

We can imagine the Israelites looking at Moses. He must have seemed a strange, wild-eyed man, who had, unlike themselves, grown up amidst the comfort and even luxury of Pharaoh’s palace. This stranger suddenly came to them and told them to defy the Egyptian task masters: first to slaughter a goat or sheep, the deity of the Egyptians, an act of high sacrilege, before their very eyes; then, to simply take their feet and go. On the one hand, he clearly possessed extraordinary powers: he dared to present ultimatums to Pharaoh, and then backing them up by asking God to bring plagues down upon the Egyptians and, at his will, asking Him to stop them, with another wave of his magic stick. On the other hand, he existed on another plane than themselves. There was a look in his eyes that was far away, as if he saw and understood things beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. Try as he would to be a kindly, father-like, compassionate leader, there was an unbridgeable gap between his world and theirs. As we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, he was a prophet who spoke to God face-to-face; he had existed for forty days and night on top of the mountain with neither food nor drink; he ceased living with his wife once he began prophesying, and certainly was above needing a woman in any vulgar sense. What could these ordinary, humble people, coming straight from centuries of grinding, back-breaking enslavement, understand of him? And just as important: what could he, really, understand of their petty complaints about meat and onions and garlics?

More on Murmurings

1) The main sin of the people was, of course, their longing for Egypt—the fact that they so rapidly forgot the sufferings of slavery: not only the indignities, but the beatings, the back-breaking labor, the violation of their women (according to one noted midrash), etc. Thus, even if one can feel some human understanding for their cravings, it is more difficult to countenance their so completely forgetting the terrible sufferings of Egypt, from which they had been liberated. But all this is part of our experience of human nature: the cravings for something different; the inability to remain at a high pinnacle of spiritual consciousness; the desire for crass bodily satisfactions (let us be honest with ourselves: to what extent is our sense of sublime spirituality on Yom Kippur eased by the fact that, immediately after nightfall, most of us know that we will be able to sit down at a table laden with whatever food and drink our heart desires?); the propensity to gripe about the shortcomings of the present, however basically good that present may be, and to romanticize the past, however painful and filled with troubles it may have been. If the Torah, knowing the weaknesses to which flesh is prone, is nevertheless unsparing in its criticism of the Israelites’ behavior here, this is because the Torah nevertheless wants the people to reach out towards a higher goal, to overcome some of these sentimental weaknesses, and to strive to live on a higher plane.

2) A puzzling feature: what is the connection between the crisis of the people’s craving for meat, and Moses’ gathering seventy elders upon whom God’s spirit rests, who then “prophesy” in the camp (vv. 16-17, 25-30). What kind of response is this? Is it intended as an answer to Moses’ complaint that “I cannot carry the burden of this people alone” (v. 14), that God provided a staff of “assistant prophets”?

Or was the widespread “outburst” of spirituality, through the elder’s ecstatic prophesying (perhaps like the band of prophets with musical instruments whom Saul encountered in 1 Sam 10:5?), somehow intended to provide a counter-balance to the gross corporeality of the mass’s craving for meat?

3) Why the sudden turnaround, in which God waxed angry at them after eating the quail? Perhaps He thought that sending them the quail would bring them to their senses. The fact that they ate them for thirty days straight came to Him as a surprise, not part of the bargain; He evidently thought that they would reject it of their own accord.

“And the Man Moshe…”

The final section of this week’s portion, Chapter 12, contains a brief vignette describing how Moses’ siblings, Aaron and Miriam, gossip about his marriage to a Cushite woman. Were they critical of his choice of wife? Was this a second wife, or does this refer to Zipporah, the Midianite priest’s daughter, under another designation? Or were they discussing how he had separated from her, adopting in wake of his ongoing prophetic activity a monk-like existence which demanded extraordinary purity, as the classical midrash has it. In any event, God’s chastises them for their gossiping (this is the classical source for the strictures against lashon hara and rekhilut—gossip and talebearing against others); punishes Miriam by making her leprous; and concludes with Moses himself praying for her to heal, in a prayer astounding for its brevity: five mono-syllabic words. During the course of this narrative, there is a succinct presentation of the uniqueness of Moses’ prophecy, which forms the basis for Maimonides’ theological elaboration of this point, as we discussed in our Shavuot Torah: that Moses received prophecy when he was awake, and not in a dream; that he received it directly, and not via symbols and parables; that he spoke with God “as with a friend,” without the fear and trembling and the sense of being overwhelmed by the Divine Presence; and that he spoke with God whenever he wished.

I would like to dwell upon one verse here: “and the man Moses was very humble.” Jewish ethical literature is filled with exhortations to modesty and humility as the ultimate virtue. In his writings on the ideal ethical personality (in Shemonah Perakim and Hilkhot De’ot), Maimonides generally advocated the “golden mean” in all things (i.e, striking a happy medium between stinginess and profligacy; anger and total apathy; depression and empty bon-vivantism; etc.), while insisting that humility is the one trait of which a person cannot have too much.

It seems to me that issues of humility and ego are especially problematic in the modern world. We live in an age in which public relations and “image creation” are major industries; in which entire magazines (such as People) are devoted to discussion of celebrities and “personalities”; in which even serious newspapers, such as ha-Aretz and the New York Times, devote considerable space to detailed write-ups / portraits of celebrities, not only in the field of entertainment, but even in more serious cultural pursuits. Even in the area of religion, one encounters “super stars”—rabbis, rebbes, teachers, and of course various non-Jewish ministers, preachers and gurus—whose style project a sense of arrogance, and the feeling that they, and only they, have the true answers.

This attitude filters down to the ordinary person. There is perhaps a certain paradox here: the pressures of modern culture, the over-crowded cities, the intense pace of modern life, the shift of the center of balance in more and more people’s lives from home and family to work and career (for both men and women), have somehow reduced the average person’s natural sense of self, of dignity, and of self-worth. This is doubtless one of the sources of the ubiquitous interest in various forms of self-help, in New Age spirituality, and in various forms of counseling. Yet one of the other results is the emergence of what I call the “modern ego.” For many people, the putative emptiness of the universe, the fragility of human life, leads to an exaggerated need, a veritable thirst, to assert and gain recognition of the ego.

It is very difficult to attain genuine humility. There is, of course, much talk of modesty in Orthodox world, but the word is most often associated with female modesty in the most narrow sense—length of sleeves, hair covering, trousers vs. skirts, etc. A cursory search in the Concordance of the usage of the terms tzan’ua and ‘anav and their cognates in the Bible (the former term, interestingly, appears only twice in the entire Bible: in Micah 6:8 and in Proverbs 11:2) reveals that they are used in the sense of “humility” or “reserve,” but never as “modesty” in the physical sense; the emphasis is not on a woman’s manner of attire, but rather on the inner essence, of humility.

The contemporary emphasis on a very demonstrative and publicity-oriented attitude toward religion reminds me of an interesting incident involving Rav Soloveitchik, ztz”l. In 1973, I was approached by a journalist friend involved in the then-nascent teshuvah (return to Judaism) movement, who was busy preparing a book relating the stories of ba’alei teshuvah connected with various different Orthodox communities. Knowing my acquaintance with Rav Soloveitchik, he asked me to approach the Rav for the name of a ba’al teshuvah among his students who might be willing to share his personal story. The following Saturday night I thus duly approached the Rav following his weekly lecture on Jewish thought. The Rav’s answer was unequivocal, and went approximately as follows: “I don’t understand! Maimonides says that it is the nature of the penitent to be modest and self-effacing, and not to publicize or dwell on his past. Ours is not the way of Christian revivalists or evangelists, who make a big show of announcing their repentance in public. It is against the very nature of a baal teshuvah to seek publicity of this type. Such a book is the very antithesis of true teshuvah!”

Hasidic thought contains some illuminating insights regarding these issues of ego. Outsiders are often dismayed by what seems a cult of personality surrounding the Hasidic leader, the Tzaddik or rebbe, and the unabashed adulation shown them by their followers. Must not a person be singularly arrogant and vain to accept such veneration? The check against this danger, at least in theory, lies in the concept of bittul atzmi, self-abnegation; that the individual who has truly achieved an awareness of and attachment to the Divine, will entirely negate his/her own ego before God.

To return to the problem of humility in modern culture: I would go so far as to say that the modern ego is quite likely the #1 problem in religious training and character development. Without a modicum of effacement of the self, it is impossible for a person to even begin to see or hear the other nor, certainly, to attain the “acceptance of the yoke of Heaven” that is the essence of the religious attitude.

Moreover, the modern ego seems to me to be at the core of the widespread problems in inter-personal relations which plague our society. I believe that it is one of the underlying sources of divorce, of why so many people are reluctant to marry; why there are so many bachelors and unmarried women. (One explanation is the sexual freedom of our age: that there is no longer any need to even be secretive about premarital relations. But another, equally cogent reason seems to me to be the modern ego: that people are less prepared to make the compromises, the every-day consideration, the thinking about the needs of another person required by marriage)

Chapters 1-10: An Afterword

To return briefly to the beginning: if we attempt to summarize these first three (or 2 ½) portions of the Book of Numbers, we find that the theme of the people, in its various portions, is preeminent. The gifts of the princes in Ch. 7, which is really the winding-up of the dedication of the Sanctuary, belongs here because of the “twelveness” of the tribes; perhaps it is a counterpart to the census in Chs. 1-2. In between, there are laws concerning: the banishment of the leprous and impure from the camp (5:1-4); the sacrifice for the atonement of certain specific offences, especially those causing monetary loss to others (5:5-10; parallel to Lev 5:1-6): the Nazirite; the trial by ordeal of the Sotah; and the tripartite priestly blessing. The common denominator of all these is the concern with the sanctity of the people, or its absence by dint of physical impurity, sins requiring atonement, or sexual licentiousness.

Beha’alotkha starts with a collection of short units, beginning with the command to light the Menorah, the Candelabrum in the Temple. It is interesting that in all those places where the Menorah is mentioned in the Torah (Exod 27:20-21; Lev 24:1-4; and here, Num 8:1-4), it seems almost an aside, something mentioned briefly, in passing. Yet it opens two separate, widely spaced parshiyot of the Torah (this one and Tetzaveh). Perhaps the Masoretic Sages who arranged the portions of the Torah liked the idea of Divine light (and the paradox of man bringing light into the glowing “dwelling place’ of the Infinite, who after all doesn’t need our light; see Numbers Rabbah 15:2).

The installation of the Levites, who substitute for the first-born as the servants of God, as both general assistants to the priests and as musicians and singers in the Sanctuary, is one of the two central themes in at least the first part of the Book of Bamidbar (Numbers), the details of the census and the arrangements of the twelve tribes being the other. These two groups—the twelve tribes, and the Levites—constitute the totality of the people. (Note what I said in my introduction about this being “the book of Am Yisrael.”) Earlier, we read about the detailed genealogy of the Levites, and the differentiated tasks of the clans of Gershon, Kehat and Merari (Num 3-4); in this portion (8:5-26) we find instruction about their installation and some specific laws. Interestingly, the idea of their coming in place of the first born, mentioned already in 3:40-51, is repeated here nearly verbatim (8:16-19). It is interesting that here, too, there is a kind of chiastic or introverted structure, reminiscent of the instruction and execution of the command to build a Sanctuary, found in Exod 25-32 and 35-40.

Michael Kagan asked: “Do you have anything to say about the fact that the Torah story has been going in circles for the last several weeks?,” referring to the story of the dedication of the altar and the descent of the Holy Presence three separate times: at the end of Exodus, following 7 days of induction and sitting of the priests (Ch. 29); in the first part of Vayikra, where the sacrificial laws are introduced leading up to the dedication of the altar and the descent of the Holy Presence (on the 8th day), and in Num 7, which begins by describing the camp of Israel, certain social laws, the gifts of the Princes leading up to the dedication of the Tabernacle (12 days), and the descent of the Holy Presence. All these events, according to Rabbinic tradition, occurred around the dedication of the Sanctuary, on the 1st day of Nissan of the second year after the Exodus. There is also an intriguing gemara in Gittin 60a-b, which I also haven't analyzed in depth, or even really learned properly, which says that “eight parshiyiot were given on that selfsame day [i.e, 1 Nissan, of year 2].”

What I have referred to as the first section of Numbers closes with some instruction preparatory to the people going through the wilderness: the commandment about the use of the trumpets to summon the people together (and on festival days and holy days; and before going to war; and, according to our tradition, on fast days in times of trouble); the arrangements of the pillar of smoke and pillar of fire, that guided them “to show them the way by day and by night”; and the two mysterious verses placed between inverted nuns, which are no more than prayers of invocation to God to be with the people when and a scatter their enemies when the ark went forth at their head, and to return and rest with the myriads of Israel, when the ark rested.