BAMIDBAR
by Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum
Torah
Haftara: Hosea 2:1-22.
IN THE
WILDERNESS
It was fitting that the
Giving of the Torah took place in no-man's-land amidst the stark desolation of
the Wilderness. Here no temporal king could claim that he played host to the
event, thereby meriting a special share in the glory. The Children of Israel
were chosen to receive the Torah not because they were the most glorious, but
because their hearts had been broken through exile and slavery. For the only
way to receive the Torah is through humility, symbolized in the lowly
Having been appointed as
guardians of the Torah, the task of the Children of Israel was to bring it up
from Sinai to the Promised Land, from which they were to shine its light to all
the inhabitants of the world. Genesis traces the roots of the Torah and of the
souls of
Now we come to the Book
of Numbers -- the "legs" -- tracing the journeying of the Children of
Israel on foot through the wilderness to the borders of the Promised Land, with
all the accompanying trials and tribulations. Our parshah of BAMIDBAR begins in
the Wilderness of Sinai, almost a year after the Children of Israel's arrival
to receive the Torah. By now they had been taught all the main laws of the
Torah, and the Sanctuary was in place and fully functional. The next stage was
to take to the road and carry the Ark of the Covenant -- encompassing the
entire Torah -- up to the land. The commandment to Moses with which BAMIDBAR opens,
to take a census of the people and organize them by tribes, was a preparation
for their departure from Sinai, which is narrated in BEHA'ALOSCHA (Numbers ch. 10).
As described in our
parshah, the twelve tribes of
Ramban (Nachmanides)
opens his commentary on BAMIDBAR by pointing out that the way the people
encamped around the Sanctuary was directly parallel to the way they encamped
around Sinai at the time of the Giving of the Torah. We find in next week's
parshah that they were commanded to send those who were ritually impure away
from the Sanctuary and out of the camp (Numbers 5:1ff). This parallels the
command to Moses to put boundaries around
These
and other parallels point to the profound conceptual link between the Sanctuary
(and
From the Wilderness of
Sinai, the Children of Israel were to carry the Ark of the Covenant up to the
center-point or "navel" of the earth in
* * *
THE
TRIBES OF
The Zohar states that the
form of the Sanctuary corresponds to the form of the work of creation. Thus the
various different areas making up the
The arrangement of the
twelve tribes in four camps around the Sanctuary corresponds to the "four
camps of the Divine Presence" and the "four camps of angels"
that channel the flow of divine sustenance into the world. These are aspects of
the MERKAVAH ("chariot") seen by the prophets, representing the
system of providence through which G-d governs the world. The four camps
correspond to the four roots of creation (Kindness, Judgment, Compassion and
their manifestation in reality: "Kingship") and to the four elements
(Water, Fire, Air and Earth, which is the "vessel" of the first
three). The various different names and numbers making up the account in our
parshah of the census of the Twelve Tribes consist of codes and ciphers that
are bound up with the root forces in the spiritual and physical worlds.
The difficulty which many
find in relating to sections dealing with the different tribes and their names
and numbers is compounded by the fact that today the majority have become
disconnected and even alienated from their own "tribal" roots after thousands
of years of exile and wandering. Originally the consciousness of tribal
affiliation among the Children of Israel was very powerful, as is evident from
the end of parshas EMOR, where the episode of
blasphemy was caused when members of the tribe of Dan refused to allow the son
of the Egyptian to camp with them because his lineage was flawed.
Today, however, few Jews
even know which tribe they come from, although the majority (besides Kohanim
and Levites) assume that they are from the tribes of Judah or Benjamin, which
were the only two that did not disappear when the Ten Tribes went into exile
prior to the destruction of the First Temple. (Some believe that the Sefardic communities of
Besides being unaware of
their own tribal affiliation, many Jews are also quite unaware that many people
throughout the world whom they consider to be gentiles actually believe
themselves to be the Children of Israel. Moreover, in many cases they believe
they DO know to which tribe they belong. This includes enormous numbers of
people in the Indian sub-continent, Africa and South America etc. as well as
the Mormon Church, which considers America today to be the home of the Ten
Tribes, and prominent members of British and European royalty and aristocracy,
who believe they are the true Israelites (without explaining why they do not
observe the Sabbath or other Torah laws).
Just to complete the
mix-up, if you were to ask most Jews today to enumerate the different
components that make up the nation, the answer would not be the twelve tribes
but rather: ultra-orthodox, orthodox, traditional, conservative, reform,
secular-right, secular-left, etc. etc.
Our fragmentation and
disarray in today's sophisticated "civilized" world is in sorry
contrast with the order of the camp in the wilds of the desert that saw our
birth! Perhaps we need to develop a new way of looking at the different types
that make up the people of Israel in terms of the order set forth in BAMIDBAR:
how near are they to the Sanctuary-Temple idea or how far away?
Shabbat Shalom!!! Chodesh Tov Umevorach!!!
Avraham Yehoshua Greenbaum