Parashat Massei

Parashat Massei
Drash given at Beth Jacob
on Shabbat, July 30, 2011
by Omri Dahan

Many of you may remember an old Mel Brooks bit in which a young Jewish woman calls her mother, complaining that the car won’t start, the house is a mess, the kids are sick, and she still has to make lunch for her Hadassah meeting. The mother says not to worry– that she will come over, clean the house, start lunch, and take care of the kids. The daughter, grateful, thanks her while the mother explains in an exasperated tone that she doesn’t mind walking to the subway, taking the subway to the Long Island Railroad, getting off the train and walking to the bus, riding the bus for three miles and then of course, it’s no problem walking the fourteen blocks to the house. Finally, the mother asks how her daughter’s husband, Sam, got to work if the car didn’t start, to which the daughter replies “Sam? My husband’s name is Paul… Is this 917-1166?”

“No, this is 917-1177.”

“Does that mean you’re not coming?”

In this week’s Torah reading, Parshat Massei, the Torah, in a very specific/detailed manner goes through the many stops Bnei Yisrael made in the wilderness along their way to Israel.

33:5-read in Hebrew

And the Jews traveled from Ramseis and they camped in a place called…

Read 33:6

And they traveled from sukkot and camped in Eitan…

Read 33:7 and they traveled from Eitan and settled in pi hachirot

Read 33:8-and they went from pi hachirot….and they went to migdal and

it just goes on and on, verse after verse and they went from this place to that place, why all the repetition?

QUESTION: The Torah which is so careful not to waste words…goes into such detail listing every place to which they traveled and set up camp. First they stopped here, then they stopped there, truthfully who cares? As long as they get to Israel! What does it matter where they stopped along the way?

ANSWER: It does matter because each stop in the wilderness was another part of the Jewish people’s spiritual journey; each stop represented another stage in their development as a people.

Rashi: when it says the Jews went from Chazerot to Rismah, the place Rismah was so named because of the lashon hara that was spoken by the spies. The word “rismah” he explains is always used in connection with lashon hara, with slander and so that place, Rismah was supposed to remind the Jewish people and all of us studying the Torah thousands of years later, about the terrible incident of the spies and the perils of speaking lashon hara.

QUESTION: BUT again WHY? If it was such a terrible moment in our history why would the Torah want us to recall it by including Rismah in our parsha? The sin of the spies is something we’d prefer to forget, not be reminded of again and again?

Because every part of life is part of our development and is therefore meant to be learned from.

Every experience, the good, bad and even the ugly we believe happens to us for a reason and is somehow designed to enable us to grow in some kind of way. And therefore the Torah mentions every place Bnei Yisrael journeyed, even the places that reminded them of their sins and failings because from every place and from every experience we are supposed to learn another lesson.

One of the most powerful examples: life of Abraham Lincoln. History has been very kind to President Lincoln who is viewed by many as perhaps the greatest President in the history of the United States but how many of us are aware of the incredible failings and setbacks which he faced in his life?

In 1831 Lincoln he lost his job.

In 1832 he was defeated for the state legislature.

He tried another business in '33. It failed.

His fiancé died in '35.

In 1836 he suffered a nervous breakdown.

In '43 he ran for Congress and was defeated.

He tried again in '48 and was defeated again.

He tried running for the Senate in '55. He lost.

The next year he ran for vice president and lost.

In '59 he ran for the Senate again and was again defeated.

Finally in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth president of the United States, and the rest is history.

Would it have been possible for Lincoln, to have become the great statesmen he became w/out having suffered those setbacks? Some believe that it was precisely Lincoln ’s ability to somehow learn and grow from each of those experiences that developed him into the great leader he ultimately became.

And so the deal at work that went south, the tire that blew as we were driving on the road, all the little and big things that happen to us that we wished hadn’t happened, are meant for us to somehow learn and grow from.

The great Ramchal, Rabbeinu Moshe Chaim Luzzato in his classic work Derech Hashem wrote that every person’s life predicament is their challenge; that every life situation is presented to us as a necessary means for our spiritual perfection. It’s not always easy being who we are, struggling each day to be better or get better results for our lives. But there is a choice in that struggle, one we can choose to embrace: that whatever appears to be IN the way, actually IS the way. As King David so poetically wrote in Tehillim, Gam Ki Elech B’Geh Tsalmavet, even in our darkest moments, Hashem does not abandon us…He has given us this precise struggle, each of us with our very own path, with all the seemingly ridiculous stops along the way – many of which we cannot understand until much later – for a reason.

And that is why in Sefer Bamidbar as the Torah records all the Jewish experiences in the wilderness it records not only the manna falling from the heavens but also the cheyt haegel, the sin of the golden calf.

It tells us not only how unified and spiritually connected the Jewish people were at ma’amad har Sinai, at the revelation but also how much they kvetched and complained and they how struggled w/ their faith in God.

Rashi asks:

why the Torah records the sin of the spies immediately after the incident when Miriam, spoke ill of her brother Moshe?

Rashi answers:

Because even though they saw that Miriam was punished for speaking ill about her brother they did not learn from that situation and ultimately they repeated her sin of slander.

Most mistakes, sins and errors that we make in life are repeats. Every once in a while we manage to err in a new and creative way but most of the time it’s the same issues resurfacing in some other area. And so it bodes well for us to learn from those situations so we can grow from every part of our lives.

Tomorrow night is Rosh Chodesh Av. We begin the 9 days culminating in Tisha B’av. And we go through this mournful period where we minimize our festivity and rejoicing also so we can learn from the most difficult and painful parts of our history, the destruction of the first and second Temples, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Pogroms, the Holocaust; we take time to reflect on all these tragedies because just like any individual, if we don’t spend time trying to learn the lessons of our history we run the risk of repeating the same mistakes again and we rob ourselves of the opportunity to grow from them. That’s why we refrain from eating meat, drinking wine and observe the various other restrictions. So we today can not only connect with what happened so long ago but ultimately grow and learn from those experiences.

Maybe that’s what our Sages meant when they said:

Anyone who mourns over Jerusalem will merit to see it in its joy” because if we spend time reflecting on what happened before, on where we went wrong as a people in an earlier generation we can better deal with ours today and in so doing merit to see the Temple and Jerusalem rebuilt.

As individuals and as a nation, may we grow from ALL of our experiences, from our triumphs and our defeats, from our successes and from our mistakes and in doing so merit to bring the geulah shleimah, the ultimate redemption both for ourselves as individuals and together as a nation.

Shabbat Shalom.