Chukat 5774 - June 26, 2014

Chukat 5774

(By Rabbi Dardik - published in this week's issue of "J")

While I have known that this moment would come one day, I cannot say that I have looked forward to it.   I have been waiting for twenty years (one could say two thousand years) to the life that will come after, but not to this particular instant. 

You see, it is time for me to say farewell.  After thirteen years in the Bay Area and just shy of four decades in the US, I am moving home to Israel this summer, to a home that has never been my home.  I love my Oakland shul-community family and my Bay Area life, and in any conventional sense Israel is a foreign country to me.  I was born and raised an American, to American parents.  I grew up here, went to school here, made my dearest friends here, married here and raised my family here.  It doesn’t stem from a desire to leave, but rather a yearning of the soul to be there.  To ascend on Aliyah.  I may not be Israeli, but I guess I am one of the Children of Israel.

My heart has long broken for Moshe in this week's Torah portion.  Something goes wrong, and he is told that “You will not lead this people into the land that I have given them” (20:12).  Moshe pleads with Hashem to allow him to fulfill the mitzvah of living in Israel or even just to step into it for a moment, but he is rebuffed and only allowed to stand on a mountaintop and peer into the land.  Just like that, Moshe’s dream was crushed.

But what happened?  The narrative does not make it clear.  Rashi surmises from discrepancies in the text that Moshe did not follow directions properly, and hit the rock from which water flowed instead of speaking to it.  Rambam notes that the wording (20:10) indicates that Moshe got angry at the people, and his anger was his undoing.

There is another explanation (Midrash Rabbah Devarim 2:8) that caught my eye.  Moshe, carrying Joseph’s bones through the desert in order to bury those remains in Israel, tries to convince Hashem to let him into Israel.  “Master of the Universe, the bones of Joseph are entering the Land.  Am I not to enter the Land?”  Hashem responds that “He who acknowledged his native land is to be buried in that land but he who did not acknowledge his native land does not merit to be buried in his land.”  The Midrash then points out the verses in the Torah where Joseph identified himself publicly as a Jew (Bereishit 39:14 and 40:15).  In contrast, Moshe allowed himself to be identified as an Egyptian man (Shemot 2:19) and as a result did not make it to the homeland that he had never lived in. 

But why does Moshe's classification as an Egyptian have any impact on his ability to enter the land?  Perhaps because as Jews we connect not only horizontally in the present with our people across the world today, but also vertically back through the millennia.  Human beings are not born in a vacuum, and much as we like to consider ourselves to be self-made we are also impacted by our pasts.  An integral part of being a Jew is identifying with our history.  We spent thousands of years trying to build a model society in Israel, at the crossroads of three continents.  And it is the epicenter of our present and future attempts to do so.  Moshe was connecting to the Jewish present, but had forgotten to reach back into the past to the roots of his identity.

Every so often, I look in the mirror and ask myself, “Am I crazy?  My Beth Jacob and Bay Area Rabbi life journey has been amazing.  Incredible opportunities to learn and teach and share with spectacular people, phenomenal education and environment for my children, and the natural beauty doesn't hurt, either. What in the world am I doing?" 

But it doesn't take long to answer: The ultimate human purpose is to live a meaningful life.  Life here has indeed been deeply meaningful, and has readied me to immerse myself and my family once and for all into the Jewish past, present and future.  After nearly twenty centuries, I could become the last immigrant in my family tree.  I can live out my most cherished values in a place where I experience a heightened sense of Hashem’s presence.  Moshe was denied this dream, but it has never been easier than it is in 2014.  It's time.  Thank you all for years of reading and allowing me to share; this fall I will be teaching Torah in the old city of Jerusalem (with a beautiful view of the Western Wall) and would love to run into you there one day.