Bamidbar 5772/2012
“Herding Cats”
Rabbi Neil A. Tow©
The job of organizing and moving a huge group of people is
daunting. On most days, I am more than
satisfied if I can get myself out of the house with all the things I need for
the day ahead.
The job of moving perhaps over a million Israelites, with
their personal items and animals, then could be as hard as herding cats. The Torah describes the people as they move
as one large mass through the wilderness, but the march to the Holy Land cannot
be as smooth or as easy as it appears in the Torah’s communal memory.
The great Rashi teaches us that each tribe camps under its
own flag, each with a different color flag so that members of the tribe will
recognize their brothers and sisters.
Each flag displays the symbol that Jacob has given to each of his sons –
the lion of Judah, and ox for Ephraim.
Abravanel thinks there are only 4 flags to make organizing the main
tribes on each side easier, and the other tribes file in under these 4 flags.
Clearly, staying organized is important – we have discussed
how God wants to teach the people to be independent and self-sufficient, that
organizing in this way unifies the people and encourages responsibility and
accountability.
There is more though going on here than a deployment of people, overcoming the inertia
of the crowd.
God wants the people, wants us, to plan for the future as best as we can knowing that the
future is, at least in our eyes, unwritten.
God models for us the way to envision the journey and its end, knowing
that along the way there will be events that spring up from the unknown.
Sefer Bamidbar,
the Book of Numbers, fourth Book of the Torah that we begin to read this week,
is a Book of journey – the journey
for our people as we leave Sinai and, at the end of the Book, end up on the
borders of the Promised Land. Along the
way on this journey, the people scurry away from the path like a rabble of
cats. Moses and God try to herd them,
knowing that, ultimately, God is guiding them and will guide them to the Land –
that God will ‘bring in the herd’.
In the end, when we look back on the course of the journey,
we will notice that the cat-herding part of the story will be as significant as
the well-ordered machine of the census and military style marching orders that
we read at the beginning of the Book this Shabbat. The routine, smooth sailing parts of any
journey are usually not the stuff of memories.
Our minds are problem-solving mechanisms that tend to disregard the
mundane (sometimes to our detriment).
There are many across the world today who are trying to
envision a future for themselves. Egyptians are voting for a president. Syrian rebels continue their struggle. Olympic athletes are gearing up for the London
games starting at the end of July.
Students in school could not be more excited to study for finals…how
well can we envision what we hope for in our lives? How much can we open our hearts to not only
visualize activities, but also to see ourselves in the way we interact with one
another, in the way we hope to connect with other people?
This is the message and challenge of this week’s parsha and
the whole Book of Bamidbar because, in the end, when we roll the Torah closed
at the end of the fifth and final Book, the Israelites will still not be
standing in the Promised Land, they will only be on its borders. They will still only be able to envision
crossing the Jordan.
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