Dvar Torah - Bamidbar 2012/5772

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.

Tazria-Metzora 5772/2012 - Jewish Spiritual Medicine

Spiritual Medicine

Dvar Torah Parshat Tazria-Metzora 2012/5772

Rabbi Neil A. Tow©

The idea that the health of the mind and the health of the body are connected is not a new idea.  Preventive medicine is not a new idea either.  The idea of a Jewish spiritual medicine is not a new idea either, but it is an idea that we need to update and remake into a more relevant and useful system of knowledge and practice.

This week we return to Tazria- and Metzora, and among other physical conditions that the Torah describes is the condition that scholar Baruch Levine calls ‘scale disease’, a condition that does not match any known skin disease whether it be psoriasis, favus, or vitiligo and for sure not leprosy/Hansen’s disease.  None of the known skin diseases compare to the symptoms, duration, or treatments suggested in the Torah.  Nor are these conditions contagious in the medical sense.  The Torah teaches us that the only reason we may separate out the person afflicted with the scale disease is to ensure that others are not exposed to the ritual impurity – the Torah is clear that the scale disease itself will not pass to others.

Levine summarizes all the material about impurity and explains the underlying principle this way:  “Bodily impurity stands for the forces of death that are countered and reversed by God’s covenantal commandments, the forces of life.”

Scale disease is linked to the ‘forces of death’ since the body ‘appears to be wasting away.’.(Levine, 129)

We can think of this idea then as a core idea of Jewish spiritual medicine – a field that seeks to fully connect the mind, body, and spirit of faith and tradition.  It is a path toward knowledge and healing that depends upon mustering our inner resources as we seek to live in more connected ways to each other, to the world, to God.

The mitzvoth, the commandments of the covenant, are a spiritual discipline, no different than any exercise program or diet.  They help us toward self-awareness, they push us to work for causes that seek to make the holiness of life real for all people.  As we complete a mitzvah we put positive energy into the world such that we fulfill the wisdom of the Rabbis that doing one mitzvah leads to another, mitzvah goreret mitzvah.

As I’ve been watching the World War II documentary by Ken Burns, I’ve been struck by the testimonies of the vets.  One vet spoke about how when he left home his Mother told him to ‘be careful’.  He said it is impossible to ‘be careful’, impossible that by attitude or technique one could have guaranteed survival.  In such an environment, physical survival is paramount.

Fortunately, we do not live in a country at war, and we can through attitude and the mitzvoth bring changes to ourselves and our communities that may reduce conflict and increase understanding and tolerance among people.  The unknown is out there and fear is powerful – if I were living in Syria or Sudan now, I would be thick and oppressed with fear.  I am afraid at times even here in our quiet North Jersey towns.

If we are to progress as a people, we need a system of spiritual medicine that can help us to turn the tide of negativity and fear, turn the tide of fads and other magical solutions and focus on wisdom that comes right from our holy books, perhaps somewhat disguised through ancient language and history, but clear in the goal of pushing forward the extraordinary qualities of life itself – and the life giving message of the mitzvoth, 613 opportunities to release holy energy into the universe.