By the Grace of G-d
Dear Friend,
I was teaching my Torah class last night about a question that the Rebbe asked regarding the name of the Parsha.
Why is the name of the second Parsha (this week is a double parsha) called ‘Masei’ which means journeys?
(Click here for a recorded version of the class on the Project Likkutei Sichos platform).
Well, the Parsha is named that because of the opening verse of the Parsha.
These are the journeys of the children of Israel who left the land of Egypt in their legions, under the charge of Moses and Aaron.
That doesn’t answer the question, it simply shifts the question to the actual verse in the Torah that introduces the narrative of the Parsha.
The question is, since the Torah is about to describe the forty-two stops that the children of Israel made during their forty-year sojourn in the desert, why are we calling this a story about ‘journeys’. Shouldn’t the verse read ‘these are the encampments of the children of Israel’?
The places that they stopped are really what the story is all about.
Let me try to clarify the question.
Imagine the following news headline.
The Jews wander for forty years through 42 locations in the desert.
It sounds dramatic as a headline.
Forty-two journeys. In forty-two years.
Exhausting and unsettling.
If you have ever moved homes, you know that it is quite taxing and exhausting.
Changing homes once a year on average – forty-two journeys in forty years – sounds really burdensome and suffering.
One can imagine someone conversing with someone from that generation and commiserating with hem ‘what a wretched existence you must have had in the desert, always on the go, without ever getting a respectable amount of time in one place’.
However, if we analyze the timeline of the time spent in the desert, we see a different and more compassionate story.
Let us look at the timeline of the journey.
Year one of the Jewish journey was Exodus from Egypt. Admittedly, it started out a bit hectic. They stopped at total of eleven times during the first month and a half after Exodus at which time they arrived at Sinai. But there was no suffering in those initial travels. After hundreds of years in slavery, traveling as liberated people was joyous and victorious.
They stayed at Mount Sinai for an extended period. To be precise, they were there for one year minus ten days.
They then took three more journeys before reaching Kadesh aka Ritmah.
At Kadesh/Ritmah they sent the spies. Things then went awry and instead of heading straight to the promised land, they got a thirty-eight-year delay in the desert.
How were those thirty-eight years spent?
Let’s fast forward to the last year in the desert (the 40th year, which was not even a full year). During that final year, once they knew that they were finally about to enter the Promised Land of Israel, they journeyed through an additional eight locations. This brought them to the banks of the Jordan River in anticipation of their entry into the land of Israel. Those final eight journeys were ostensibly ‘upbeat one’ as they were on the home stretch to go into the ‘Land flowing with milk and honey’.
So, it’s the middle thirty-eight years that we have to account for.
Twenty journeys in thirty-eight years.
Of those thirty-eight years, the first nineteen years of that epoch, they remained located at Kadesh/Ritmah.
Yes, you heard right. Nineteen years in one location. Plenty of time to settle in.
For the following nineteen years they traversed the desert and stopped twenty additional times. An average of one year per location.
If you add all the above journeys together, you get a total of forty-two journeys. (11 plus 3 plus 20 plus 8 = 42 journeys).
That was a bit unsettling. And indeed, this is why we look at their years in the desert as being unsettling.
But not overwhelmingly traumatic.
After the above analysis it does not appear as turbulent as it sounded in the headline.
For when we look at the details, we see that the majority of the forty years was quite settled and tranquil.
(In the Kehot Chumash with interpolated translation it is summed up as follows: From this chronicle, it is clear that God did not exhaust the people by making them wander continuously during the 38 years between the sin of the spies and the entry into the land. Of the 42 stations, 14 occurred between the Exodus (Nisan 15, 2448) and the decree (9 Av, 2449), and 8 between Kadesh (Nisan 1, 2487) and the plains of Moab (after Tishrei, 2488). The people spent 19 years at Ritmah (from 2449 to 2468), so, in the remaining 19 years (between 2469 and 2487), they camped at only 20 stations. They thus spent an average of a year at each of these stations).
Which accentuates the question:
If most of the time they were camped, why does the Torah describe this forty-year period as the ‘journeying’ of the Jewish people?
Why is it not called the ‘encampments?’
After all, as we have just seen, they spent the vast majority of their time camping not journeying.
Before I share the answer, let us look at our contemporary lives and how we classify the various activities we engage in.
If we were to evaluate our lives trying to classify our lives by the two descriptive terms of ‘journeying’ or ‘encamping’ a fascinating story emerges.
There is a relative of mine, a Shliach who runs a very busy and successful Chabad House in the tri-state area of NY. I have heard him make the following declaration several times regarding his work ethic. ‘Whenever I am in the office, I feel that I am wasting time, as I could and should be out visiting people or in the Chabad House teaching Torah classes’.
In his rabbinic mission, the ‘moving’ part of his life is really where he sees his effectiveness. Not when he is ‘camped out’ in his executive offices making sure that the nuts and bolts of the operation are working. He has successfully delegated the smooth running of his organization to a general manager. Now, he can be up and about in doing Jewish outreach.
The reverse would be true when it comes to someone who works in an office.
Say a doctor for example, the more he is out of the clinic or hospital, the less effective he is. For the doctor, when he is in his clinic or at the operating table, this is where he is ‘journeying’ and ‘advancing’. His ‘camping’ and ‘time out’ is when he is on the couch in his private living room.
Today we have a new concept. Digital Nomads. A ‘digital nomad’ is not limited to a geographical location rather to a ‘virtual’ location. For them it would be true to say that the longer he or she spends at the ‘screen’ the more output they produce. Their ‘journey’ and the place that ‘things happen’ for them in their professional lives, is at the screen when they are not physically moving at all (other than typing).
So, journeying is really a code word for achieving, growing, exerting and most importantly, not vegetating.
Does this relate to quantity of time spent at ‘work’, ‘journeying’?
No. We should not take quantity as an indicator of how we identify.
First, a line taken from the talking points of a bed salesman.
Salesman to client:
‘Did you know that you spend about a third of your life in bed? (Either sleeping or trying to fall asleep or trying to get up).
‘Wouldn’t it make sense that you should invest thought and money into getting yourself a comfortable bed’?
And then driving it home with a sales pitch ‘Do I have the perfect bed for you….’.
In terms of quantity, he has a point.
You may spend twice as much time sleeping as you will working, in the duration of your lifespan. But just because you spend so much accumulated time in bed, would you identify yourself as a ‘sleeper’ when asked to describe ‘who you are’ and ‘what you do’?
Hardly likely.
It may be that after deducting time for eating, sleeping and other ‘human management’ chores, you are left with a but a small fraction of your schedule for doing what is meaningful to you.
Clearly, life is not at all to be judged solely by where you spend most of your time.
Our lives are defined by our aspirations, goals, missions, and world outlooks.
Where do you really live?
I mean where are you alive?
Where do you grow as a human?
What do you know, deep down in your heart, makes G-d happy?
Do you think your mission in life is to sleep?
Is the finest moment of our existence when we are on autopilot-cruise control?
Or perhaps, we feel best, and we are at our best when we are exerting ourselves and expending energy in (both material and spiritual) movement.
Is life about getting over the disturbance and inconvenience and ‘journeying’ of growth and returning to an ‘encamped’ stationary existence?
Or is life about regrouping and gaining strength while stationary and ‘encamped’ in order to ‘journey’ once more on the path of growth with all of the exertion and sometimes unsettling efforts that it requires?
The Torah tells us here unequivocally, that it is the ‘journeying’ that defines the Jewish travels in the desert.
And in our contemporary lives too, it is ‘journeys’ that G-d tasks us with. These comprise our ‘marching orders’ and are the overarching goals of our lives.
Each of our lives is comprised of forty-two symbolic journeys. The Exodus from Egypt being birth, the entry into the promised land being the land of Gan Eden after one’s passing.
The collective Jewish journey, is an allegoric forty-two step journey, starting from the banishment from Israel with the destruction of the Temple till the final destination being Mashiach.
If you have no goals and feel that things are good the way they are without any aspirations for making things even better, this is a sign of stagnation.
The JOURNEYING from one stage to the next, this is what Hashem wants of us.
This can add some context into the purpose of twists and turns in our roadmap through life. The potholes are not meant to sink us, they are intended to get us to rev up our engines and put forth greater efforts.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Don’t think that ‘journeying’ and growth requires suffering or tribulations. It doesn’t have to be disconcerting and turbulent. We have seen that in the case of the Jews travels in the desert, there were long periods of time when they were settled in one location.
It can even be as comfortable as having ‘bread from heaven’ and ‘clouds of glory’ that shield and buffer you from external inconveniences.
But the frame of mind must be one of ‘journeys’. Of seeking the next step upwards so that we constantly get closer to G-d and better at uncovering our true Divine potential.
In the best-case scenario, these journeys should be self-motivated.
When someone sins, the way to rectify is by doubling up one’s efforts. To use the language of the Talmud ‘if till now he learned one page of Torah, when making efforts to restore his relationship with G-d, he should learn two pages of Torah’.
This is actually the real reason that G-d allows to fall. For when we put the effort to pick ourselves up, we arrive at a higher place than we were before we fell.
But we don’t need to fall to grow. If we set our own internal goals that keep reaching deeper and higher, if once we are comfortably learning one page of Torah, we set a goal to learn two pages, we don’t need the outside challenges to motivate us to jump higher.
We can choose to set our own constantly evolving goals of growth. So that we don’t we need a fall to spark our jump, we set our own internal ‘jumping’ goals.
Journeying does not mean leaving your geographical location. It means growing in your relationship with G-d, and in building deeper, and more mature and beneficial relationships with others.
Ultimately, Hashem’s goal for the Jewish people is to have our journeys lead us to the final destination, the coming of Mashiach and the rebuilding of the Bet Hamikdash. This will cancel out the negativity of Tisha B’av and allow us to have a Tisha B’av that is transformed into a day of joy and festivities.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yosef Kantor