Behaalotekha בהעלתך
Parashat Behaalotekha begins with the final preparations for the Israelites’ journey from the Sinai desert to the Promised Land. There are instructions for Aaron, the high priest, to tend to the light of the Menora, and for consecrating the Levites into their special role as guardians of the sacred. Before setting out, the Israelites celebrate Passover, one year after the Exodus itself, and provisions are made for those who are unable to celebrate it at its proper time to do so a month later. Details are given about the cloud that signals when to encamp and when to move on. Moses is commanded to make two silver trumpets to summon the people.
The narrative now changes tone. The Israelites set out after their long stay in the Sinai desert, but almost immediately there are problems, protests, and complaints. Moses suffers his deepest emotional crisis. He prays to God to die. God tells him to gather seventy elders who will help him with the burdens of leadership. In the last scene of the parasha, Moses’ own sister and brother speak against him. Miriam is punished. Moses, here described as the humblest of men, prays on her behalf. After a week’s wait for Miriam to be healed, the people move on.
In the first essay we look at an unusual feature of the text as it appears in a Torah scroll: a passage is separated from the rest by two brackets, leading the rabbis to say that this brief section is a book in itself. What does this mean? The second essay is about two ways of characterising Jewish identity. The third and fourth are about Moses’ despair. Why here and not before? And how is this related to the specific kind of leader Moses is? The fifth is about the role of the seventy elders in lifting Moses’ depression. The sixth is about Miriam’s complaint. What was it, and why was she punished for it?
The Book Between the Books
There is a small detail in Parashat Behaalotekha which, if properly understood, sheds considerable light on the structure of Jewish spirituality. A two-sentence paragraph appears at the end of chapter 10, roughly halfway through the parasha:
When the Ark was to set out, Moses would say: Advance, O Lord! May Your enemies be scattered, and may Your foes flee before You! And when it halted, he would say: Return, O Lord, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands! (Num. 10:35–36)
The meaning of the passage is this: The Israelites were about to begin the second half of their journey through the wilderness. They travelled, tribe by tribe, in the order specified earlier in the book, with the Ark, symbolising the Divine Presence, in their midst. So at the beginning and end of each stage on the way, Moses would remind the people that they were not alone, nor were they defenceless. God was with them, giving them strength in battle and security in their resting places. We still say these verses in the synagogue when we take the sefer Torah out of the ark, and when we replace it.
What makes this passage unusual is that, as written in the Torah scroll, it is separated from the rest of the text by two inverted Hebrew letters, each a nun. The rabbis rightly surmised that they form a set of brackets, parentheses, separating this one paragraph from the words that precede and follow it. Some rabbis went so far as to say that this shows that these two sentences are a book in its own right. In other words, Numbers is not one book but three.1Soferim 6:1, Genesis Rabba 64:8. As to why the text is inserted here, R. Shimon b. Gamliel’s view is that it “separates between two punishments” (Shabbat 116a). In this essay I offer another interpretation.
I want to explore the meaning of this idea. In what sense does this one paragraph divide the entire book of Numbers into a before-and-after, and what does it add of its own?
If we look at the beginning of Parashat Behaalotekha, we see that it focuses on an aspect of the service of Aaron the high priest:
The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to Aaron and say to him, ‘When you set up the lamps, see that all seven light up the area in front of the lampstand.’” Aaron did so; he set up the lamps so that they faced forwards on the lampstand, just as the Lord commanded Moses. (Num. 8:1–3)
This simple daily ritual epitomised the role of the priest. A priest engages in rites that in essence never change. One symbol of this was the Menora, the lampstand, tended each day so that a ner tamid, an everlasting light, burnt in the Sanctuary as a sign of the presence of the eternal God. Priestly rituals followed a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly cycle that never changed. Barring tragedies such as the destruction of the Temple, they could be calculated in advance until the end of time.
On the phrase “Aaron did so…just as the Lord commanded Moses” –
Rashi comments, “This is stated in order to praise Aaron, that he did so [i.e., followed Moses’ instructions] without making any change.”2Rashi is quoting a midrash, Sifre ad loc.
On the face of it, this is a very odd comment. Do we need to be told every occasion on which a priest – or anyone else, for that matter – did what God commanded? Is that an occasion for praise? It is and ought to be the norm. Only the exceptions are newsworthy.
In fact, though, Rashi is alluding to an earlier drama: the inauguration of the Tabernacle at which two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, offered up “strange fire that had not been commanded,” and they died (Lev. 10:1–2). I have argued elsewhere3Covenant and Conversation: Leviticus – The Book of Holiness (Jerusalem: Maggid, 2015), 149–152. that what Nadav and Avihu were doing is what they had seen Moses do at moments of great spiritual intensity, namely acting on his own initiative. What they failed to understand was that he was a prophet; they were priests. A prophet responds to the unique circumstances of the here-and-now. A priest – who lives in the shadow of the Eternal – inhabits eternity. The essence of priestly service is to do what you are commanded “without making any change” (Deut. 28:14). What the Torah is saying about Aaron at this point is that he understood his role. He was Aaron, not Moses; a priest not a prophet; he epitomised that which does not change.
Contrast this with what we see in the second half of Parashat Behaalotekha, where the focus is not on Aaron but on Moses. No sooner do the people begin the journey than they begin to complain – we are not told what about – at Taberah. Next, at Kivrot HaTaava, they complain about the food in such a way as to induce in Moses a temporary breakdown. Then in the next chapter, Moses’ own sister and brother, Miriam and Aaron, complain about his behaviour. There is nothing relaxing, regular, or predictable about the life of a prophet. He or she lives in the turbulence of time. The prophet has to be alert to every danger, internal and external, physical and spiritual, to the people. Today is different from yesterday, and tomorrow will be different again. There is only one thing predictable about the future, namely that it will be unpredictable.
The prophets of Israel were radically unlike their counterparts in other cultures. Every religion has had its oracles, soothsayers, stargazers, necromancers, diviners, and foretellers of the future, just as now we have economists, meteorologists, pundits, and futurologists. All of these are people who supply an answer to the question, “What is going to happen?” The prophets of Israel did not believe you could predict anything with certainty in the human domain because what is going to happen depends on us. We face an open future, because we are free. We, with God, are co-authors of the script, which has not been written in advance. Therefore the prophets did not predict. They warned. They said, in effect, “This will happen unless….” They summoned the people to teshuva, to repentance and return. There is no evil decree that cannot be averted. That is the difference between Aeschylus and Isaiah, or between Sophocles and Jeremiah. It is the difference between Greek tragedy and Jewish hope.
So the two halves of Parashat Behaalotekha focus respectively on Aaron the priest and Moses the prophet. Despite the fact that they were brothers, they could not be less alike. Their roles, sensibilities, and responsibilities, their very ways of experiencing and interacting with the world, were altogether different.
Now consider the structure of the three central books of the Torah: Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. The outer sections – the first nineteen chapters of Exodus and the last twenty-five of Numbers – are full of incidents. The Israelites leave Egypt and travel through the desert. There are dangers, battles, and miracles on the way. There are human complaints, divine anger, and crises that call for strong leadership of the people and daring intercession with God. Events transpire. The text is predominantly narrative. We are in the presence of history. This is the world of the prophet. Here the dominant figure is Moses.
However, within this outer wrapping are fifty-nine chapters – the last part of Exodus, the whole of Leviticus, and the first ten chapters of Numbers – in which almost nothing happens. The Israelites do not travel. They stay in the Sinai desert. Time slows to a standstill. At the end of Exodus we read, “So the Tabernacle was set up on the first day of the first month in the second year” (Ex. 40:17). Scores of chapters later, in Parashat Behaalotekha, we read, “The Lord spoke to Moses in the desert of Sinai in the first new moon of the second year after the Exodus from the land of Egypt” (Num. 9:1). For more than half of the Torah’s inner three books, the Israelites hardly move in time or space. It is as if they are suspended in a realm beyond both, in a place (the desert) that is no place, and in a time that seems to defy time. That is the world of the Tabernacle and the Temple, the home of God as He is not in history but in eternity. This is the universe of kedusha, holiness, in which the dominant figures are Aaron, the high priest, and his descendants.
These are the two faces of Judaism. There are aspects of Judaism that never change, wherever and whenever we are. The laws of purity and impurity, permitted and forbidden, sacred and secular – these have barely changed through the centuries. And though many of them are no longer operative, because there is no Temple and its service, they remain part of the Jewish law still studied in yeshivas and houses of study throughout the world. This is where we encounter the holiness, the otherness, of God as He exists beyond time and space, infinite and eternal.
But there are aspects of Judaism that are deeply enmeshed in time and place, above all in the fate of the Jewish people as a nation in its land or as a people scattered and dispersed throughout the world. Most of the books in Tanakh – some historical, others prophetic – are about this dimension. They tell a story about the faithfulness or faithlessness of the people to their covenant with God. There is nothing metaphysical or other-worldly about this story. It is about politics and economics, battles won or lost, about Israel as a nation in a world of nations, and about its ability or otherwise to stay true to its founding principles as a covenanted people through the whitewater rapids of history.
Judaism lives in the creative tension between these two essential elements of its being. If Israel was only a people of eternity, it would never have had an impact on history. Jews would have been a priestly sect like the one known to us from the Dead Sea Scrolls, or like monks and mystics of other faiths, holy and harmless, secluded and serene, in touch with the ethereal music of the spheres but not the substance of everyday life.
If, on the other hand, Jews had been only a people of history, they would have ceased to exist after the Babylonian conquest, or if they had survived that half-century of exile they would certainly have disappeared in the almost two-thousand-year exile after the failed revolts against Rome. They would have been like the Jebusites and Perizzites, at best a brief footnote in the history of a long-vanished past.
We now return to where we began, the two verses each flanked by an inverted nun: “When the Ark was to set out, Moses would say: ‘Advance, O Lord! May Your enemies be scattered, and may Your foes flee before You!’ And when it halted, he would say: ‘Return, O Lord, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands!’” This passage is set at the dividing line between the timelessness of the Israelites at Sinai and the time-bound nature of their journey towards the Promised Land. It is symbolised by the radical difference between Aaron the priest, daily tending the everlasting light in a ritual that never changed, and Moses the leader and prophet who faced the uncertainty of constant change.
See how precisely the inserted passage – the book between the books – sums up Jewish history in a mere two verses. There are times when Jews halt and encamp, when time itself seems to stop and the people feel close to eternity as they did, long ago, in their prolonged stay in the desert of Sinai. And there are moments when the cloud shifts, the trumpet sounds, and the people know it is time to move on. History beckons. Destiny calls. For God exists within, not just beyond, time and space and we have to engage in the world as it is, even as we aspire to the world as it ought to be.
These are the two books of Jewish life: the Judaism-of-eternity and the Judaism-of-history. Nowhere is the line between them clearer than it is in Parashat Behaalotekha, as the long stay at Sinai comes to an end and the people have to gather their belongings and travel on. It is precisely here, at the juncture between the two, that the two verses each flanked by an inverted nun appear.
So this brief and simple paragraph is indeed a kind of book between the books, the interlude between two movements of the symphony, the adagio of the stay and the allegro of the journey. What it tells us is simply this: that whether setting out or halting, the Ark must always be there at the heart of Jewish life, reminding us that God is to be found both in eternity and history, stasis and change, beyond time and within time, joining His fate to ours, the God of both priest and prophet, who gives us the patience to rest and the courage to move on.