Masei מסעי
Parashat Masei begins with an itinerary of the forty-two stopping points of the Israelites on their forty-year journey through the wilderness, culminating in their encampment on the plains of Moab, where they will stay until the death of Moses.
Their destination already close, the parasha sets out the boundaries of the Promised Land, as well as specifying certain places that will become cities of refuge where people guilty of manslaughter are to be protected against possible vengeance on the part of a relative of the person who died.
The parasha ends with a claim on the part of the leaders of the tribe of Menashe that the ruling in favour of the daughters of Tzlofhad that they were entitled to inherit their late father’s share in the land could mean that the land was lost to the tribe if any of them married members of another tribe. A divine ruling resolves the conflict: the daughters have a right to inherit the land but must marry only within the tribe. With this, the book of Numbers ends.
The first of the essays explains why the Torah finds it necessary to detail at length the various stages of the Israelites’ journey. The second asks why those exiled to a city of refuge were allowed home on the death of the high priest. The third looks at one detail of the laws of the cities of refuge that sets the life of an individual above the good of the community as a whole. The fourth, by contrast, shows how the second half of the story of the daughters of Tzlofhad emphasises group rights alongside the rights of individuals. The fifth is about the religious significance of the land and State of Israel. The sixth is about the prophetic voice in Judaism, as exemplified by the haftarot read during the three weeks between Shiva Asar BeTammuz and Tisha B’Av, which always coincide with the end of Numbers and the beginning of Deuteronomy.
The Long Walk to Freedom
The Israelites set out from Rameses on the fifteenth day of the first month, the day after the Passover. They marched out defiantly in full view of all the Egyptians.… The Israelites left Rameses and camped at Sukkot” (Num. 33:3–5). So begins the almost mind-numbing recitation of the forty-two journeys the Israelites made during their years in the wilderness. They journeyed from X and camped at Y. They journeyed from Y and camped at Z. It is for the most part a tedious recitation, deliberately so. Why then is it here?
The word Torah, the name given to the Five Books of Moses, means “instruction,” “teaching,” “guidance.” It does not record events merely because they happened. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the book of Numbers, where almost thirty-eight of the forty wilderness years are passed over in silence, evidently because, although things happened in those years, they were mere events with no teaching to be drawn for the generations. Where then is the teaching in this list of place names?
The sages made a brave suggestion.
It is like the case of a king whose son was ill. He took him to a certain place to be cured. On their return journey, his father began to recount all the stages, saying: “Here we slept. Here we cooled ourselves. Here you had a headache.” So the Holy One, Blessed Be He, said to Moses: Recount to them all the places where they provoked Me.1Numbers Rabba 33:3.
Yet this remains challenging for a number of reasons. First, many of the places listed here are not mentioned elsewhere in the biblical text. If significant events occurred there – and all the more so if they were places where the people provoked God – then these stories are missing.2Equally interesting is the fact that one of the places where the people provoked God is not included in this list, namely Taberah (Num. 11:3). Ibn Ezra (to Deut. 9:22) and Nahmanides (to Num. 11:3) both explain that it was not one of the places where the people encamped. They merely stayed there briefly on their way to their next stopping point, Kivrot HaTaava.
What is more, there is no mood of rebuke at this point in the narrative, no deliberate attempt to remember places where the people provoked God. That is the task of the early chapters of the book of Deuteronomy, where Moses does indeed take the people to task, getting them to know the shortcomings of their parents’ generation so that they will not repeat their mistakes.
More likely, what we have here is a reminder for all time of what Nelson Mandela called the long walk to freedom.3Nelson Mandela, The Long Walk to Freedom (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994).
Look at a map and you will see that the distance between Egypt and the land of Israel is not far. They are today bordering countries. Even in biblical times, the journey was not a major one. In Genesis 12 we read of how Abraham travelled there after arriving in the land of Canaan because there was a famine and he needed to buy food. The same thing happened in the days of Jacob and Joseph. The physical journey is a matter of weeks, not years.
The real journey to freedom, however, is not a physical one. It is a mental, moral, and spiritual one. It is long, arduous, and demanding, and there are challenges and failures along the way. That is what the book of Numbers has been all about. God was with the people. Yet they lacked the faith in themselves or in God to take the challenges in their stride. There is an air of petulance about the people still, when they complain about the manna, or the water, or this or that aspect of Moses’ leadership.
This was signalled at the outset. We read, in Exodus, that “when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, ‘If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt’” (Ex. 13:17). We now know what this meant. The direct route meant travelling along the coast from the Nile Delta eastwards and northwards. Rameses II maintained a series of garrisons there, ready to repel an attack from the Hittites in the north. Had the Israelites taken this route they would have faced well-trained forces of the Egyptian army, ready to overwhelm them and take them back to Egypt.4See James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 164–198. See also
K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 266–267.
Yet the indirect route turned out not to save the people from war. Within days, the Egyptian army was pursuing them in chariots, the most powerful military technology of the time, which gave Egypt its unique strength. The people did indeed regret having left Egypt:
Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Did we not say to you in Egypt, “Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians”? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert! (Ex. 14:11–12)
This encounter was not accidental. The Torah states that God deliberately provoked Pharaoh to pursue after them (Ex. 14:4).
Nor was this all. Within days of crossing the sea, the people were attacked by the Amalekites. This time the battle was not fought for them by God; they had to fight it themselves. Even so, there is something unexpected in the negative report of the spies and the immediate demoralisation of the people. Everything we read in the Torah and the book of Joshua suggests that the people of the land were terrified of the Israelites, not the other way around. The people knew that with God on their side, they could not lose. Yet fear overwhelmed their capacity for rational thought.5This is what Daniel Goleman calls an “amygdala hijack.” See D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), ch. 2.
This led Maimonides to suggest, in Guide for the Perplexed, that God deliberately led the people through the wilderness in order to put them in a situation where, by sheer necessity, they would acquire strength and endurance:
It is a well-known fact that travelling in the wilderness without physical comforts such as bathing produces courage, while the opposite produces faintheartedness. Besides this, another generation rose during the wanderings that had not been accustomed to degradation and slavery.6Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III:32.
Maimonides makes this point in the course of his larger argument that it is impossible in human nature to go from one extreme to another, from the established way of doing things to a completely new one. That is why the Torah does not propose a series of radical breaks with what the Israelites had become accustomed to in Egypt. The Torah works through “the cunning of history.” It produces its effect slowly and gradually.
If so, then the forty-two stopping points on the way are a literary device to communicate just how many stages we must go through to get from here to there when the destination is liberty itself. The road from slavery to freedom is as long or short as it takes for people to develop the habits of responsibility for their and their children’s future. Freedom means making sacrifices in the present for the sake of peace and prosperity in the future. It means obeying laws for the sake of the common good. It involves virtue on the part of its citizens, and courage, and discipline. That is what the list in Parashat Masei is all about: the many small journeys it took before the people were ready to enter the land and begin to construct a society of freedom under the sovereignty of God.
Rousseau was blunt about the need to train people for liberty at the beginning of the journey to freedom. In one of the most powerful passages in The Social Contract, he insists that a nation has to get this right at the outset, otherwise it will fail:
Once customs are established and prejudices rooted, reform is a dangerous and fruitless enterprise; a people cannot bear to see its evils touched, even if only to be eradicated; it is like a stupid, pusillanimous invalid who trembles at the sight of a physician.… Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.7Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1968), 88–89.
One of the most salient distinctions, made by all the early theorists of freedom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the distinction between liberty, the freedom to do what we ought, and licence, the freedom to do what we like. This is roughly the same as the difference between the Hebrew terms ḥerut (law-governed liberty) and ḥofesh (the absence of someone else controlling what you do). The book of Judges contains a poignant sentence about Israel several centuries after Joshua’s conquest: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 21:25). That is the condition of licence. In it, liberty is at risk.
More relevant still to the book of Numbers than Rousseau’s remark is an observation by a man who was critical of the French revolution that Rousseau’s writings inspired, namely Edmund Burke. In his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, he wrote:
Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.8E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 289.
That is precisely the recurring theme of Numbers. It is why the Torah draws attention to the people’s complaints about the manna and the water. It is why it tells the story of their seduction by the Moabite women, which led in turn to the embrace of idolatry (Num. 25:1–4). It is the key to understanding both parts of the story of the spies – both the lack of self-confidence of the people when they yielded to their demoralising report and the excess of self-confidence shown by the maapilim, the people who after God’s decree impetuously set out on a military campaign only to be defeated by the Amalekites (Num. 14:40–45). The people had intemperate minds. They were wayward. They succumbed to the mood of the moment. They allowed themselves to be swayed by passing waves of emotion. Their passions forged their fetters. They were not yet fit to be free. In the end they had to leave that task to their children.
“They journeyed from X and camped at Y. They journeyed from Y and camped at Z” and so on – for forty-two stages. This is no mere reminiscence. Nor is it included for the sake of history alone. It is a way of reminding us in every generation how long it takes to reach the Promised Land. It has nothing to do with distance on the map and everything to do with self-control in the mind.
What Numbers is teaching us – and it will be the theme of one of the most remarkable political documents in history, the book of Deuteronomy – is that freedom is not what most civilisations have thought it is. It is not primarily a matter of structures of governance – democracy versus aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, and the rest. Democracy can lead to tyranny; indeed Plato thought it always would.
The most important guarantor of freedom is the “habits of the heart” of the people. That is one of the fundamental purposes of Torah: to train us, through the 613 commands touching on all aspects of life, in habits of self-control, moral responsibility, and a sense of justice and compassion. There were times when Jews lost their freedom. But they never lost their passion for it, or their ability to seize it when the chance came. Look at every movement for liberty in the modern world and you will find, somewhere in its inception, either Jews or Jewish ideas. To quote Heinrich Heine: “Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”
In one of the great speeches of the twentieth century, American jurist Judge Learned Hand said this about “the spirit of liberty”:
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.9“The Spirit of Liberty,” speech at “‘I Am an American’ Day” ceremony (Central Park, New York City, May 21, 1944).
There is an obvious question. If God wanted us to be free, why did He not make us law-abiding? Why did He not hardwire a disposition for justice into our genes? The answer is equally obvious. You cannot make someone free. That is something we each have to learn through education and experience. It is a contradiction in terms to think we can be forced to be free.10That did not stop Rousseau from making this error: Social Contract, 64.
Maimonides makes the point forcibly in Guide for the Perplexed: God can force people to obey the law, but He has never done so nor will He ever do so. “If it were part of His will to change the nature of a person, the mission of the prophets and the giving of the Torah would have been altogether superfluous.”11Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III:32.
The list of journeys at the beginning of Parashat Masei is there to teach us a principle that has been ignored for most of history, always with tragic results.12During the years this book was being written, uprisings took place in 2011 in many Middle East and North African countries. It became known as the “Arab Spring.” The result as of 2016 is a series of failed states and the spread of terror, civil war, brutality, and religiously motivated barbarism that have destroyed what little freedom there was to begin with. Yet almost no one in those early months made the obvious point, that without the “apprenticeship of liberty,” no change of ruler brings freedom – only a new tyranny.
There are no shortcuts to freedom. You do not achieve it by deposing a tyrant or instituting democratic elections. You have to educate people to be free, and they have to learn and internalise its disciplines and responsibilities. Parashat Masei teaches us that the walk to freedom is long, and there are many stopping points along the way. It needs not just miracles from God but also self-transformation by human beings. There is only one way out of the wilderness, and that is learning to be free, however long it takes.