One of the strangest moments of dissonance that exists in our prayer life occurs very frequently on Friday night when we sing along cheerfully, melodiously, in harmony to the words of Psalm 95:
אַרְבָּעִים שָׁנָה אָקוּט בְּדוֹר וָאֹמַר עַם תֹּעֵי לֵבָב הֵם וְהֵם לֹא־יָדְעוּ דְרָכָי׃
יאאֲשֶׁר־נִשְׁבַּעְתִּי בְאַפִּי אִם־יְבֹאוּן אֶל־מְנוּחָתִי׃
What do those words mean?
Forty years I was provoked by that generation; I thought, “They are a senseless people; they would not know My ways.” Concerning them I swore in anger, “They shall never come to My resting-place!”
Not exactly something to sing about! The psalm, poetically expressing God’s anger, characterizes the time in the desert as a period of unceasing provocation that culminates in God’s angry oath that the generation of the desert shall not enter the promised land.
And yet, in the Haftarah that we read last week, we see the experience of the desert described in an entirely different way:
הָלֹךְ וְקָרָאתָ בְאׇזְנֵי יְרוּשָׁלַ͏ִם לֵאמֹר כֹּה אָמַר ה זָכַרְתִּי לָךְ חֶסֶד נְעוּרַיִךְ אַהֲבַת כְּלוּלֹתָיִךְ לֶכְתֵּךְ אַחֲרַי בַּמִּדְבָּר בְּאֶרֶץ לֹא זְרוּעָה׃
Thus said the LORD: I accounted to your favor The devotion of your youth, Your love as a bride— How you followed Me in the wilderness, In a land not sown.
[That’s also a song…]
So was the desert a time for ceaseless provocation or a time of romantic newlywed love? It was both. And, the same is true for almost any period of time. How would you characterize your childhood? What about middle-school? How will you look back on the past two years? The first weeks of severe Covid shutdowns and shelter-at-home rules were terrifying and…the seventy two hour “three day yom tov” at the beginning of the first Covid Pesach was the longest duration of uninterrupted time in which I have been able to focus on my family without other distractions or responsibilities in many years.
How would you characterize the experiences we are having now? We can look in a negative light and we can look in a positive light and they both are true and being able to see events in both of those ways is important.
In our parasha, Sefer Bamidbar ends with a retelling of the journey that B’nai Yisrael took in the desert from Egypt to the border of Eretz Yisrael in Arvot Moav. This journey can be understood in so many ways. It was a punishment – we spent forty years in exile while we waited for an entire generation to die. And it was preparation, we had forty years of education to prepare us for life in Eretz Yisrael.
The listing of all the locations where we encamped in the desert can also be understood from different perspectives. Rashi, quoting the Tanhuma, compares the recounting of the list to a parent who must undertake a long and arduous journey with a sick child to find effective medical treatment. On the way back, after the child is healed, the parent points out all the milestones on the way and says, “remember when we were here?” The experiences were hard and frightening to endure, but once there is a happy ending, we can look back with nostalgia at even hard experiences.
Rabbi Ilai Ofran points out that the listing of each stop on the journey is itself a message about all journeys. They begin with a single step. And one progresses along a journey one step at a time. Imagine how daunting it must have felt to stand at the foot of Har Sinai and being told, רַב־לָכֶם שֶׁבֶת בָּהָר הַזֶּה׃ – you have spent too much time sitting at this mountain, it’s time to start moving. You should not have to work hard to imagine this moment. We have all faced the need to accomplish something hard. We have all faced tasks that will take a lot of time. Hopefully we all have ambitions as the holiday season looms over the horizon, to become different people.
The secret to accomplishing big goals is to just take one step at a time. The secret to becoming a dramatically better person is to become a slightly better person. And each step leads to the next.
Maimonides, in the Guide, explains that the Torah lists all of these travel details so as to give credibility to the Torah itself. Only an accurate and true book could contain so many details. I would say a bit differently: the only believable journey that leads to anywhere or anything worthwhile is one that starts with a single small step.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 