Traveling Jews 'R' Us

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, July 9, 2005

Have you ever come back from vacation, looked at your pictures, and discovered that you couldn’t identify some of the places? That may be less of a problem with digital cameras, but I know I still have photographs, taken at a spot that seemed important at that moment, and which now are just a vague memory.

This week’s Torah portion, about whose more exciting sections Shayna and Ari have told us so much, includes also list of the names of places where the Israelites camped. These names are recorded for posterity. At the time they must have seemed important but in some cases the Torah doesn’t tell us anything about what happened there. About the first of these Oboth, the JPS translation politely notes: “This site cannot be identified”. About the next, Iyyei Ha-Abarim, they offer us all kinds of interesting suggestions relating to the etymology of the word ever, but still at the end are forced to conclude:” the site Iyyim has not been identified”. For ten verses the Israelites wander from Oboth, to Iye Ha-Abbarim, to Wadi Zered, to Arnon, to Be’er, to Midbar to Mattanah to Nahaliel to Bamoth, and finally to Pisgah, the place where Moses will look over into the Promised Land.

The cruise lines tells us: “Getting There is Half The Fun”. I am not sure the Israelites would have agreed. But I do think that in listing all of these obscure place names the Torah is trying to balance its focus on getting to the Promised Land, with some attention to the journey itself. These places, even if only half remembered, shaped and formed the Israelites. Their journey was a sort of vacation. Vacation? Well, food and water were provided, food in the form of mannah and water from Miriam’s well, at least during her lifetime. They did not go to work as they had in Egypt, building the Pharoah’s store cities. But it was more like army boot camp then summer art and swimming camp. It was community building and toughing up to get ready for the challenges that lay ahead.

In the book that we are reading this summer for our book discussion group: The Liberated Bride by A. B. Yehoushua, there is a scene in which the main character goes to a theatrical performance, which turns out to be about the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert. “The Children of Israel, having left Egypt with the battered suitcases of European refuges, were now beginning their trek through the desert.” And then the trek –“with slow movements and crystalline words, the actors held the audience in thrall, pulling after them strips of fabric on journeys that crisscrossed to far places and peoples, conquered cities and smoking ruins, …transfixed by a zealous and restless God who unable to leave them alone, promised and threatened, pummeled and soothed, resolved and decreed, the Jews never wearied of their wanderings.” For A. B. Yehoushua these desert wanderings became all of Jewish Israel, from Judea to Babylonia, to the Iberian Penninsula, to Ashkenaz, to Poland. Perhaps that’s a second reason to list all the places- that we might wonder at the Israelite, at the Jewish, experience of God, for surely nothing less than something awesome, could motivate a people to withstand such a journey.

Finally as we read this portion, about wanderings, and about the places that seem so important when we are there, and turn out perhaps not to have been so consequential in hindsight, I think of each of our lives. Each of us has a story of our own journey, with snapshots in our memories, some clear and some less distinct. I think of Rabbi Fine’s poem “Birth is a Beginning”, which we read on Kol Nidre eve and which includes the words;

“Until, looking backward or ahead, we see that victory lies, not at some high place along the way, but in having made the journey, stage by stage, a sacred pilgrimage.”

They traveled from Aboth to Iyyei Ha-Abbari, to Wadi Zered, to Arnon……and so do we.