Rabbi Toba's Shabbat Thoughts

In this week’s Torah portion, Behaalotecha, the Israelites finally begin their journey from Mount Sinai – where they’ve been camped for over a year since leaving Egypt—on to the promised land.  During that time, they've built the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary, and have been camped around it according to their tribes.  All has been orderly and regulated, in preparation for the next phase of their journey.
 
As soon as camp breaks and they start moving, everything falls apart. The Israelites march for three days, and then “the people took to complaining bitterly before YHVH.” God’s anger, manifested in fire, greets the complaining, and soon the community is longing for the days of slavery, when they were nourished and ate meat (or so they remember). Soon Moses is complaining to God that he has no idea how to meet the people’s needs, and God gets angry yet again.  Welcome to the wilderness, the parasha seems to be saying. Actually moving a community along towards freedom isn’t so easy.
 
For the rest of the book of Numbers, the Israelites’ journey will be a succession of episodes of complaining, power struggles, and failures of leadership. The Torah is, if nothing else, breathtaking in its depiction of human limitations. And the fiery divine anger that continually meets these limitations is intended, I think, to make manifest what the Torah’s authors imagined as God’s disappointment in these newly freed people.  They’ve been liberated from servitude, they’ve  been given miraculous manna in the desert, they have divinely-inspired leadership—and still, all they can do is complain. They are not up to the demands of freedom, and not only they, but the Source of Life and Liberation Itself, suffers as a consequence.
 
While I appreciate the Torah’s honesty about the challenges of living in, and leading, covenantal communities, I have to say that I am feeling less pessimistic about the possibilities of communal relations.  Since October 7, our congregation – like Jewish communities across America – has had to face the very real challenges of remaining connected across deep differences in experiences and views.  At the gathering we held last night, when 28 CDT members joined me for conversation about how we are feeling in relation to events in Israel and Gaza, it was clear that everyone was struggling in different ways. Some of our members feel held by the community in their suffering; others feel isolated. Our different perspectives can be triggering for one another.  As I invited participants to share questions that they are sitting with in this moment, a number of questions had to do not with Israel or Gaza, but with us here in America.  What will become of Judaism, and the American Jewish community, in the wake of the devastation we’ve experienced on and after October 7? 
 
I don’t have answers to those questions.  But even as the troubles in Israel/Palestine seem to deepen daily – with the relentless suffering in Gaza, the growing protest movement and despair of many of the hostage families in Israel, the terrorizing of Palestinian communities on the West Bank, and the growing threat of war with Hezbollah in Israel’s north—here in the American Jewish community, I feel that we are learning invaluable lessons about what it means to remain in community.  For too long, a mythology about Jewish unity pervaded much of our American Jewish story (even though, as far as I know, Jews have never been unified anywhere, at any time, around almost anything).  This mythical “unity” was often used to squelch dissenting or nonconformist voices and ideas.  As this façade of unity cracks, we are experiencing painful dissension and even outright hostility between different groups of Jews.  And I know that these divisions can be personally painful when we encounter them in our families, at CDT, or in other spaces.
 
And yet, here at CDT and beyond, there are many congregations whose members are managing to hang in there with one another.  We are, willingly or not, in the midst of a powerful experiment in remaining connected across deep and agitational differences. We are being asked to go beneath the slogans and the labels, and to really understand what makes for our differing views.  We are being invited into a compassion for self and others in ways that might be new. We are being challenged to  remain in relationship in a way that honors our differences, not obliterate them.
 
If Moses was a far from perfect leader, as our Torah portion implies, than I certainly have my share of limitations. I am keenly aware of my inability to do or say all that I could to reach everyone in our community in the ways you all deserve.  I have come to realize that perhaps the best that a community like ours can do is to make sure that no one is uncomfortable all of the time, but know that everyone will be uncomfortable some of the time. With that awareness, I want to say how much I appreciate walking through this wilderness with all of you. I pray that we can stick it out, and make it to some kind of promised land together. May our efforts at learning and living together be not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all those living in Eretz Yisrael/historic Palestine, and for all beings on this planet.