B'Ha'alotekha (Numbers 8:1 - 12:16)

Vayehi binso’a ha’aron vayomer moshe, kuma adonai v’yafutsu oyvekha, v’yanusu m’san’ekha mipanekha; uvenuho yomar, shuva adonai rivevot alfei yisrael. “When the Ark was 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!”

In the Torah, these verses are bracketed. They are set off in the text by a reversed letter “nun” at the beginning and the end. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi took this to mean that these verses constitute a separate book of the Torah. In a footnote to his book Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, Prof. Saul Lieberman mentions a midrash that attributes these two verses to the prophecy of Eldad and Medad, whom we read about further on in the parasha. Another possible interpretation is that these two verses are separate because they represent an alternative ending to Sefer B’Midbar – the Book of Numbers. Until this point, we have read about the preparations for the journey. These two verses represent the ideal ending of that preparation: a journey in which Israel follows the Torah. The remainder of the Book of Numbers represents the historical reality that begins with Israel’s complaints and rebellion.

These bracketed verses also bracket our Torah service. We say the first when we take out the Torah, and the second when we return it to the ark. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of saying them at a particularly joyful celebration of the Torah -a hakhnasat sefer torah – the dedication of a new Torah scroll to the synagogue in the yishuv where I have lived for the past thirteen years.

It was a wonderful celebration in which the whole community participated – observant and non-observant, religious and secular. All walked together behind the Torah in a unity symbolic of the ideal ending of Sefer B’Midbar, with all of Israel walking behind the Ark. There was an uplifting feeling of togetherness; a sense that all Jews could come together around the uniting force of the Torah, whether as the living voice of God, the divinely inspired attempt to express the experience of holiness, or as the exalted human foundation of our heritage. Here was a manifest acknowledgment that the Torah is fundamental to the ethos of every person who thinks of himself as a Jew.

The celebration concluded with a festive meal, and of course, with speeches. One speech, by an ultra-Orthodox maggid – a Hassidic preacher - marred the sense of unity. The maggid - apparently overcome with awe, and swept away by religious fervour – decided to tell a story that expressed what he saw as the spirit of absolute dedication to Torah values that characterizes the Torah-true Judaism of the haredi – ultra-Orthodox – world, and that marks the difference between the world of Torah and hiloni – secular – Israeli society.

I am not a maggid, and lacking the artistry of a great storyteller, I will not attempt to reconstruct this marvellous story in all its minutely contrived details. I will, instead, limit my account to the bare facts of this example of the manifestation of God’s glory on earth.

According to the story, a religious young man was stationed in a bunker in the Sinai desert during the Yom Kippur War. Water in the bunker was running out, and due to the unrelenting artillery bombardment, it was impossible to leave the bunker to replenish supplies. But, being a truly observant Jew, the young man would not eat before performing netilat yadayim – the ritual washing of hands before eating bread. After an entire day of fasting, his commanding officer – a secular Israeli - asked why he would not eat, and the young man replied that he could not eat unless he washed his hands, as required by halakha. This was repeated on the next day, and then again on the next. After three days of fasting, the secular officer, unbelieving but exasperated, finally gave in to this tzaddik’s devotion to God’s law, and permitted the young man to leave the bunker to get water, admonishing him that he was doing so at his own risk. The young man left the bunker, with only his commitment to mitzvot to protect him. When he was a short distance away, the bunker suffered a direct hit, and all of his non-observant comrades were killed. Only he – through his unwavering dedication to even the minutest details of Torah – was saved.

The many rabbis in the room nodded in approval. The less observant members of the audience squirmed in their seats. How could any person raised with the ideals of Western humanism accept such a worldview? What kind of religion would demand such utterly irrational conduct? What kind of God would act so horribly toward his children?

The potentially unfathomable chasm between the religious and secular worldviews could not be more obvious than at that moment of religious delight in God’s wondrous devotion to his loyal believers, and secular revulsion at that glee at God’s callous abandonment of all reason and compassion.

But the true horror of the event can only be appreciated fully if you are acquainted with the rules of netilat yadayim. First of all, a person need not wash to eat fruit, or vegetables, or meat, or anything that one eats with a fork or a spoon. In fact, there is nothing in a standard box of Israeli Army field rations that requires netilat yadayim. Indeed, the Shulkhan Arukh – the standard code of Jewish law – says that a person who performs the ritual of netilat yadayim for such food is gas ruah – haughty.

But our maggid’s story is not just about a haughty soldier, or about the niceties of halakha, but about its underlying spirit.

The Shulkhan Arukh also says: “One who is in the desert, or in a place of danger, and who has no water, is not obligated to perform netilat yadayim.” And as if that were not enough, the Magen Avraham – a standard commentary to the Shulkhan Arukh – explains that the reason for the exemption from netilat yadayim in the desert is that a person in the desert is like a soldier at war, who is exempt from having to seek water for netilat yadayim because it would put him at risk.

So, our maggid’s tzaddik was exempt from netilat yadayim for every imaginable reason. The halakha entirely agrees with the common sense of the secular humanist.

So why did the maggid tell this nonsensical fairytale that puts the Torah to ridicule? And why didn’t any of the rabbis in the room protest? I imagine it was because they weren’t thinking in terms of halakha l’ma’aseh – of the day-to-day application of halakha to life. For them, the story wasn’t about Jewish law, or about morality, or God. It was about how “we” are better than “them.” It was about “otherness” and rejection of the secular world. The imaginary religious zealot is God’s warrior standing up to the valueless secular Israeli soldier. Common sense and human compassion never had a chance. Humanism was never in the running. In the worldview of that maggid and the nodding rabbis there is no conversation between modernity and tradition, no dialectic between Western philosophy and Jewish theology, and no attempt to reconcile Humanism and Halakha. There is the world of Torah and there is Chaos. That was the point of the story.

The secularist, confronted by the story of the soldier, cringes in horror at what is presented to him as the beauty of Torah. It is something that is beyond his comprehension. It is foreign to his conception of what it means to be a Jew, and what it means to be a person.

When I sat at that seudat mitzvah – that celebratory meal in honour of the Torah – I understood why I am a Conservative Jew. I am a Conservative Jew because I believe that when modernity and tradition communicate they enrich the language of Judaism, that philosophy and theology complete one another, and that Humanism is the earthly spirit of Halakha, and that Halakha is the divine expression of Humanism.

It is that constant interaction, that never-ending struggle that allows Judaism to infuse every part of life. Secularism rejects those parts of life that are religious, while an ever more radicalized Orthodoxy forbids those elements of human experience that are secular. Each in its own way admits of a frailty of its worldview, and is poorer for it. Each embraces a concept of Judaism that is too weak or too rigid to face a challenge from the other side.

But Judaism is stronger than that. It can add depth and historical perspective to secular modernity, and it can use the challenges of modernity to expand its horizons into the future. To accept less is to minimize the Torah and limit God. To accept less is to be like that maggid who chose to ignore the fact that the crowd that danced before the newly dedicated Torah – the crowd that he addressed - embraced Jews of every type.


The maggid lives in a surreal universe composed entirely of the two out-of-context lines of Eldad and Medad’s vision of perfection. The secular world is the story that begins with the rebellion against God. But Sefer B’Midbar comprises both stories, and it is the ongoing dialectic between the two that completes the Torah.

If we wish to dedicate ourselves to building a Jewish society, then the truly miraculous story we have to try to understand, and the wonderful tale that we have to tell is that of so many very different Jews holding hands to dance around the Torah.

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon