We begin reading the fourth of the Five Books of Moses this Shabbat, the Book of Numbers. It is called Bamidbar in Hebrew. “Numbers” refers to the census taken of the Israelites in order to count those who would be in its “army,” but Bamidbar means “In the wilderness,” reflecting, if you will, the anticipation of entering the Promised Land. We don’t know when that will be – and in the Torah, according to the sages, there is no chronology – but as the Boy Scouts say, “Be prepared!”
Now midbar means either wilderness or desert (ba= “in the”). We’re told that the wandering took place in the Sinai and indeed most of it is as you imagine a desert to be, barren. There are only a few areas where it’s sandy like we really imagine a desert to be, so I think it best that we refer to it as the Sinai wilderness. Having traveled through the Sinai for a week or so I can tell you with a 100% guarantee…it doesn’t matter what you call it, there’s not much there.
What is there is Mount Sinai, the legendary mountain climbed by Moses to receive the Ten Commandments. Of course, there are a few such “Mount Sinai” mountains; no one is positive which is the real one. Personally, I don’t care what they say, “I know the real Mount Sinai. I climbed it!” Actually, there is one unique aspect of my mountain that fits the description: when you’re at the summit you can see everything below, but from below you cannot see where the summit is. Moses was able to see the encamped Israelites – all 600,000 of them – but they couldn’t see him and surely not the theophany when the actual handoff occurred (you should know me well enough to know I take this with a major grain of salt, far more than transfers smoked salmon back to lox).
But Bamidbar, that Book of Numbers has some wonderful and exciting moments, far more than the ho-hum Book of Leviticus just completed (yet another reason I have to repent on Yom Kippur, my dismissal of the third book). There is complaining (no comment); there is the story of the Balaam and the talking donkey; there is the Priestly blessing (“May God bless you and keep you…”); there is the death of the generation that left Egypt; there is the promise once again that God would make our people great; and there is the story of the twelve spies who evaluate the chances of conquering the land. This is not necessarily the order in which these stories occur; it’s the order which came to my mind. Nevertheless, most of Bamidbar consists of narratives, all of which add to our understanding of what’s important in our history whether or not they happened. Remember – and, surprise! it’s time to repeat what you haven’t heard from me in quite some time – never let the facts interfere with the truth.
(Speaking of the Ten Commandments, as Moses enumerates them to the Israelites, a man says to the woman next to him, “If this is retroactive to last weekend, we’re in big trouble.”)