Mas'ei: "These are the Journeys"

Shabbat Mas’ei / Rosh Hodesh Av 5768 / August 2, 2008

These are the Journeys

We must always remember where we came from and be grateful for the miracles that have brought us here.

I’m very pleased to announce that after a month of looking, my family and I have found the home we will be living in. Just yesterday, our offer on a house in this neighborhood was accepted by the current owners. If all goes well, we’ll be living in our new house in about a month. It is particularly exciting for us because we’ve never owned a home before. And, we’re also exciting because for the last several years, neither Melanie nor I have lived in one place for very long. As a matter of fact, since graduating high school and leaving my parent’s home in 1992, I have lived 14 different apartments in the last 16 years. And, I have not lived in any one of those places for more than 2 years. This is very exciting and new to us. I’m really looking forward to settling down… We’re finally going to live in a real house! No more furniture I found our on someone’s curb. No more noisy upstairs neighbors stomping around or playing their electric guitars at 2am. No more lazy landlords or crazy managers. No more unreturned security deposits. No more tiny kitchens or storing things under beds and sofas. We’re finally going to live in a house!

I imagine that the children of Israel might have felt similarly standing on the East bank of the Jordan river, poised to enter the promised land. Finally, they could put their long and difficult past behind them. This week’s Torah portion – parashat Mas’ei – is really the last chapter in the journey toward Eretz Yisrael. The book of Dvarim, which we begin reading next week, is a series of Moses’ sermons to the people, but this week we read about the end of the journey. You might thing there’s no looking back, but parashat Mas’ei opens with a long and rather prosaic list of all the places where we camped along our long trek through the wilderness.

Chapter 33 opens: “These are the marches of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron. Moses recorded the starting points of their various marches as directed by the Lord. Their marches, by starting points, were as follows.” In all, the Torah records 42 different encampments in 40 years… that certainly breaks my record. This long list includes the names of places that appear nowhere else in the Torah. Some are commented upon, while others are simply listed.

Why list all these names? Midrash Ba-Midbar Rabbah provides a number of reasons: The first reason is that the list serves as a reminder of all the miracles that God did for us along the way. It is an acknowledgement that during those 40 years, God was always with us serving as our “sukkat shalom” – our shelter of peace and tranquility. It wasn’t always an easy journey, but we survived in no small measure because of God.

The second reason the Midrash gives is that remembering all the places serves as a reminder of the mistakes we made along the way and our frequent rebellion against Moses and God. Recounting all of our journeys is a caution against our own hubris – the false belief that we are entirely in control of our destiny.

And, the third reason given by the midrash is that listing the campsites is meant to teach us two important virtues – the value of hachnasat orchim (welcoming guests into our homes) and the importance of gratitude. Just as God sheltered us and showed us hospitality in our long journey, so too we must be kind and welcoming to the stranger. And, we must always remember where we came from and be grateful for the journey that has brought us to the promised land.

Our own lives are not unlike the circuitous journey of the Israelites in the wilderness. And, when we fail to look back and reflect on the path we have taken, we risk forgetting the miracles we have experienced along the way. We risk becoming arrogant and absorbed in our successes and we easily forget the lessons we learned from our shortcomings. And if we forget all the people that helped us along the way, we can become selfish and ungrateful.

My prayer for us this morning is that we always remember where we came from, the journey that has brought us here and the values we’ve learned along the way.

Shabbat Shalom