Community Magazine May 2013

Dedicated inmemory of   Sarah  bat LucetteKishik  T his wasn’t your typical trip to Israel. The travelers were not aboard an air-conditioned aircraft, and there were no stewards or stewardesses serving meals. And it took much, much longer than the 10-hour flight from Kennedy to Ben-Gurion. Bene Yisrael ’s journey from Egypt to the Land of Israel spanned 40 years, and took place mainly through uninhabitable, arid, desert lands. They traveled under the protection the miraculous clouds of glory, and were fed by the heavenly manna that rained down each morning and a supernatural traveling well of water. These conditions are very difficult for us to relate to, and our ancestors’ experiences might thus seem too remote to bear any practical relevance for us, who live in a digitized world of apps. But we believe with unwavering faith that each and every letter of the Torah has volumes to teach the Jews of every generation, and it therefore behooves us to learn and apply the lessons of the desert even to 21 st -century life. Of particular note is a section in Parashat Behaalotecha (Bamibar 9:15-23) in which the Torah describes the system of travel during those 40 years. A cloud, representing the Divine Presence, served as the nation’s “GPS,” charting their route and directing them, and when it lowered over the Mishkan , this was a signal to Bene Yisrael to encamp. They would not travel again until the cloud rose, at which point they would journey until the cloud descended once again. The system was quite simple, but the Torah appears to afford it great importance. No fewer than seven times (!), the Torah writes in this section, “ Al pi Hashem yahanu ve’al pi Hashem yisa’u – They encamped according to Gd, and they journeyed according to Gd.” The Torah repeatedly emphasizes that the Jews obediently followed Gd’s “navigation,” obeying the cloud’s signals of when to journey and when to encamp. If the Torah found it necessary to make this point with such emphasis, we may assume that there is a significant lesson for us to learn from this system. “The Kindness of Your Youth” One reason for this emphasis is to extol the virtues of that generation. We all know how challenging it is to travel – packing and unpacking, keeping track of our things, physical exhaustion, and the monotony of hours of travel that puts our patience to the ultimate test. Bene Yisrael – some three million people – would travel for days or weeks on end, without knowing when they would be able to stop, and would also spend months encamped, not knowing when they would be required to pack up their things and set out again. And except for a handful of unfortunate incidents recorded in the Torah, no one complained. Nobody ran ahead, nobody protested, and nobody disobeyed. This group might have been the most patient, disciplined and obedient group of travelers of all time, despite traveling under the most difficult and agonizing conditions. RABBI ELI J. MANSOUR The Ultimate GPS Navigation System How the forty year journey in the wilderness teaches us that we are always traveling on the right track. 16 Community magazine