Bamidbar - Covenant & Conversation - Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks thoughts on weekly torah portion

In English, the book we begin this week is called Numbers for an obvious reason. It begins with a census. It takes the numbers of the Israelites and there's a second count towards the end of the book. So on this view, the central theme of the book is numbers – demography.

The Israelites, still at Sinai at the beginning of the book but on the brink of the Promised Land by the end, are now a sizable nation numbering 600,000 men of an age to embark on military service. Within Jewish tradition, however, the book has become known as B'midbar, “In the Wilderness” and this suggests a very different theme.

The superficial reason for the name is that it's the first distinctive word in the book's opening verse. However, there may be a much deeper reason, and the work of two great anthropologists, Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, suggest a completely deeper possibility.

The fact that Israel's formative experience was in the desert – in the wilderness – turns out to be highly significant, because it is there that the people experience one of the Torah's most revolutionary ideas, namely, that an ideal society is one in which everyone has equal dignity under the sovereignty of God. How does this connect up with the work of these anthropologists?

Van Gennep, in his Rites of Passage, argued that societies develop rituals to mark the transition from one state to the next. From childhood to adulthood or from being single to being married. And they involve three stages. The first is a ritual of separation, a symbolic break with the past. The third is incorporation. Re-entering society with a new identity. Between the two is the crucial stage of transition. When having said “goodbye” to who you were but not yet “hello” to who you're about to become, you are recast, reborn, refashioned. Van Gennep used the word liminal, from the Latin word for threshold, to describe this second state, when you're in a kind of no man's land between the old and the new.

And that is clearly what the wilderness signals for Israel. It is liminal space – the space between – between Egypt and the Promised Land. There Israel is reborn. No longer a group of escaping slaves but about to become Mamlekhet Kohanim v'goy Kadosh – a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The desert, a no man's land, with no settled populations, no cities, no civilizational order, is the place where Jacob's descendants, alone with God, cast off one identity and assume another.

This analysis helps us understand some of the key details of the book of Exodus – Sefer Shemot. For instance, the daubing of the doorposts with blood. It's part of the first separation ritual in which the door through which you walk to leave your old life behind and go to meet a new future, has special symbolic significance.

Likewise, Kriyat yam Suf – the division of the Red Sea – the division of one thing into two, through which someone or something passes, is always a symbolic enactment of transition. As it was, for instance, for Abraham, in the passage in which God tells him about his children's future, about the fact that they're going to suffer exile and enslavement, Abraham divides the animals. God divides the sea. But the movement between these two divisions is what signals the phase change.

Note also, that Jacob has his two defining encounters with God in liminal space, the space between, between his home and the home of Laban. On the way out, on the way in, in the middle of nowhere, liminal space, that is where Jacob meets God.

Victor Turner added one additional element to this analysis. He drew a distinction between society, and what he called communitas. Society is always marked by structure and hierarchy. Some have power, others don't. There are classes, castes, ranks, orders, gradations of status and honor. For Turner, what makes the experience of liminal space different and transformative and vivid and shaping is that in the desert, in no man's land, there are no hierarchies. We're all in this together. “There's an intense comradeship and egalitarianism”, he says. Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenized. People cast together in no man's land of the desert experience the essential and generic human bond. That's what he means by communitas, a rare and special state in which for a brief but memorable moment, everyone is equal.

Now, we begin to understand the significance of Midbar – wilderness – in the spiritual life and history of Israel. It was there that they experienced, with an intensity they'd never felt before nor would they easily feel it again, the unmediated closeness of God which bound them to him and to one another. And that is what Hosea means when he speaks in God's name of a day when Israel will experience what I think nowadays, we would call a second honeymoon. Listen to these words. “Therefore, I am now going to allure her, I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. In that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘my husband’. You will no longer call me, ‘my master’.”

We now understand the significance of the account at the beginning of the Bamidbar, in which the twelve tribes are encamped in rows of three at the four sides of the tabernacle, each equidistant from the Holy. Each tribe was different, but with the single exception of the Levites, they were all equal, equidistant from the tabernacle. They ate the same food, manna from heaven. They drank the same drink, water from the rock or from the well. None yet had lands of their own, for the desert has no owners. There was no economic or territorial conflict between them. They bonded as a society of equals.

The entire description of the camp at the beginning of Bamidbar, with its emphasis on equality, exactly fits Victor Turner's description of communitas. The ideal state people only experienced in liminal space, where they've left the past and Egypt behind, but they haven't yet reached their future destination, the land of Israel. They haven't yet begun building a society with all the inequalities to which society gives rise. For a moment, they are together. Their tents forming a perfect square with the tabernacle at its center.

The poignancy of the book of Bamidbar lies in the fact that this communitas, this experience of equality in the desert, lasted so briefly. The serene mood of its beginning will soon be shattered by quarrel after quarrel, rebellion after rebellion. A series of disruptions that would cost an entire generation their chance of entering the land. Yet, Bamidbar opens, just as does the Book of Bereshit, with a scene of blessed order. There, A natural order. Here, a social order. There, divided into six days. Here, divided into, two times six, twelve tribes. Each person in Bamidbar, like each species in Bereshit, in his or her rightful place. Each with his standard, under the banners of their ancestral house.

So, Bamidbar, being in the wilderness was not just being in a place, it was being in a state of being, a moment of solidarity, midway between enslavement in Egypt and the social inequalities that would later emerge in Israel. An ideal never to be forgotten, even if never fully captured again in real space and time. Judaism never forgot its vision of natural and social harmony, set out respectively in the beginnings of the books of Bereshit and Bamidbar, as if to say that what once was could be again, if only we heed the word of God.

Shabbat Shalom.