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NumbersCantorial
Soloist Marjorie Hochberg February 21, 2005 The world was like a wilderness before the Exodus and the giving of God's behests on Sinai. Numbers Rabbah 2. 06 03 2005. 539-88-5755. 529-0134. 327-4501. 498-0174. 232-3294. Recognize any of those numbers? No matter, you undoubtedly have more than your share in your address book, calendar, palm pilot, cell phone or Blackberry. In our society, it often feels like we live buried under a mind-numbing avalanche of numbers 1,440 minutes of every day: our home phone number, business phone number, cell phone, social security number, credit card numbers, passwords, computer id's, baseball stats, the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius, and on and on and on. And is there anything worse than be reduced to a number? For most of us, the identifying numbers that our educational institutions, places of employment and governments use to track our classes, grades, working hours or income are synonymous with dehumanization and for the institutions that employ them -- take the IRS for example--we feel something other than tender regard. Besides that, for those of us not blessed with the genetic mutation that allows some to thrive in fields like tax accounting and statistics, all those numbers are deadly dull and boring. Boredom, I'm convinced, is not just unpleasant, it's a painful emotion -- ask any 5 year old. This past week, I accompanied a five year-old named Emily to a photo session followed by a rehearsal for her first ballet recital. For those of you not familiar with very young girls and dance performances, this involved getting the child into tights, ballet slippers and an angel-inspired ballet costume of tulle and glitter. Then came styling her hair into a ballerina topknot, applying lipstick to her little lips, and mascara to her eyelashes. After that, all we had to do was to keep the perfectly composed dance package from disintegrating while she literally climbed the walls waiting for her class's turn to be photographed. Following the photos, we removed the delicate costume and bribed the young artist with ice cream so that she could tolerate the hour-long wait before her dance rehearsal. The rehearsal involved first, driving to a different location to find the performance venue, hiking a long circuitous route behind the stage past potentially lethal snaking electrical cords and abandoned spotlights to the green room and waiting some more before the young dancers made their appearance on stage. Perhaps you can picture a room full of adults simultaneously talking, singing, playing, coloring--employing all the tricks adults use to keep boredom at bay so that the 5 year old Pavlovas could tolerate that tedious period between arriving at the Green Room and rehearsing their dance. This week's parashah, Bamidbar/Numbers, begins with God ordering Moses to take a census of the community of Israel. With the help of the chieftains of the ancestral tribes, Moses and Aaron compile a list of every Israelite male aged 20 and over by clan. All of the tribes are counted except for the Levites, who are charged with caring for the Mishkan--the portable Tabernacle in the desert. The tribes are also assigned positions for their camps on the North, South, East, and West of the Mishkan. At first glance, it is hard to imagine what this boring, detailed, formulaic list of numbers has to do with holiness or connection to the Divine. Yet, every year, this portion precedes the Festival of Shavu'ot, the holiday that celebrates the receiving of Torah at Sinai—the seminal moment of revelation for the Jewish people and the most dramatic moment in Jewish history. Just out of curiosity, I attempted to research the subject of boredom in Jewish literature--and found nothing. There are many examples of boredom and restlessness in the upcoming portions of the Book of Numbers, so it isn’t that Jews don’t get bored. Rather, it seems that in Jewish tradition, the mental states one endures-- or enjoys-- on the way to the celebration, festival or revelation pale in comparison to the experience of the main event. Not unlike the Green Room full of young dancers waiting their turn to run on stage, the Israelites waited in the desert for God's revelation. We are told in Exodus that at Sinai, they washed and dressed in clean clothes, abstained from sex, and took steps to prepare themselves physically and emotionally to receive the word of God. In Parashat Bamidbar, all were counted with their families, clans and tribes because all were entitled to receive the Teachings of God at Sinai. All had to be counted, had to be in their place, and had to be ready to receive the commandments before the word of God was revealed. In Bamidbar, all were counted because, of course, every Jew, and every human, counts. On this Shabbat, the importance of every soul is especially vivid because so many of the faces that would be in our midst this evening are celebrating Shabbat in Eretz Yisraeil. Every one of them, as every one of you, brings special gifts to our Temple community, including the gifts of scholarship, art, grace, talent, and compassion, as well as physical gifts of money, time and, of course, food. In our collective history, the revelation of the commandments was a singular event, but we celebrate it every year because receiving the Torah is an ongoing process and a reiterative decision--one we make over and over again in spite of occasional boredom, disillusionment, or loss. The Talmud says, "The world was like a wilderness
before the Exodus and the giving of
Shabbat Shalom. |
