Rebbetzen Tziporah: After the Plague…..

 

Dear friends,

One of the most striking pesukim not just in this week's parshah, but (for me) in the entire Torah is, "And it was after the plague". The expected comma introducing a clause that tells you what happened next is conspicuously absent.

Perhaps it is to tell you that life continues with meaning after the plagues play themselves out. After the blood libels and the inquisition, after the holocaust, after the kind of destruction that we no longer can even grasp, the destruction of the Bais HaMikdash, there is a next day.

Pessimists and cynics will be happy (or at least as happy as they allow themselves to be) to tell you that this kind of meaning is just a human construct. We go on living because we are not dead. This is far from the way things are. Everything in the world, including the inanimate world, the world of vegetation, and the animal world, is geared towards survival. Death is always the enemy. Just as (what I found to be) an interesting aside, biologists discovered that plants have a way of "talking" to insects letting them "know" when they will benefit the most from doing their favorite activity, eating… The Parshah continues narrating the way the land will be apportioned. And then you get to a fascinating contrast between the unspoken cynicism that some of us feel, and the truth of Torah.

Tzelafchad's five daughters demand a portion in the Land. They want to continue, to inherit, to have a piece of the action of Olam HaZeh, the way Hashem determined it should play out, with each tribe defining this world in its own way, following Hashem's directives! Hashem's response is to tell Moshe to give them what they asked for.

Their demand is often twisted. They are presented as the frustrated feminists of the ancient world, demanding that the borders that Hashem created when he made two genders be torn down. When you look more carefully at the narrative, you will see that they didn't try to "break the glass ceiling". They were very open in saying that if their father had left sons, then there would be no reason to make a claim—the land would remain with their family.

Olam Hazeh, this world, is where the action is at. It's where your ability to choose is tested, and where challenges have meaning. The tricky part of this equation is that the bold striking beauty of challenge is sometimes tarnished and blackened. Sometimes we fail.

Eretz Yisrael was far more challenging than the desert was. It's a place now, and was a place then, where humans had to struggle to survive. They had to work the land, contend with changing weather, deal with hostility, meet the reality of being with other nations and not degenerate into the kind of society that comes out of a sociological blender in which uniqueness disappears. In order to deal with all of this, the text introduces another story that at first seems unrelated to Bnos Tzelafchad.

Moshe is concerned about his people's future. It is now clear that he will not be the one who leads them into the Land and guides them through their struggles. Hashem answered his prayers by telling him to appoint Yehoshua as the next leader, and needless to say (by the way, did you ever find that that phrase is by its nature always redundant? So did I, but as you see, that didn't stop me from using it!), Moshe obeyed Hashem's command. He was also able to give Yehoshua "some of his glory" a phrase that is very difficult to grasp. Moshe was compared to the sun. He brought light, energy, warmth and clarity with him. Yehoshua was compared to the moon, whose light is just a reflection of the sun's light. It is that kind of light, that kind of leadership that the Jews needed when they would enter Eretz Yisrael.

Yehoshua had some of Moshe's glory, some of the purity of his light, but it was different in ways that made it the kind of light needed. Moshe's light was a gift from Hashem. It came down from the kind of place that words can't describe. His prophecy was on a plane that was never reached by any other prophet. Yehoshua wasn't Moshe, nor was he meant to be Moshe. He stood on terra firma—the literal ground of this world, the world of struggle and challenge. The world that you and I stand on throughout our lives. He had to find Hashem's light in this world. The Name that we use for Hashem's presence in our world is "Shechina", which literally means the one who dwells with us (the same root as shachen, a neighbor). This world, the world of challenge, is the one in which we now face the exile of the Shechina, meaning although Hashem is unchanging, sometimes the depth of confusion that living in galus brings, makes us unwilling or unable to find Him.

One of my husband's chevrusas is Rabbi Karmel, the son of the famous Rabbi Karmel who edited and published Michtav Me"Eliahu. He teaches in a yeshiva for beginners in Bnei Brak. Yesterday (literally!) one of the students came in before davening looking terribly distraught. He approached him and asked him what happened. The boy told him that he had just spoken to his mother, who told him that his father had died. His father, a non-Jew was the head of the PLO offices in Germany. Rabbi Karmel didn't know what to say. Davening had already begun, so he put his arm on the boy's shoulder, and joined the tefillah. When he reached the blessing, "You have granted humans knowledge", he pleaded with Hashem to give him the right words. After davening he went over to his student and said, "Look how deep the galus haShechina is!" and it was time for both of them to weep.

We are also in deep galus, even though it is not usually as evident or as dramatic. It's the time of challenge, a time when our love for Hashem, and our awareness of His presence inside us can find a place here and now, in our real world if we are open and willing to seek Him.

Love, 

Tziporah