Bamidbar: Diversity

This week, we start the fourth of the five books of the Torah. Vayikra, Levitucus, the book of Kohanim, the last book, closed with  "These are the commandments that the LORD gave Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai."  It  completes the big revelation. But there are aspects of the law that can only be carried out in the Promised Land.  The next book will talk about the journey. 

This book opens with  " אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֛ה בְּמִדְבַּ֥ר סִינַ֖י    the LORD spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai,"  This is the next phase, the larval stage, of wandering.  This book will tell us about the travels and accompanying travails, in the desert.  This journey will become the paradigm for most of the history that follows it, a people in exile.  Now, after the establishment of the State of Israel on the territory set out in the Torah, I question whether the exile has ended and what that means.  Does the exile  continue until I am happy with the situation? 

As the nation enters the wilderness, there is an expectation of attrition.  The conditions are too adverse,  not everyone will survive  It is reasonable to count everyone, to see who makes it; and to have names; to remember  those who die. As it turns it, only two men who were in the count (Caleb and Joshua)  would survive.  The rest would die in the forty years sentenced in the desert. 

The census is divided by tribe and the tribes are partitioned into families. The princes of the tribes are named.  The names have meaning:  אֱלִיצ֖וּר:The Lrd is my rock,שְׁלֻמִיאֵ֖ל My completion is the Lrd, נַחְשׁ֖וֹן Serpentine...The names reflect parental hopes and incipient traditions.  

The people had developed variations.  There were small differences in the practices of groups.  The division into tribes and families validated and reinforced the variations.  It is Darwinian: the future world could reject any number of paths, but the many  options would increase the chance that some would survive. Jacob had expressed this idea when he feared the destructive anger of Esau and he divided his family into groups - so if one were  destroyed, the others would survive. 

Do we have an analogous situation in  the modern world?  Jews born after the Holocaust are in a jambalaya of the remnants of various traditions.  By the time the post war refugees arrived in the US, American Jews had already developed several lines of development, ranging from the amazingly successful  (Henry Morgenthau) to the tribes described by Phillip Roth ( New Jersey, second and third generation) and Saul Bellow ( Mid North American).  These ensconced clans welcomed the survivors who brought traces of their varied backgrounds to the melting pot. The remainder of the remnant who came from the DP camps brought their hybrid customs from the formal German to the evasive Soviet. These were  patterns of behavior that copied admired aspects of the surrounding culture, or reacted to the conditions that the surrounding culture imposed. 

In Israel, the challenges were greater. Customs and practices that had diverged over centuries in far flung places,  recognizably different people . They were fluent  in polyglot,  written in different characters.   Not only did they  have to learn to live together, they had to form a nation.  They have  a variety of visions, a plethora of missions. By a combination of dream and desperation, they created a  state that approaches the messianic. The visions, and their successes, and the conflicts among them, become a major problem. 

This parsha includes the transfer of the honor of aiding in the service from the first born to the Levites. As the book proceeds, the question of who is selected for leadership becomes prominent.  Sometimes the need for consistency outweighs the advantages of variation ( sometimes not). 

Diversity requires tolerance and acceptance which stretches the limits of what we previously considered acceptable. There should be limits to the permissible, but they deserve periodic examination.