There is this belief that the rich and famous have these amazingly exciting lives, making some of us regular people want to live vicariously through them in the form of memoirs, tabloids, and TV documentaries. Our own lives seem boring in comparison to the recorded ups and downs of celebrities. With less than three decades of life, what journeys have we been on? Maybe we had a few birthday parties, survived at least 12 years of education, and even traveled a bit. Compared to Tony Stark’s huge birthday bash on the top of a New York City skyscraper, where the toughest of boxers got his toques handed to him in a drunken brawl with the former mayor, your story may seem a little boring.
It’s all in the way we tell the story, though, just listing a few events in our lives, with few details, really does us no justice. That’s what this week’s Torah portion does with the story of the Jewish people, listing the different journeys the Jewish people went on during their time in the desert. Parshat Massei tells us the “wheres” of the 40 years in the desert, without really telling us the “what.”Reading this alone would leave the feeling that the Jews had a pretty easy trip to the Land of Israel. You need to read the other stories, from before Massei, to get the good stuff. Listing a bunch of events will tell our stories, but we need to be more aware of the events in our lives and how they were important transitional journeys in order to truly appreciate them.
So we must ask the question: Why does the Torah, which has already given us the details of the Jewish people’s journeys, decide to give us the shorthand version too? The medieval commentator Rashi explains that this is to dissuade us from the idea that the Jews journeyed nonstop for forty years. Can you imagine traveling for decades with a huge crowd of people and only stopping to camp out at night? No matter what the spies said, nobody deserves that, and so Rashi wants to prove that’s not what God, being merciful, did. He does so by using arithmetic, counting the number of journeys to show that they only traveled to 20 places. Chances are it did not take 2 years per station, which means the Jewish people had breaks between those journeys.
Without Massei, we might assume that those 40 years were horrific. Yes, there was supposed to be something utterly amazing at the end of the road, but it seems the Jewish people suffered the entire time, to the point where we could possibly understand why so many of them were such miserable people. Instead, they had plenty of breaks, where they were able to relax, eat yummy manna and hang out with God at the Mishkan.
Traveling through life toward a terrifyingly unknown endpoint, we can often hit some rough spots. When we think back on many moments, it can trigger a lot of negative feelings. The disappointment we felt when a close friend did not come to our birthday party, the depression that came when someone we thought we loved decided they would much rather date someone else. Retelling the story can feel like we’re reliving it. It’s much easier to quickly gloss over the events of our lives, turning these rich important events into quick one-liners.
Even though it might help us avoid pain, this is not the best way to live. It’s important for us to embrace all the moments of our lives, the good and the bad, so that we can learn, grow and move forward.
It may seem as if I am going against the Torah—Massei condenses 40 years of experiences into a few place names, how is that not glossing over negativity?
Because it tells us those difficult stories first. Going back to Rashi’s explanation, we see that the Torah’s goal in telling the stories in this order is to teach us that there was a break between journeys and that not everything was bad.
Instead of ignoring our own journeys, we need to remember this, too. Yes, that close friend did not show up, but did the friendship end? Weren’t there enjoyable times spent together afterward? So you had a bad breakup, but don’t you enjoy being free, or at least the new opportunity to find a new relationship?
Massei takes all those more detailed stories and weaves them together into the backstory for how the Jews had come to be where they are, standing by the river Jordan preparing to cross over into the Land of Israel. When we are positive and able to admit that our lives have not been as hard as we may think, we’re better able to put our own stories into context. We can understand the transformation they have had on us, and we can look forward to the next steps in our journey.
David Gutbezahl is a student at Gratz College.
