Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class. My name is Gedalia
Meyer and I am podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel. Change is the great constant in life.
We look for stability in much of life but what we get is change.
This pattern unfolds upon us from the moment of birth. If we are fortunate, we are provided
with a stable environment of nourishment and love, the perfect world for a baby to grow and develop.
But within all that stability are changes that happen so fast that they seem like the
camera has been set to a higher speed than normal. Before this child knows it, he or she is a teen,
equipped with a body and mind that is almost ready to meet the world on their own.
For that entire time, this child wishes for nothing else but stability. In spite of this,
or perhaps because of it, the changes keep coming. From toddler through early childhood
to young adulthood, this person undergoes changes that would baffle a full-grown adult.
In a span of about a dozen years their body has changed to an unrecognizable form
and their mind has gone through so many transitions that they have trouble figuring
out who they really are. While that young man or woman can still remember playing with toys,
they are thinking about career choices and mulling over beliefs about the world. It
is a whirlwind of changes within a veneer of stability, enough to make anybody’s head spin.
With full adulthood, things begin to both slow down and speed up. The physical changes slow
considerably, but degrees of independence instill another round of psychological and personal
change. This is the time when that person must find who they are and where they fit in the world.
They might move to several different places, even to different parts of the world. They might change
their religious beliefs, their social or political affiliations, even their sexual orientation. All
this is thrust upon them like a menu at a restaurant with too many options. But
these choices have to be made whether they like it or not, for this is life.
It is in the realm of beliefs that the greatest and most profound changes take place
from that point on until the onset of old age. Beliefs are strange animals - they form the core
of who we are and yet can seem as whimsical as scrolling through Facebook posts. We usually
don’t want to change our beliefs but when we look back after decades of supposed stability,
we may find that they have changed right under our noses. Those beliefs are, in a sense,
our reality. They may not form the earth under our feet or the form that our physical
bodies take, but they sure dictate how we see that earth and that body. They
shape our understanding and our choices of everything from who we love or hate, to God.
This week’s Parsha is called Bamidbar. It is the first Parsha in the next book of the Bible also
called by the same name, but more familiar to English-speakers as Numbers. Bamidbar means ‘in
the wilderness’, a reference to the wilderness of the Sinai desert, where the Israelites would
spend the next 38 or so years wandering around as they made their way to the Promised Land.
The name Numbers comes from the fact that two different censuses occur in this book,
this first one in this Parsha.
We are going to skip discussion of this rather long Parsha because the Biblical
holiday of Shavuot, or ‘Weeks’ will fall this Sunday evening. This holiday is the third of
the so-called ‘Pilgrimage Festivals’, the other two being Pesach and Sukkot. Those other two are
each a week long, while Shavuot is only one day. Nothing much really happens on Shavuot,
unlike its better known siblings and unlike the very Jewish Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Hence,
it tends to get overlooked on the Jewish calendar and ignored in the grand scheme of things.
It’s not even as well known as the more minor holidays of Purim and Channuka.
Shavuot is a classic agricultural celebration that was changed over
the centuries into a completely different commemoration. For at least 2000 years,
Jews have celebrated it as the day which marks the giving of the Torah
on Mt. Sinai. Whether it always marked this event is a matter of speculation and tradition. Whatever
the case, Jews today concentrate their focus on studying some aspect of Torah wisdom or law,
frequently committing themselves to go the entire night, until morning prayers. This is followed by
what has become mandatory in Jewish settings - a dairy spread filled with all manner of cheesecake.
In the middle of what amounts to a good deal of prayer following what may have been an all-nighter
of Torah study, there is the reading of a very short book of the Bible. This is the book of Ruth,
the simple story of a young widow who follows her mother-in-law, named Naomi,
back to Israel from the neighboring land of Moab, which is now Jordan. Ruth herself was from Moab,
but she married Naomi’s son after the family left Israel during a famine. Eventually both Naomi’s
and Ruth’s husbands died, along with the husband of Ruth’s sister-in-law, Orpah. The three women
were left on their own - a highly undesirable fate in the Biblical world of 3000 years ago.
After all these deaths, Naomi decided to return to her homeland, which she hadn’t seen for ten years.
She told her daughters-in-law to return to their ancestral homes and their ancient gods,
since they would not find anything resembling either in Israel. They insist that they want to
return with her. It is only with much persuasion that she manages to convince Orpah to return home.
Their parting is sad, and it is obvious that much love had developed between them.
But Ruth refuses to return. She insists that she will go with Naomi
to Israel and live there as an Israelite, however rare and difficult this was at the time
Nami tries to make her see the impossibility of this role of the dice. She would have limited
prospects of marriage and her life would forever be one of an outsider. But Ruth sticks to her guns
and, in the course of a few short verses, becomes the classic Biblical example
of a convert. Although she is never called the classic Jewish word for a convert,
she has since become enshrined as the prototype of this experience. She commits herself to
following the practices and beliefs of Naomi’s people, come hell or high water. In this regard,
Ruth is a heroine in a class by herself among the legendary figures of the Bible.
In the course of the rest of this short book, she manages to find a place among the female gleaners
of a man named Boaz, who is a relative of Naomi. After a brief hint at a sexual encounter in a
barn during the night, she marries him. With him she bears a son named Oved, to the great acclaim
and blessings of all the women who attended the birth. This Oved, in turn, sires Yishai, who,
in turn, sires none other than David, the future king of Israel. Thus the story takes Ruth through
a full spectrum of life’s ups and downs - from a forsaken widow who takes the wild chance at
joining a different people with different beliefs who will likely reject her, to scrounging a
living by gleaning in the fields, to becoming the ancestress of the greatest king of ancient Israel.
It is a little difficult to know what the actual point of this story is.
Is it to introduce the ancestry of David? Is it to illustrate the Biblical experience of
conversion to belief in the Israelite God? Is it to depict simple dedication to a personal choice?
Or is it just to tell the story with no point whatsoever? It could be all of these or none.
The story tells itself and we, the readers have to figure out the message for ourselves.
Perhaps there is a subtle message in the somewhat uneventful story, at least by Biblical standards.
Perhaps the message includes all of the above and something else that flits through them all
and above them all. This is a story of a young woman. She lived in the world of the Bible,
3000 years ago, when life revolved around the seasons and the harvest and plagues and
famines. Wandering beyond the nearest river was a long journey. Living in a foreign land
was risky to the point of recklessness. It probably meant enslavement or worse.
Changing one’s religious beliefs was simply not an option. It was as unlikely as changing
one’s sex or the color of one’s eyes. It couldn’t be done except under great duress,
like war or some other tragedy. To abandon one’s ancestral home without any need
other than personal choice was the height of foolishness. It was a form of cultural suicide
that almost nobody risked. Ruth is one of two in the BIble, and the other is almost unknown.
But Ruth did all that and survived. Although it is not stated as such, she was rewarded with a son
who became the grandfather of the future king of Israel. What could account for such
a titanic shift in her fate? She was born into a people who were the almost perpetual enemies
of the Israelites. She probably had little to no contact with them. She may have never even heard
of them until she married one. She certainly had never considered returning to live among them
and adopting their beliefs. But this is precisely what happened to her, and it
happened so naturally that one feels the script had been written for her from before she was born.
It is almost Biblical in its pre-ordained feel. All these changes happened to Ruth like she was
playing a part in a movie. But the choices were hers, almost every step of the way.
Ruth is the story of change. It is life flowing underneath us like a river, set in its course
but always moving somewhere else. It tells us that our fate is as set as the course
of that river and as flexible as the water we feel moving around us in every direction
as we stand in it. Our expectations may be fulfilled or something else entirely
unexpected may happen to us. Either way, it is the story of our lives. We may make decisions
that steer the course of our lives, or things may happen to us that radically change our fate that
have nothing to do with personal choices. Those changes are the story of our lives.
The single facet of our lives that we can truly have influence over is our beliefs.
They are a subset of our choices, the relatively small collection that defines how we see the
world. Ruth took the radical move of choosing to change her fundamental religious beliefs.
This was unusual at the time but is somewhat more common today. She set a kind of Biblical
precedent for the entire future - as haphazard as the changes in our lives appear to be,
some are under our control. We can decide our most profound and fundamental beliefs.
We can choose to be who we are and whom we shall become. Shabbat Shalom!