Make Room in Your Tribe

By RABBI ALANA SUSKIN

Parashat Masei (Numbers 33:1-36:13)

And Moshe wrote their travels for their journeys by God's word, and these are their travels for their journeys (Numbers 33:2). The Esh Kodesh relates this line from the opening of Parashat Mas'ei to a quote from the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin, in which Ulla refers to the terrible suffering that will come with the birth pangs of the Messiah. We are reminded of God's statement to Eve after she ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, In travail will you bear children (Genesis 3:16). This, says the Esh Kodesh, is a reminder that all the different worlds that God creates come into being through a process of birth. Before eating that fruit, objects in this world were more like Platonic forms—they were held in the mind of God in perfection—and in the world of atzilut, the highest world, this is still the case. In our world, however, each thing seems to have an individual existence. Thus it is impossible for anything new to come into being without something dying. For something to draw down divine light into this world, it has to nullify itself, because as long as it has the illusion of existence, nothing new can come of it.

The Esh Kodesh suggests a seed: the tree that comes from it may be thousands of times larger than the seed, but before the tree can grow and produce fruit, the seed must decompose in the ground in order to germinate. This is what is meant by the quote from Genesis (in travail will you bear...): human birth requires a sort of nullification as well. In Midrash Tanchuma (Tazria 6), we learn that "While squatting upon the birth stool, ninety-nine of her groans are for death, while only one calls out for life." The painful process of birth requires a woman to relinquish some of her own physical powers, in order to create something new. This temporary nullification allows something new to be drawn into the world, just as God says, Shall I labor and not give birth? (Isaiah 66:9) in order to bring the redemption into the world.

In our parasha, the list of travels—are they also travails?—seems to go on endlessly, followed by a list of those who receive a portion in the land. The first tribal head named is for Judah; he is listed as Calev ben Yefuneh. Just two chapters prior (32:12), however, he is called "Calev the son of Yefuneh the Kenazite." In fact, in ten or so mentions, the only other place where he is mentioned with the tribe of Judah is in Numbers 13:6.

In Genesis 15:19, in the dark and strange vision, God promises Avram that his seed will be given the lands of a number of nations, including the Kenazites. From this verse, we might think that these peoples must somehow be eliminated, since we receive their lands. And indeed, in our portion we are told to disposses the land of its inhabitants—yet Calev receives a portion in the land, though he is quite clearly "Calev the son of Yefuneh the Kenazite" in several places—not, apparently, an Israelite.

By mentioning Calev, the text is giving us a glimpse of a struggle between two ideological positions: that there can be no one living in the land but the Israelites; or that there are, in fact, other nationalities who are a part of God's plan for the land, and we must respect their position there.

Who is this Calev, this prince of ambiguous identification? In Numbers 13, Calev was sent to spy out the land, along with representatives of all the tribes. Yet verse 22 in that chapter relates, they went up to the Negev, and he came up to Hevron—a hint, perhaps, that Calev alone spied out Hevron, and so it was given to him as a reward. In 14:24, the reward is reiterated, as God says that Calev, unlike the other spies and the Israelites, had another spirit with him and he followed after Me fully; I will bring him to the land where he had come—that is, the city of Hevron—and his descendants will possess it.

Today, there are many groups living in Israel who are not the descendents of Israelites. We forget, because of the current violence, how many live with poor treatment at the hands of Israeli society—Romanian and Thai workers, Bedouin and Druze who suffer from mistreatment because they are Arab, Palestinian Israeli Christians. There is a place for us to meet a people whose hearts, like Calev's, are filled with a ruach acheret—another spirit; who are like Calev, who loved the land so much that he refused to grant the possibility of relinquishing it no matter how difficult the other spies thought it would be to get it. He only allowed himself to see the goodness of the land and the necessity of living in it.

Israel has the opportunity to make our situation either travel or travail. Either we can take our pain and fear and translate it into justice for all the members of society, or we can continue to allow the fear to define us, asserting our victimhood as a trump card over fixing any of the predjudices of our people. If we succeed in nullifying ourselves—making our feelings of victimhood into a force for change—then our travails will become travels, toward a channel for divine light to come into the world. If not, then they will be merely travails, suffering while the seed rots in the ground.