(Delivered August 3, 2024)

Are we there yet?

This is an age-old question. It comes up, of course, on car trips with children, on a fairly regular basis, almost like clockwork. It also came up for me a lot as I was studying our Torah portion this week. We are winding down Sefer Bamidbar—the Book of Numbers—and with it, the narrative substance of the Torah. Yes, of course, there is another book in the Five Books of Moses, but Sefer Dvarim—Deuteronomy—is a retelling of the first four books, punctuated by Moses’s long goodbye. So for all intents and purposes, this week finds us at a major moment of transition. Here at the end of Mattot-Masei, the Israelites are poised to enter the Promised Land, seemingly about to fulfill the beautiful dream that Avraham had back in Parshat Lech L’cha. This is the longed-for culmination of forty years of wandering and bickering and searching and giving up and starting again. This is the fulfillment of a vision, the anticipation of which spurred the harrowing journey out of enslavement. Here we are, witnessing the Israelites, our ancestors, ready at last, to attain what they have been yearning for, what their parents toiled for, what their grandparents could only dream about. 

Are we there yet?

But in this seeming moment of triumph, this double portion of Torah finds Moses and the Israelites not looking back with a sense of satisfaction and contentment. Rather, they come to the unpleasant realization that getting there is significantly less than half the fun, and by the way, there’s no there there. In Parshat Mattot-Masei, Moses has meltdown after meltdown, becoming increasingly unhinged just when the story should cloak him in triumph. In the first part of the parsha, which we don’t read this year, he becomes furious that in conquering the Midianites, the fighters allowed the women to live rather than slaughtering them. This is not the righteous, moral Moses we have come to admire as our teacher and leader. His twisted rationale is that the seductiveness of the Midianite women had caused the plague that had decimated the Israelite camp until Pinchas’s act of vigilantism. Even if this had been the case with every single Midianite woman, and even if it didn’t take two to tango, is this a reason for such wild destruction?

Then, in the part we do read today, Moses goes ballistic on the Gadites and Reubenites, assuming that their apparently sensible request to remain in Moav with their cattle and not cross the Jordan into the Holy Land was evidence of treachery that would lead to a repeat of the incident with the scouts—and perhaps an additional forty years of wandering as yet another generation might prove unworthy to enter the Land. Again, his logic makes a certain amount of sense on paper, but the way he handles himself …really doesn’t look good. It seems all this conquest does not bring out the best in the Israelites, nor in their leadership. 

Just as they seem to be about to enter the land and fulfill the desire they have held in their hearts for nearly half a century, they decompensate in spectacular fashion. It makes me wonder. 

Maybe, Are we there yet? is the wrong question.

I have a dear friend, a brilliant writer and composer, more extravagantly talented than most of us could ever hope to be. When he was in his early thirties, he wrote a show that was produced on Broadway, starring people you and I have heard of. It was nominated for a Tony Award. It was a big deal. He and I didn’t meet and become friends until some years later, and when we were reflecting together about that early success, he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “Don’t climb the mountain too soon. Because you think that when you climb the mountain everything is going to be perfect. But actually, what you find at the top is a bigger, gnarlier, higher mountain.”

Likewise, those of us blessed with children in our lives experience this phenomenon over and over. When they are in utero, we imagine life will be perfect when they are finally born. When they are infants, we imagine life will be perfect when they sleep through the night. When they are toddlers, we imagine life will be perfect when they go to school. You get the idea. And then, when they set out on their own, we imagine life will be perfect when they come back to visit. Each phase brings something delicious and something more to want. And much as we long to see their children and their children’s children, it is in the nature of being human to leave question marks and ellipses in our wake. The promised future is always out of reach.

I think also of 1948. When the modern state of Israel was established, I imagine many Jews felt that finally we’re coming home. Finally, we can be safe. Finally, we can occupy the high moral ground we envision for ourselves. The truth, as we agonizingly know, is much more complicated than that. Yes, we are home. But safety and high moral ground are much more thorny than we allowed ourselves to imagine for all those generations when we didn’t have a Jewish homeland. October 7 taught us—again—how unsafe we truly are, even in our own country. And the incident at Sde Teiman this past week—in which the arrest of a handful of IDF soldiers who brutalized a Palestinian prisoner sparked rioting by settlers in protest of their being punished—has shown us that although Am Yisrael is one people, we are not all speaking the same moral language or holding ourselves to the same standards. In 1948, when our beloved Israel was founded, I doubt we could have imagined that such depravity and pain would still be ours. 

And as we navigate these weeks leading up to Tish’ah b’Av, the weight of our historical trauma feels awfully heavy indeed, and the pasuk from our haftarah this week,

לָכֵן עֹד אָרִיב אִתְּכֶם נְאֻם־יי      וְאֶת־בְּנֵי בְנֵיכֶם אָרִיב׃

Oh, I will keep rebuking you, says Adonai,
and your children’s children I will rebuke.

curdles in our ears. Over and over, as our history unspools, our highest aspirations become muddier as they draw closer. The Torah seems to be telling us—over and over, because we are human and need to keep hearing it—that dreams take work, that the ideals we picture have a cost we can’t always recognize until it comes due. 

And yet we journey. 

The second part of our double-portion of Torah today, Parshat Masei, goes to great lengths to look back and name each and every stop along the way of those forty years of wandering. 

From the departure that caps the Pesach story, as the Egyptians are burying their dead, the Israelites journey. They journey to Sukkot, and Eisam, and Pi haChirot, and Migdol. To Marah and Eilim and Dofkah. And on and on. 

Always journeying. 

The sages wonder: why name all these places? Rashi takes comfort in knowing that as forty-two places are named to describe a period of forty years’ wandering, it must mean that the Israelites had moments when they settled in and stayed. Moments to pause for breath and reflection. The Midrash Tanchuma offers a parable: the articulation of place name after place name is like a King who is traveling with an ill child and as he recounts the story many years later, he lovingly names the places where they paused: here is where we slept, here is where we were cold, here is where you had a headache. Even though there was this terrible divine decree that there would be four decades of uncertainty for the Israelites, God was still paying attention. God kept an eye out.

But if we look closely at the verse that introduces this travelogue, there’s something else too. Chapter 33 verse 2 reads: 

וַיִּכְתֹּב מֹשֶׁה אֶת־מוֹצָאֵיהֶם לְמַסְעֵיהֶם עַל־פִּי יי וְאֵלֶּה מַסְעֵיהֶם לְמוֹצָאֵיהֶם׃

And Moses wrote down their departures for their journeys at the command of Adonai;
these were their departures and their goings out. 

The verse emphasizes the going, not the arrival. In other words: not comings and goings, but goings and goings. Our Torah tells us that setting out, looking forward, holding aspiration is essential. That even in the hardest of times, we set our sights on the horizon and keep moving. There will always be a tension between present and future, between what we have and what we think we need. The lesson is to remember and respect the past, see the imperfect present for what it is, and keep striving, even knowing that when we get there, we’ll set out again.

There is, perhaps, something to be said for unrealized dreams, for having something more to hope for and work toward. 

So. Are we there yet?

No. But we’re still journeying.

Shabbat shalom!