I am writing to you from my College Reunion where I am enjoying a quick overnight before returning to Scarsdale for Shabbat. By the time many of you read this, I'll already be back in town!
Ben Bag Bag, that improbably named Sage, was right to teach of the Torah, "Turn it, and turn it again, for everything is in it" (Pirkei Avot 5:26). Rare, even impossible, is the encounter with Torah that does not reveal some new insight, some new detail waiting to be discovered, turned over, explored, interpreted.
So it is this week in my discovery of a detail from the Torah portion called Beha'alotecha, the passage we read this week from the Book of Numbers. In Chapter 10 the Torah relates the marching order of the Israelite Tribes and their respective chieftains. With the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant traveling, piecemeal, up front, under the porterage of three Levitical clans, the The Torah depicts the tribes marching in a fixed formation and fixed order each time the Israelites would break camp, marching until they reached their next station in the wilderness, each encampment and departure prompted by God's atmospheric signals: a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.
Here, then, is the detail that caught my attention this week. For all of the tribes a simple formula is used to describe the marching: "Then the banner of the camp of [tribe name] set out, according to its ranks...." The formula deviates only once, when we get to the final tribe in the formation, the tribe of Dan.
"Then the banner of the camp of Dan set out, the collector for the other camps, according to its ranks..." (Num. 10:25, emphasis mine). What are we to make of the inserted phrase, "the collector for the other camps?"
RaSHI explains by way of the Talmud Yerushalmi: "The collector for all the other camps: The Jerusalem Talmud [states]: Because the tribe of Dan was numerous they traveled last, and if anyone had lost anything, they would [find it and] return it to him." (RaSHI ad loc.)
It's a touching and significant image: the Tribe of Dan, the final tribe in the Israelite formation, shouldering the responsibility to collect or gather up anything left behind by the tribes ahead of them.
It's an image, I believe, that offers wisdom to us Jews today, particularly us Reform Jews. Each of us marches behind the generations of forbears who have bequeathed to us Jewish wisdom, Jewish practices, the ethics of Jewish generations gone by. In most cases our forbears, our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and countless departed generations we never could meet, carried their Jewish banners with pride and commitment, leading the way from Sinai to all their lands of Promise, the Jewish tradition safe and intact under their care.
But every now and then our forbears let drop into the desert sands of time a teaching, a tradition, a custom, practice, or ritual--at times inadvertently and at times eagerly. Perhaps some of our forbears, all too eager to shed particular signifiers of Jewishness like ritual dress, restricted diet, Old World language and traditional synagogue melodies let drop their kippot and tallitot, their kosher food and their Yiddish words, their niggunim and their nusach into the sand.
And we who march last in formation, we who come of late trailing their footsteps in the sands of time, perhaps have spotted those little tribal treasures scattered here and there on our own Jewish journeys, and perhaps we have deemed them worthy enough to examine, blow off the accumulated dust of time and travel, and try them on for size again. The Tribe of Dan, collector for the all tribes who marched before them, thus played an important part in the life of the People of Israel and so do we who march only latest: gathering up the lost fragments of Jewish life, seeing how they might make sense today, and cherishing those treasures that enrich and deepen the Judaism that we shall leave for those who march after us.
As always, I encourage and welcome your comments below.
Happy Studying!
Rabbi Jonathan Blake
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