Transitions – B’midbar
Westchester Reform Temple
May 14, 2010/2 Sivan 5770
Men’s Club Shabbat
RABBI JAN KATZEW, Union for Reform Judaism
& member, Westchester Reform Temple
I am honored to have been asked to deliver a D’var Torah on Men’s Club Shabbat. D’var Torah means “a word of Torah.” This week’s word of Torah is “B’midbar”. B’midbar means “in the wilderness”. It bears no apparent relationship to the English name of the Book we begin this Shabbat – the Book of Numbers. Appearances are often deceiving, in the Torah as in life.
B’midbar - In a wilderness, in uncharted territory, is where most of us dwell most of the time. The wilderness is not the same as the desert. The wilderness is a place of transition. Tevya almost had it right. Not “tradition” but “transition” may be the essential concept that holds the secret to Jewish life. William Bridges, whose surname is ideal for his authorial subject, composed an article entitled “Getting them through the Wilderness” in which he wrote: “Transition is very different from change. Change is situational… Transition, on the other hand is a three phase psychological reorientation process people go through when they are coming to terms with change. It begins with an ending – with people letting go of their old reality and their old identity. Unless people can make a real ending, they will be unable to make a successful beginning.”
In the words of Torah, unless we can learn to live b’midbar, in the wilderness, we will not be able to live in the b’eretz ha-muvtachat, in the Land of Promise. In the life of the Reform Movement, we are still in transition. The generation of our people that left Egypt spent forty years of meandering in the wilderness before they were ready to experience the responsibility that comes with freedom. It has not yet been forty years since the first woman rabbi was ordained or the first woman cantor was invested, and we are appropriately in the wilderness, still in transition, still holding on to old paradigms and prejudices, still trying to figure out the roles of men and woman in the evolving Jewish community.
B’midbar reminds us to be patient, not to expect that we will be able to take shortcuts, to walk directly from an anthrocentric Jewish culture to a dynamic equilibrium of gender and age balance. Transitions take time and it is as natural for us to have separation anxiety from our prior realities as adults as it is for a child to experience separation anxiety in her first day in school. As Reform Jews we are experiencing multiple transitions. It is now the statistical norm that a student in a congregational school in the Reform Movement is the progeny of at least one parent that was not born as a Jew. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented scenario in Jewish memory. The Reform cantorate has become predominantly female in a single generation. We are a people in transition, bamidbar, and we will do our share of misdirected wandering, just like our forebears. But, with God’s providence and our perseverance, we will learn what it takes not only to survive, but to thrive in our evolving, at times frustrating and almost always fascinating reality.
In the wilderness of Sinai, the Israelites took a census; hence the Book of Numbers is an alternative, appropriate name. Timing is everything, and in 2010, we have, I assume, all participated in the United States census. There were several substantive differences between Sinai and American censuses. Sinai counted only the men 20 years old and older, presumably because they could be counted upon to fight in order to defend the fledgling children of Israel against any enemy forces that would set out to destroy them. The American census seeks to count every person of every age that lives here, as a model of democratic principle. However, there is another distinction that is emblematic of a constructive tension between American and Jewish values. According to the US Census Bureau, “When you fill out the census form, you’re making a statement about what resources your community needs going forward.” According to Sefer B’midbar, the Book of Numbers, “Take a census of the whole Israelite company [of fighters] by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names of every male, head by head.” We count Americans in order to allocate resources. We count the descendants of the Israelites, ourselves, in order to defend the values of a minority, a people that is both ger v’toshav, a stranger and a resident, perpetually in transition, in a wilderness, B’midbar.
Shabbat Shalom!
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