SERMON   PARASHAT BAMIDBAR   

June 7, 2024

Rabbi David Edleson  

Temple Sinai  

South Burlington, Vermont

Ella,  I’m so proud of you and all the work you have done to get ready for tomorrow.  You are so smart, and you think in complex ways about how humans behave in groups and about the human condition.  

Your portion is not a bat-mitzvah friendly one, either.  It is made up long lists of various censuses – yes, that’s the plural of census -  a census of who can enlist in the army and who can work on the tabernacle and a general census of the Israelite population in the wilderness. 

It starts: 

"On the first day of the second month, in the second year following the exodus from the land of Egypt, the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, saying: Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names of every male, head by head. You and Aaron shall record them by their groups, from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms." (1:1-3) 

So the first number in the Book of Numbers is the number of people 20 years and up eligible to serve in an army.   Given that they are about to engage in war with several hostile kingdoms, either to pass through or ultimately to go up into the land of Canaan, they need to know what resources they have.   We get the final tally like this:

"All the Israelites, aged twenty years and over, enrolled by ancestral houses, all those in Israel who were able to bear arms - all who were enrolled came to 603,550." 

This is a surprising number, especially given that the US army is smaller, with around 450,000 troops.   It is much larger than the Israeli army today.   It is a good time to be a Reform Jew, since a number this large would mean that the Israelites in the wilderness numbered in the millions.  

It is also a good lesson in being skeptical and questioning the source of numbers and information that we are getting, whether in the Torah, or in our current lives when we are bombarded with information and disinformation. 

It also calls on us to think about the ethics of war and to wrestle with the complex moral questions that war asks. 

Rabbi Shlomo Brody has written extensively on Jewish ethics of war, and does a great deal of education on this topic with Jewish teens and college students.  Rabbi Brody strongly encourages us to engage in these complex ethical questions in our Hebrew Schools and in our adult conversations.  He suggests we create curriculae that ask us to wrestle with the hard questions that war raises.  And he says:

“And we shouldn’t be afraid of using case examples when we messed up, when we made mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes were made in the fog of war and sometimes those mistakes were made because it was a bad moral calculation. Deep thinkers, serious people from a deep moral tradition like our own should be able to recognize that we do some things right and we do some things wrong and we need to learn from those mistakes.” 

Brody approaches this by asking students to consider actual situations of war through a list of values that can be in tension with one another especially in war.

He said,

“It’s like a nexus, almost like a cocktail of how people make choices. It’s connected to Jonathan Haidt’s work around moral frameworks that people use to see the world.”

He goes on name of the these values that can be in tension.  For example, the inherent dignity of every human being can be in conflict with instilling fear in the enemy.  Or the value of protecting ones on family or country can be in tension with the Jewish prohibition of unnecessarily shedding blood. Or the value of serving one’s country can be in conflict with the value of personal responsibility for our actions.    

Rabbi Brody’s approach of competing ethical values was parallel to what was stressed at a conference of Reform Rabbis and Educators in New York two weeks ago.  On the topic of teaching Israel, there was consensus among leading Jewish educators that we should we should teach Israel in the context of Jewish peoplehood, and explore the complexities of modern Israel, ethically and religiously, in all age groups. 

Too often, like I have, we wait until you are bat mitzvah age or older to start to delve into the complexities of the issue. 

These leading educators said that while we should be age appropriate, we should not shy away from letting our students hold both love and pain, both connection and questioning, so they are prepared to engage the complexity of these issues in Jewish life and in answering  “What does it mean to be a Jew in the world today?”

I have already learned that often, our tweens and teens are already more complex thinkers than many of the adults I know, and certainly more than what adults say on social media.  The conversations we have sometimes in class show a wide range of views, and different ethics about big issues like identity, and war, and religion.  I think that a key to complex reflection is the ability to hold contradictions without the need to resolve them too quickly.  In other words, we can see that a situation is really complicated, and that both sides can be justified even if each side claims right and justice is on their side.  I have found our young people much more skilled at holding that sort of dissonance than we give them credit for, or than we see on the news. 

There is a great deal of reward in our culture these days for professing clear, unambiguous ethics and ideologies, and that can be hard to resist.  Argument and a sense of urgency push us naturally to want a clear answer to what is right.  And some people are by nature ideologues and we are living in a time that too often rewards that.  But in the long run, those fundamentalisms are threatening to civility in a pluralist society.   

Jews have a long sense of time and history, and we know that what seems so passionately clear and right in one generation might look very different 10, 20, or 1000 years later.   Things we were certain were right end up causing harm.  Something we believe passionately is just wrong ends up looking very different years later.  We can’t predict the future very well.     

Being human is complicated, and humans are complicated beings.  We are each of us a bundle of contradictions, and that must mean that our communal and national life reflects our humanity, in all our brilliance, and in all our insecurities and our selfishness.  To love a single human is to know that we are a messy species, and that is infuriating and absolutely beautiful and meaningful. 

So I hope for you Ella, that you continue to see the world complexly, with love and anger and all the complications of trying to be a good human in the world.  I don’t think we can do that without learning how to love the messiness and the art of being human.    But you’ll say more on that tomorrow.  

Shabbat Shalom.