Sivan 11, 5776/June 17, 2016
Parashat Beha'alotcha opens with the sublime image of Aharon literally "raising the lights"of the golden menorah and closes with the inexplicable harsh words spoken by Miriam andAharon about their brother Moshe, and G-d's severe response to Miriam's lapse of judgement, and in between these two events, Beha'alotcha chronicles the no less extreme examples of the best of, and the worst of, the children of Israel. The plethora of incidents it describes and the breadth of radical shifts in faith and trust in G-d and the concomitant extremes in behavior make Beha'alotcha a tour-de-force, an almanac of 'the best of times and the worst of times' for the nation of Israel.
In fact, Beha'alotcha does not merely chronicle the full gamut of contradictions which make up the people of Israel, it chronicles the full gamut of contradictions which make up all of humanity. This is who we are, and ever since Adam chose to live in a world of free will and the ability to choose between good and bad, between faithfulness to G-d and rebellion, each one of us contains within our beings the very same DNA of faith and loss of faith, of living in active harmony with G-d's world, or slipping into acts of outright rebellion.
Beha'alotcha itself is made up of three distinct sections. The opening of Beha'alotcha, which we noted above, tells of the nation of Israel, set to enter the land of Israel, in perfect sync and harmony with G-d . When G-d chose to rest in the desert His cloud of glory would descend. The Levites would assemble the Tabernacle and the tribes would set up their encampments. When G-d chose to travel on, He would raise His cloud of glory up from the Tabernacle, the Kohanim would sound the trumpets, the tribes would strike camp and the nation would move on. It doesn't get better than this.
The second distinct section of Beha'alotcha, what our sages describe as an entirely separate book of the Torah, consists of the following two verses:
"So it was, whenever the ark set out, Moses would say, Arise, HaShem, may Your enemies be scattered and may those who hate You flee from You. And when it came to rest he would say, Repose HaShem, among the myriads of thousands of Israel."(Numbers 10:35-36)
Moshe rabbenu (Moses our master) the man who ascended Mount Sinai and later oversaw the construction of, and who with his own hands, assembled and established the Tabernacle, has now, in breathtakingly few words, described the perfection of an entire nation that moves and rests, that breaths in and breaths out with the will of G-d , Who leads and protects His people from all harm.
The third part of Beha'alotcha, beginning with "The people were looking to complain..."(ibid 11:1) is jam-packed with strife and discord. The people complain bitterly of a lack of something which they, in fact have an abundance of, reminisce of a sweet past which they, in fact, never experienced, and express terror of a future that G-d has already guaranteed them. In response, Moshe seem to undergo a meltdown, begging G-d to "please kill me," (ibid 11:15) and G-d's response to the people's unjustified demands also seems uncharacteristically out of proportion. And from here things just go south. The nation that saw G-d's voice at Sinai, can now no longer see past their own grumbling bellies. All these extremes coincide within the verses of Beha'alotcha, a veritable patchwork of the human condition, making Beha'alotcha not just a parasha which describes the reality of man, but a parasha which itself bears the same disconnects and radical departures from one end of the spectrum of human behavior to its diametric opposite.
Nevertheless, Beha'alotcha opens with a detailing of the "form of the menorah," the seven branched menorah whose branches and knobs and flowers and base are all made of one single piece of pure gold, "miksha echat." Man, too, with all his myriad parts and complex and contradictory impulses which lead him both to the heights of human behavior, and to the depths, to the fulfillment of G-d's intentions for him, and to the the debasement of the G-d ly image, was created by G-d "miksha echat" - a single, integral, indivisible unit, complete with contradictions and the ability to overcome them. Our sages have taught us that there is no necessary chronological order in the Torah narrative, ("no before and no after," in their words), and the long list of extreme and contradictory behavior described in Beha'alotcha is not presented in an order that is necessarily chronological or fixed. In other words, the inexplicable contradictions described inBeha'alotcha, exist in us all, simultaneously. We choose, each moment, who we are and how we express our relationship with G-d and man.
Beha'alotcha is a brutally honest paean and also lament of the human condition, sparing nothing. But the hope it expresses is in its opening verses. If man can be compared to the seven branched menorah, then it is Aharon's sublimely humble "raising of the lights"of the better angels of our humanity, through his faithful fulfillment of his responsibilities in the Holy Temple, which gives us a leg up. Building for G-d a Holy Temple, bringing His presence into our lives, gives us the Divine edge and tips the scales on our behalf. G-d never asked of man to make it on his own. In fact, being here for man was always G-d's idea: "Build for Me a Sanctuary and I will dwell among them." (Exodus 25:8)
-The Temple Institute
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