This past Shabbat, I had the honor of sharing some words of Torah at Temple Israel of Natick, which I am happy to share here with our community.
In Parshat Masei, we reach the end of sefer bamidbar, the book of wandering in the desert. At first glance, this parsha looks a lot like an expanded version of the bedtime ritual that in our house we call, “today and tomorrow,” which we added to the bedtime routine to help our first toddler organize all the excitement of what had happened to him today and his anticipation of what might be coming tomorrow, so that he might eventually relax and go to sleep. “Today we woke up, we got dressed, we ate breakfast, you went to school and there you made that cool fingerpainting… Tomorrow will be Shabbat, we’ll wake up and put on our shabbat clothes, …” Masei, literally journeys, might be alternatively titled, “The last forty years and the next bunch of years.” “First we left Egypt, we left from Raamses after all the Pesach excitement, then we went to Sukkot, then we went to Eitam… Next you’re going to go into the land of Israel, Joshua and Elazar the Cohen will be your leaders…” There are lists of who will lead along with them, what to conquer, how to start dividing the land and establishing cities. We know that there is in fact a whole book coming, Sefer Devarim, of Moses’ last-minute advice and rehashings of where B’nai Yisrael have been and are going, but in this moment, this parsha acts as a short version of a memoir of Moses’ life, and that of the people, since he was entrusted with the task of leading them on their journey from slavery to autonomy.
This week, as I’ve been mulling what thoughts about the Torah I would share with you today, I’ve also been working my way through a memoir by Liane Kupferberg Carter called, Ketchup is my Favorite Vegetable; A Family Grows up with Autism. This book is a pre-reading requirement for a class I’m taking next week at Hebrew College on Neurodiversity Across the Jewish Lifespan, and in it, the author describes her journey as she and her family shepherd their autistic son, along with their neurotypical son, to adulthood. Like Moses, the task, and the enormity of that task, takes the author somewhat by surprise, and she faces frustrations, setbacks, and a great many moments where she does not know what to do and does not have a previous experience or another person to turn to for advice on a difficult situation.
It strikes me as parallel to Moses and Aaron’s task of leading the people on this journey, a task they didn’t exactly take on of their own initiative. During the shacharit amidah, knowing I would be sharing these words of Torah, a line caught my attention, “Yismach Moshe b’matnat chelko, Moses delighted in the gift of his lot,” and I worried that my words would come across as suggesting that what Moses, and the author of this memoir share is primarily an unwanted burden. That is not at all my intention. I believe that for each of them, as for most people who find themselves with more than they expected or bargained for in the responsibility of caring for someone, they eventually find the joy and the gift in their situation, even as their task can be overwhelming and may have taken them by surprise.
The first two verses of the parsha hint at this ambivalence. The first verse introduces the journeys the people took b’yad Moshe v’Aharon, in the hands of Moses and Aaron. In the second verse, Moses writes down the journeys they took al pi hashem. Figuratively these words mean at God’s instruction, though literally, and we’ll come back to why this is important later, al pi hashem, translates to “by God’s mouth”. Always ready to learn something from potentially extraneous words, the classical commentators argue about what this phrase is doing here. What was done at God’s command? Some think it relates to Moses writing it all down. Other say, no, what was at God’s command were the journeys themselves. A commentary called the Kli Yakar suggests that the words apply to most of the journeys but not all. They apply to the journeys undertaken from their starting points and going to their destinations, as described at the beginning of verse two, but when the two words are repeated in the reverse order, the journeys from their destinations to their starting points, this refers to the moments when the people of their own accord and out of fear or lack of faith started to turn back. In this sense al pi hashem, means in accordance with God’s will, and perhaps at odds with human understanding and comfort levels. These are the moments when we are able to keep faith and keep going.
This phrase al pi hashem notably appears again, thirty-six verses later (The gematria nerd in me is quietly having a field day with this inside, but I’m going to move on and if you’re intrigued by it too, we’ll talk later, or feel free to leave a comment), when in the midst of a pretty terse list of encampments, the text takes a two to three verse detour to remind us about the death of Aaron. Aaron, we read, ascended mount Hor al pi hashem, which we’ll continue to translate for now as at God’s instruction, and died there. The commentators, and the midrash, are again not sure what to do with this phrase. Is it talking about his ascent or his death? If it is his death, why would the Torah need to tell us that his death was God’s will? Would that be different from what happens when anyone else dies? The midrashim and commentaries have some intriguing suggestions, but I want to take a short detour, first, into my own musings.
Some of what I read in Ketchup is My Favorite Vegetable fit my image for what I imagined the author might write about. One recurring theme that took me somewhat by surprise, though, was the struggle the author and various members of her family return to over and over around the fear of death. She talks about her own childhood fear of losing her parents, and how she tries to protect her older son from that fear when he is young, and her surprise when she finds that he has found that same fear despite her best efforts. She talks about struggling to comfort her autistic child as he struggles to understand and face his fears of the death of loved ones and pets even as he grows older. And she repeatedly returns to worries about what will happen to her children after her own death and her husband’s. I am not sure why the theme of fear of death surprised me in reading this memoir. Maybe I was expecting to read about an experience that was, in many ways, different than my own. But grappling with the big, anxiety-ridden, and ultimately mysterious questions about death was one of many elements of reading about her life that turned out to be pretty universal to any parenting journey.
If this parsha were called “the last forty years and the next,” in parallel to the bedtime story of “today and tomorrow,” it would make perfect sense that there is a break in the simple list of things that happened to re-process the traumatic event of Aaron’s death. The big things always come up at bedtime, even things that seem far in the past. In fact, the fear of death comes up at bedtime, often when I’m not expecting it. Each of my older children has gone through phases where they just can’t stop thinking about those big questions. One has told me, “I just wish I could know. I just wish I could talk to God and God would promise.” What does he want God to promise? I think it is related to some version of a midrash on this moment and those mysterious words, al pi hashem. The different texts tell it different ways, but the common thread is this: al pi hashem, does not just mean figuratively at God’s instruction, but here literally means by God’s mouth. Aaron, the midrash tells us, died by a kiss of God, without having to face the angel of death. This, the midrash understands as a tremendous honor, one shared by Aaron’s siblings, Moses and Miriam. If you’re going to die, and everyone is, this is the best way to do it. So, what makes this the good death, and if it is so good, how can a person go about setting their mind at ease by signing up for this one, rather than the standard option? Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news.
According to the version in tractate Bava Batra of the Talmud, there were six people over whom the angel of death held no sway, and they were Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The proof is derived from the text where the wonder siblings are described as dying al pi hashem. (Actually, Miriam isn’t, but the midrash connects her with other textual references to her brothers and explains that to have written it explicitly in the Torah would have been too racy). The patriarchs’ perfect deaths are derived from their each being blessed with the word kol, everything, (which, by the way is referenced in birkat hamzon, the blessing after meals, where we ask to be blessed like the patriarchs bakol mikol kol.) They were blessed with everything including immunity from the angel of death. So, if you can figure out how to be one of those six, you’re in luck.
The midrash on Shir Hashirim (jumping off of the line “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth”) takes a somewhat more expansive view, attributing this death to all the righteous. If you engage in Torah study, so that the words in your mouth make you “kissed”, then in the end, God (here referred to as Hakol, Everything, or The All) will kiss you on the mouth. In this reading there is an element to the love poetry of Shir Hashirim that points to a longing for a closeness to the divine that can protect from the fear of death.
The Rambam, Maimonides, in his Guide to the Perplexed, reads this midrash in the context of the pursuit of intellectual understanding of the divine, which he conflates, in a sense, with love. He writes, “The meaning of this saying is that these three died in the midst of the pleasure derived from the knowledge of God and their great love for God.” Rambam asserts that this death is in fact, as my child believes, a deliverance from death, and only Moses, Aaron and Miriam were at the spiritual level to attain it. But, Rambam explains, others can come close, and their death can be like a waxing of their understanding as their physicality wanes, leaving them in an eternal blissful state of knowledge of God. (I don’t think this is what my child has in mind, but maybe at some point he’ll find this comforting.)
So, the Torah pauses at the death of Aaron to reprocess the trauma at this transitional moment for B’nai Yisrael. But it doesn’t stop at telling us where and how Aaron dies and at what age. Uncharacteristically, the Torah also gives us a date, forty years after Bnai Yisrael left Egypt, on the first day of the fifth month. Remembering that the Torah counts Nissan as month one, that puts Aaron’s yortseit on the first of Av which happens to be yesterday. I won’t go into particulars here but midrash and traditional commentary link Aaron’s death to the destruction of the Holy Temples on the ninth of this month, and to the statement in the Talmud that when the month of Av arrives, joy is diminished. One midrash resolves a discrepancy between the location of Aaron’s death in our parsha with his death and burial location in another parsha by saying that the people responded to Aaron’s death by reversing course, going back eight stations on their journey, one each day, until they finally buried him on the ninth of Av in the other location.
Aaron, of course, as the first high priest, has an strong connection to the Holy Temple, and it makes sense to tie his death to its destruction. Furthermore, Aaron is known in rabbinic tradition as the quintessential ohev shalom v’rodef shalom, lover of peace and a pursuer of peace. His loss represents the threat of those values being lost within the community. And the destruction of the temple, centuries after Aaron’s passing, is attributed in large part to rampant sinat chinam, baseless hatred.
But in our parsha we’re not there yet. We’re working our way through processing “the last forty years” and moving on to preview “the next”. One of the main focus points of this preview is on the six cities of refuge that are to be established. These cities are a subset of the Levitical cities, where the Levites, who don’t have personal land holdings, will live. These six are designated places for people to go if they accidentally kill another person. There are a few things I find fascinating about these cities. For one thing, they acknowledge the reality that human beings sometimes make terrible, unthinkable mistakes, and that this is not equivalent to if they did the same thing intentionally, while also acknowledging the very real human impulse for revenge. So, as long as the accidental murderer is in that town, they are safe from those who would take revenge. But if they leave the town, a close relative of the person who was killed is not held liable for killing the killer.
Another thing I find fascinating about the cities of refuge is that the Torah is very explicit that in order to qualify for entry, the killer must have been free of any trace of hate or enmity for the victim. These cities, inhabited by the descendants of Aaron and his kinsman, were not to become hideouts for haters and criminals claiming innocence.
Finally, the cities of refuge were available to people who needed them, but did not represent a life sentence. People who were living there were free to return to their homes in safety in the event of the death of the current high priest. There is a debate as to why this is. Some explain that people would be so dismayed at the death of the high priest that they would leave aside their grudge against the accidental killer. Others say that the death of the high priest achieves atonement for the community in a way that nothing else does. Perhaps most compelling is the explanation that justice is the responsibility of the high priest. If an accidental murderer were to leave a city of refuge in the lifetime of the high priest, he would be obligated to ensure that justice was served. And what would be just? Does the accidental murderer deserve to die for something he did inadvertently? Does he deserve to live while the other has died? Aaron’s descendents, the pursuers not only of justice, but of peace, are not asked to make that impossible choice.
For some questions there are no good answers. Even the high priest, be it Aaron or Elazar, who is taking the lead as B’nai Yisrael move forward, or one of their descendants, cannot resolve life’s, and death’s, most mysterious and persistent questions. And we can’t expect ourselves or our children to resolve them either. The best we have to offer is the hope of a best case scenario, al pi hashem, by God’s mouth / instruction, and a path forward on the journey that is each of our lives, the path al pi hashem, by God’s instruction, forward not backward, bravely forging ahead in the face of uncertainty and fear, with faith and hope, al pi hashem.