In this week’s Torah portion, the Torah relates the journey of the Jews through the desert. It painstakingly details all the trips and its many stops until Bnai Yisrael reach the borders of Eretz Yisrael. Rashi, in his commentary on the first pasuk of the Parsha, asks the obvious question; why did the Torah need to detail the trips of the Jews to such an extent? Wouldn’t it have been enough to state that the Jews traveled through the midbar without encumbering us with such seemingly meaningless detail? After all, doesn’t Rav Shimshon Rafael Hirsch explain that the word “Torah” is from the root “Hora`ah” - to teach? Given that this is the case, what is the Torah trying to teach us by listing the itinerary of these travels?
Rashi, quoting Rav Moshe Hadarshan, responds with the following point. The Torah wishes to teach us that given that the travels of the Jews in the midbar for 40 years was punishment for the chet hamiraglim (the spies), one may come to think that the Jews were becoming more fatigued from constant motion. To this the Torah responds by saying that the Jews had specific places to rest as well. With this in mind, the Torah lists all the places the Jews went and where they rested, to give us a sense of the Chasday HaShem, even when we aren’t deserving of it.
The Ramban, quoting the Rambam in Moreh Nevuchim, gives a different interpretation. He says that if the Torah would not have told us the particulars of the trip, then in the ensuing generations, as time would take its toll on the freshness of people’s memories of the events, naturalistic explanations of the Jews’ survival in the desert could possibly take hold. People, with various heretical agendas, might be inclined to explain the survival of the Jewish people in such harsh conditions by attributing it to being the result of the close proximity of the Jewish encampments to other nearby civilizations, which had the resources necessary for survival. Thus, to relieve us of such heresy, the Torah took the time to detail the entire trip in order for us to see that, in fact, the Jews were in the middle of nowhere and despite all that, they survived intact.
Yet one needs to wonder: is the message of proving the Torah to its adherents in the face of its doubters of such importance that the Torah needs to spend so much space detailing it? Moreover, is the refutation of the mockers so important to the Torah that it needs to devote a large portion of an entire sedra to it? Isn’t it well known from the statement of Chazal (BR 8:8) that HaShem told Moshe Rabbeinu:
“כתוב והרוצה לטעות יטעה” (Ka-tov, v’harozeh L’ta-ut yateh), “write and let those who wish to make a mistake make their mistakes” If so, then again, why did the Torah need to elaborate in such detail about the sojourn?
To understand the answer, I wish to relate the following episode. A friend of mine recently spent his vacation with his wife in Costa Rica. Before heading off to the Caribbean island, they were strongly advised to take some powerful antibiotics. When I asked why was it necessary for them to take the medicines, they told me that in Costa Rica, there are some very dangerous diseases not found in the United States and the body’s immune system needs to be boosted before their trip so they remain safe and don’t contract those diseases.
I believe this story can be applied to Ruchniyus as well. The Torah is teaching us the importance to spiritually and intellectually immunize ourselves against the doubts hurled at us by those who mock our Holy Torah. For many of us who face a daily challenge to our Torah observance as we interact with an increasingly doubtful and materialistically driven world, it is of paramount importance to immunize ourselves against the hostile outside forces. In these times, where skepticism and books promoting it appear on the New York Times bestseller lists for many consecutive weeks, we desperately need spiritual protection. In a world filled with moral relativism and where science has become the religion of the masses, it is of supreme importance to strengthen our spiritual defenses with rational and observable proofs of the Torah’s truth.
With this in mind, the Torah devotes a good portion of the sedra to shoring up our emunah in the Mesora. For if our emunah is weakened, we become powerless against the tide of secularism engulfing the world. It is not to the heretics the Torah is talking to, it is to us. We are the ones who need to be immunized against foreign ideologies so we don’t become prey to outside forces. We need to be able to respond to doubts inside ourselves which are awakened from time to time when we are confronted by doubts posed on us from the outside. This is the reason that the Torah lists, in fine detail, all of the trips, so that our faith in our holy Mesora becomes strengthened.
In closing, I would like to repeat what I have heard from my Rebbe, Rav Yisroel Belsky, shlita, many times in the name of HaRav Gedalyah Schorr, z”l, pertaining to this topic. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, many wondered how it was possible, if the moon is such an alien environment, for a human being to be walking on it? Rav Schorr z”l replied, in reality, they are not on the moon - they transported earth with them in their spacesuits and thus are able to live in an alien environment! Following up on that remark, Rav Belsky said that, often, we need to enter the secular world for many personal and professional reasons. Yet, a Jew needs to take along, lehavdil, the Torah and emunah with him wherever he goes so that he remains immune to the hostile forces around him. By shoring up one’s spiritual defenses and taking all necessary precautions to not get sick, one can, bsiyata dishmaya, come out unscathed and be even stronger than before.
Shabbat Shalom.
Chazak, Chazak, V'Nischazek.
