MATTOT/MASSEI

Numbers 30:2 – 36:13

This week’s combined Torah portions of Mattot and Massei bring us to the end of the Book of Numbers. As if to confirm this, the 33rd chapter of that book lists the various journeys of the Israelites through the wilderness, reading rather like one of those sets of directions you can download from the internet to guide you stage by stage to your destination.

‘They left Rissah and camped at Kehelathah.
They left Kehelathah and camped at Mount Shepher.
They left Mount Shepher and camped at Haradah.
They left Haradah and camped at Makheloth.
They left Makheloth and camped at Tahath…’ (Numbers 33:22-26)

After the list of directions has finally ended, the Israelites are told what to do next: ‘When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you.’ (Numbers 33:51-52)

Not much room for any doubt there as to how the Israelites are required to deal with its inhabitants. And, lest they feel any reluctance to drive out the inhabitants of the land, seeking instead to come to some kind of accommodation with them and share the territory, they are further advised: " 'But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live. And then I will do to you what I plan to do to them.' "(ibid 55-56)

Never, I suspect, has the Torah been more wrong. And the mistake of the biblical authors reverberates around the land about which they wrote some three thousand years after their words were uttered. The 34th chapter of the Book of Numbers lists the borders and boundaries that the Israelites are expected to draw around themselves to separate themselves from their enemies. These are the lines beyond which, presumably, those people whom they are required to drive out are to be driven. And – although the Torah neglects to mention it – once driven beyond those borders, those displaced people will seethe resentfully and seek their revenge.

At the time of writing, such people living beyond two of the boundaries that have been drawn in times more recent than those recounted in the Book of Numbers, are expressing their resentment and hostility. On both sides of the borders, families pull their dead and injured from the wreckage of buildings destroyed in what some might consider to be a modern re-working of the biblical instructions – or instructions received from another divine source.

But, as I said, I think the Torah has got it wrong. Driving people out of their land, beyond its borders, only causes them to develop a fiercer devotion to it from their exile – the Jewish people can attest to that after almost 2,000 years of Diaspora. If the Torah had suggested instead that, on entering the Promised Land, the Israelites should seek to establish harmonious and mutually beneficial relationships with its inhabitants, then history – ancient and modern – might have taken a very different course. As it is, the very fact that others have been driven from their homes and their land is what has caused them to ‘…become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides.’ And the biblical assertion that a failure to drive them out means that ‘…they will give you trouble in the land where you will live’ could not be more wrong, when set against the current situation in the Middle East. The time to recognise the futility of maintaining such apparently scripturally sanctioned hostility to others has long passed, but there are still too many who prefer cling to ancient doctrinal enmity than to move forward and seek to embrace peace.

Rabbi Pete Tobias
The Liberal Synagogue Elstree

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