By Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu

Nobody can offer a convincing explanation for why two famous verses are actually bracketed from the surrounding text in this week’s portion, Be’he’alotecha. A letter nun, upside down, stands like a little fence at both the beginning and the end of these verses, that are part of the liturgy we read or sing at the beginning of each Torah service.

And when the ark was to set out, Moses would say, Advance, o Eternal!

May Your enemies be scattered, and may your foes flee before You!

Both the Talmud and Rashi say that these words appear inside these little spaces because they really belong somewhere else. But I think that the best explanation for this is the most obvious one. Five verses earlier, Moses pleads with his Midianite brother-in-law, Reuel, to stay with them as they begin the long journey through the wilderness; Reuel knows the lie of the land, Moses and the people need him.  Reuel refuses, and in a curious inversion of Abraham’s origin story, he tells Moses he wants to go home to the land of his fathers instead. Immediately after our stand-alone text, there is indeed a serious rebellion; but not by enemy locals. It is an uprising of the Israelites themselves, driven crazy by subsisting on manna, and craving proper meat to eat.

I would suggest that these verses are in exactly the right place, but they express a difficult truth. The Ark is an object so powerful, that it goes out ahead of the people to protect them from their enemies. But who is the enemy? A rebellious angry cohort of your own people? Or someone from another tribe whom you know and trust, and call upon as your friend? It is complicated to rely upon one another; the demands of the wilderness and our unlikely survival call for an uneasy self-reliance. With rebellion in the ranks, and no friendly local to rely upon, it is no surprise that the Ark, and Torah, must go an ahead, conferring protection and stability. By writing these words into the Torah’s very text, and uniquely, seeing them physically stand apart, is a kind of wilderness re-enactment. Both there, in the scroll, and in our mouths when we remove the Torah from the ark. We walk the tightrope against perpetual disappointment, living with our conflicts, moving forwards with hope, beginning again and again, every week on Shabbat.

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