At the Word of Hashem – Parsha Beha’alotcha 5786

Numbers 9:23: על פי יהוה יחנו ועל פי יהוה יסעו את משמרת יהוה שמרו על פי יהוה ביד משה

“At the Lord’s bidding they would encamp, and at the Lord’s bidding they would travel; they kept the charge of the Lord by the word of the Lord through Moses.”

Rav Chaim Shmulevitz offers a parable that beautifully captures the spirit of Parsha Beha’alotcha:

A mother spends her day running errands with her infant child in her arms. If you were to ask the mother where she had been all day, she might answer: “In the morning I went to the bank, in the afternoon I stopped at the hair salon, and later I dropped something off at the post office.”

But if you were to ask the baby, he or she would simply answer: “I spent the day in my mother’s arms.”

In the wilderness, during our infancy as a nation, we were carried in Hashem’s hands.

Little was left to us to determine, not even when we would travel or where we would encamp.

Upon entering the Land of Israel, that dynamic changed. We assumed greater responsibility over every facet of life.

Today, we have matured as a people to say the least.

Yet the truth remains unchanged.

Though it may seem that we are no longer being “carried”, our collective destiny remains no more in our hands than it was in the wilderness.

The responsibility and free will with which we have been entrusted creates the illusion of control, yet we still journey at the word of Hashem.

We still move toward destinations we did not choose and through circumstances we could never have anticipated.

We are still dependent. Still guided. Still carried toward a destiny that remains, for now, beyond our sight.

The difference is that the infant eventually grows up. The challenge of maturity is not to stop relying on the One who carries us, but to recognize His hand even when it is no longer obvious.

Shabbat Shalom