Behaalotcha: Long Divine Plan

 A good plan is like a road map: it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there. -H. Stanley Judd

Amongst the many unique and unusual aspects of the Torah, as compared to any other book of law ever composed, is that a significant portion of the prescribed laws were not relevant to the time or place where the Torah was first introduced.

Many of the laws are dependent on a land yet to be conquered. Many require a Temple yet to be built. Many involve businesses, courts and institutions that were yet to become reality. All human law systems come to address existing issues, to give an answer to a pressing need or situation, to solve or prevent a problem in society. The Torah’s laws are for the most part forward-looking, imagining the people of Israel, in the land of Israel, with its own self-rule. Some of the laws are so esoteric that the Sages of old claim they will never be applied, while many other laws will only become relevant again in the Messianic Era.

This week’s Torah reading presents an array of both past and future laws as well as the narrative of some of the disappointments God had with Israel. Rabbi Hirsch, commenting on Numbers 8:1 comes to the following conclusion:

“Precisely the paradox that there should have been such a wide gap between Israel as it was at the time of the Giving of the Law, on the one hand, and the Law and its assumptions and requirements, on the other, a gap that could be bridged only over a span of centuries, should be the most eloquent proof that this Law is indeed of Divine origin and should mark it as a unique phenomenon in the history of mankind. All other codes of law were predicated on conditions that prevailed at the time of their origin. This Law is the only one to have set itself up as the supreme goal of human development on earth; it still awaits a generation sufficiently mature at last to translate its ideals into reality.”

God’s Torah is a long term plan for the nation of Israel and for the world as a whole. It is a plan that has been unfolding for more than 3,000 years with agonizing lows and dizzying highs. Just fifty years ago we reached another milestone in that inscrutable plan: the reunification of Jerusalem and the return of the Jewish people to much of its ancestral land.

May we witness and participate in more positive developments of this historic process.

Shabbat Shalom,

Ben-Tzion

Dedication

On 50 years of Jewish sovereignty over ancient Jewish land.