Bamidbar 5762
Rabbi Barry
Leff
As a general
rule, I am NOT a big fan of the critical-scholarly approach to Bible studies.
The scholarly approach for the most part is interested in dissecting the Torah
and trying to figure out when different pieces were edited, and by whom, and it
looks for analogs in other cultures, etc.
It's not that
I disagree with the so-called "documentary hypothesis"-the idea that the Torah
was edited by a number of different people over many years. I don't.
It's just that for the most part the scholastic contemplations are not
terribly relevant to my reading of Torah.
I do not read
Torah the way I would read a history book. I do not look to the Torah to tell me with a great deal of
historical accuracy what actually happened on any particular day. Instead, I read the Torah looking for
the eternal truths about people, especially the Jewish people, and our
relationship with God, and how God wants us to conduct our lives. As such, the collected wisdom of our sages, who have
commented on the Torah for the last several thousand years, are generally of
much greater interest to me. I am
more interested in the MEANING in the Torah than the HISTORY of the Torah.
Conservative
Judaism is a pluralistic movement.
Within the movement we have some people whose theology is close to
Reform: Torah is the work of people, perhaps "divinely inspired," but definitely
the work of people. There are also
people in the Conservative movement who a view of Torah that is close to what is
typical of Orthodoxy: God gave the Torah to Moses at Mt. Sinai, and it contains
the literal word of God.
I do believe
in a certain mystical sense that God contracted God-self, and God is found in
the Torah. I also believe, on an
intellectual level, that the Torah records the history of our people as legend;
most episodes in the Torah probably have some basis in truth, but have been
elaborated on by storytellers up until the final editing.
I do believe
that there was a special encounter between God and the Jewish people through the
spiritual giant Moses at Mt. Sinai over 3,000 years ago. This week's Torah
portion provides an example of a way in which the critical scholarly approach
can be valuable in enhancing our understanding of the Torah. This week we read parsha Bamidbar, the
first parsha in the book of Numbers.
The Torah
records that 603,550 men of fighting age went out from Egypt. This is a very
challenging number. 600,000
fighting men would extrapolate to a total population of over 2 million people
wandering around the desert. A
rather incredible number, very hard to believe.
Surely 2
million people wandering around the desert would have left some kind of
archeological record. How could
they all have been supported in the desert?
Questions like this lead some to say the Exodus never happened.
A critical
approach to the text however, can lead us to a way out of this quandary. As Gunther Plaut points out in his
commentary on the Bible, the word "elef," in modern Hebrew the number 1,000, can
also have another meaning.
It is not unreasonable to translate elef as troop, or platoon. The same word with different vowels, is
"ahloof" which means chief, or in modern Hebrew, general. Instead, we could read the text as
originally saying there were 600 platoons-perhaps with ten men to each-for a
total of about 6,000 fighting men, and a total entourage of perhaps 20,000
people. Later editors of the Torah, taking
"elef" for thousand, not troop, made some editorial changes to make other verses
consistent with this reading.
Twenty
thousand people in the desert is a far more believable number. Twenty thousand
nomads, living a low-tech low impact lifestyle, might not have made big troves
of easy to find archeological artifacts.
Six thousand troops is consistent with what scholars say would have been
a reasonable size fighting force in that day and age.
There are
those who totally avoid the critical scholarly approach. They say that analyzing the Torah in
this way will lead people to lose faith in the validity of Torah, to lose faith
in God. I disagree. Knowing that
there is a reasonable explanation to bring the numbers in this week's parsha
into line with a more reasonable and believable figure, strengthens my faith in
the Torah. It strengthens my faith
that the Torah contains a record of our people based on actual events, even
though the details may vary, as in any story told over and over again for a
period of a few thousand years.
May we all
succeed in growing our faith in the Torah, especially this week as we approach
the holiday of Shavuot when we celebrate God giving the Torah over to the Jewish
people. Whether or not all the
details recorded around this event are accurate-whether it happened with
lightning and thunder and Moses fasting for 40 days--is not nearly so important
as the fact that it happened. God
gave us the Torah, and that is plenty of cause for celebration.
Shabbat
Shalom