Vampire Weekend's Surprising Jewish Stories
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Bamidbar, 33:1: “These are the journeys of the Children of Israel who left the land of Mitzrayim according to their groups, in the hands of Moshe and Aaron.”
Bamidbar Rabbah, 23:3: “It is analogous to a King whose son was sick. He took him to one place to heal him. When they returned, his father began to recount all the journeys, and said, “here we slept, here we were cold, here you had a headache.” So too, the Holy One, Blessed is He, said to Moshe, “recount for them all the places where they angered Me”, therefore it says, ‘these are the journeys”.
In this week’s Torah portion, the Torah recounts the 42 encampments that the Jewish people stopped at during their long journey from Egypt to the Land of Israel. Why is it so important for the Torah to devote so many words to seemingly insignificant information?
The Midrash explains with an analogy of a King whose son is sick, and so the King takes him to a place where he could be healed. When they return, the King recounts each journey and what happened there, such as when the child had a headache. The Midrash concludes that in a similar way, God recounts where the Jewish people angered Him.
The Midrash is explaining that God wanted to recount the places where the Jewish people sinned and their consequential punishments. This only begs the question: what was the benefit of reiterating such unpleasant events?
The Limmudei Nissan1 answers that this comes to teach an important idea about how people look back at the less than glorious moments in their life’s history. The natural tendency of most people is to forget their inauspicious history and to wipe the slate clean. The Torah teaches that this is an erroneous attitude. It is important to remember our past even if that past includes incidents that do not make us proud.
Why is this the case?
One reason is that the only way we will know how to be better in the future is to learn from our past. Rabbi Yissachar Frand cites a famous phrase of the American philosopher George Santayana “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” In this vein, the reason the Torah catalogues all encampments is to teach us, in Rabbi Frand’s words:
“Yes, there were moments in your past in which you fell down, but you were able to bounce back from those moments. Yes, there were moments in your history in which you did not act properly, but you were able to pull yourselves out by your strength of character. Those are important lessons that a person has to know. A person is the sum total of his experiences — good and bad. To have an attitude “I just want to forget about the past” is going to doom a person to failure again. The Torah feels it is worthwhile to enumerate the 42 encampments to teach this lesson — that life is a journey. The journey is sometimes not a straight line — it has ups and downs, peaks and valleys. There are glorious moments and less than glorious moments. We should not erase any of them from our memory banks.
Rabbi Frand then relates the following story in connection with this idea. Someone once asked him a question. He had a child that had a very difficult time becoming engaged and married. In the course of the several years that it took this person to become engaged, the parents compiled a loose-leaf notebook of all the different suggestions for dating that were proposed and considered over the years. It became quite a thick compendium. The father said to himself that when his child finally becomes engaged, “I am going to burn this notebook.”
This was not a totally novel idea. It was the ‘custom’ among some people to burn their mortgage document once they had finally finished paying it up. It is also still common for some school students to burn their study books when they graduate. These actions symbolize a view that this part of a person’s life is gladly over and is being erased from history. This is how the parent felt with regard the shidduchim of his child.
Rabbi Frand told him that he was not sure that this was the correct Torah approach: “I told him that this experience was a journey in which there were ups and downs (probably mostly downs), but it was a journey that a person hopefully grew from. It is not something to destroy as if it never happened.”
Rabbi Frand’s proof was the lesson of the 42 encampments. God wanted the Jewish people to remember when they made mistakes and when they endured difficulty and failure. These events did not become superfluous once the Jewish people finally entered Israel. Rather they contributed to the building of the Jewish nation and in the same way a person’s own history makes him.
Rabbi Frand advised this parent that in spite of the fact that there were painful moments associated with this notebook, the chronicles of the trying period in which his child was trying to find their destined partner is nevertheless not something that should be burnt. They should be stored and be available so that from time to time it will be possible for both the child and the parent to say, “Look what I went through and look from where I have come.”
May we all merit to learn from our past, even when it was not so pleasant.
