Parshah Commentary

Parshat Matot-Masei

The Torah, according to a well-known midrashic aphorism, “has seventy faces.” This is usually taken to mean that any passage can be interpreted in numerous ways. But it also indicates that there are many different methods by which we can derive meaning from the Torah’s words. Most Torah commentary tends to focus on specific verses or passages, probing the word choice or grammar and analyzing the narrative progression or characters’ motivations. A more idiosyncratic technique—often used by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson (1902–1994)—comments on the meaning of an entire parshah, in all of its diversity, through an analysis of the name by which it has come to be known. This approach has its roots in the readings of the Kabbalists, who ascribed particular significance to all names, but found those of the parshiyot especially meaningful. This week we have a double portion, Matot-Masei, and thus two names to interpret.

“Matot” is generally translated as “tribes,” but can also mean “staffs” or “branches.” It is a close synonym of the word “shevatim,” which shares the same meanings, and which is the more common term for the Israelite clans in the Torah. So why does our parshah use the word “matot” rather than “shevatim”? The Lubavitcher Rebbe suggests that the difference between the words is a matter of emphasis: “Matot” is more often used to refer to things cut off from their origins, like dried and hardened staffs, while “shevatim” is more often used to refer to things still connected to their living source, like branches. The Israelite tribes, the Rebbe suggests, are sometimes referred to as “shevatim” and sometimes as “matot” because all people have two existential modes. At times, we feel more attached to something larger than our own selves; we feel like branches of God, or of our communities, from whose living sap we draw spiritual vitality and moral direction. But often we feel cut off, dried out, and hardened by life’s travails and tragedies. Reading our parshah through this lens, we can find various possible experiences of staff-like spiritual alienation even where the text does not explicitly frame them as such, like in the laws regulating vows and oaths. According to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, these elective prohibitions—which an individual may choose to take on in addition to the mandated mitzvot—allow for the possibility of extracting oneself from a parched rut of numbing materialism and moving toward spiritual rejuvenation.

The name of the second parshah of this week’s double portion, “Masei,” stands in complementary contrast with the first, evoking not spiritual detachment but spiritual growth. “Masei” means “journeys” and refers specifically to the 42 stages of the Jewish people’s journey from Egypt to the Land of Israel. The early Hasidic masters taught that these journeys are reflected in each person’s own voyage through life: “From the day a person is born and leaves the mother’s womb—which, as it is known, is analogous to the exodus from Egypt—one then travels from journey to journey, until one arrives at the supernal land of life.” Furthermore, the Lubavitcher Rebbe added, it is the very quality of journeying from one stage to another that distinguishes humanity from angels: While angels are always already their most perfect selves, humans can always become more perfect. To leave the constraints of Egypt behind is not to immediately arrive at the Holy Land, or at the supernal land of life. Progress is nothing more than a step from which we can make yet more progress, so long as our eyes remain fixed on our ultimate goal.

For some, this hermeneutic approach may seem to carry us away from the flesh-and-blood narrative of the text, into a world of detached abstraction. But as these cases show, it can actually help us find more personal meaning in the text by linking the weekly Torah portion with the narratives of our own spiritual lives. This, as the Kabbalists understood, is the power of names: the apparently arbitrary reveals something intimate and profound.

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.