Parshah Commentary

How do we keep moving forward when the deathly forces intensify against us? When the road before us becomes a wall closing in, where do we turn? How do we keep moving together in the face of deathly horrors? Masei, the second of the two portions we read this week and the final parshah of the Book of Bamidbar, may point us to responses to these questions. The parshah begins by reviewing the itinerary of the Israelites’ 40-year journey from Egypt to the banks of the Jordan River. In this barebones trip down memory lane, only the stopping stations are listed, with almost no mention of the significance of their stay there. For example, we read that “they traveled from Rephidim and encamped at the wilderness of Sinai,” but not about the Revelation at Sinai, the construction of the Tabernacle, or the death of Nadav and Avihu there. We read that “they traveled from the Sinai wilderness and encamped at Kivrot Ha-Ta‘avah,” but not about the insurrection demanding meat that transpired there. Nothing of the scouts’ report, Korach’s insurrection, or the other major events of the desert narrative. But when it comes to the Israelites’ journey from Kadesh to Mount Hor, we read, “Aaron the priest ascended Mount Hor at the command of YHWH and died there, in the 40th year after the Israelites had left the land of Egypt, on the first day of the fifth month.”

Aaron’s death jumps out as one of the only events actually mentioned. But it stands out for a different reason, as well: It contradicts another verse in the Torah. Our parshah notes that Aaron died at Mount Hor, but in Moses’s retelling in the Book of Devarim, “The Israelites traveled from the wells of Benei Ya‘akan to Moserah; there, Aaron died and he was buried there.” So where did Aaron die—Mount Hor or Moserah? An early midrash notices that our parshah describes Aaron’s death with the active verb for dying (“vayamot sham”), while Devarim uses a form that could mean “lay dead” (“sham met Aharon”). On that basis, it resolves the apparent contradiction by explaining that Aaron died at Mount Hor, as our parshah says, but he lay dead and was buried in Moserah.

This resolution raises its own problem: Moserah was seven stations earlier than Mount Hor on the Israelites’ journey. That means that when Aaron died at Mount Hor, the people backtracked until they found an appropriately dignified burial place, at Moserah. Of all the Israelites’ rebellions in the Book of Bamidbar, the behavior that aroused God’s wrath most severely was when they threatened to turn back toward Egypt. Indeed, throughout the story, turning backward has been cast as sedition.

But we may look at the Israelites’ backtracking in another light. Sometimes a journey is mere preparation, the necessary means to arrive at our destination, where we can perform our desired task. Sometimes, though, the journey is valuable in itself. For example, the Talmud teaches that upon witnessing a young woman bypass a local synagogue to pray in a more distant study house, Rabbi Yohanan understood that there is spiritual reward in the experience of walking those footsteps on the way to pray. The 20th-century rabbi Yitzchak Hutner (Pahad Yitzhak, Rosh HaShanah 5) explains this dynamic in light of a Talmudic interpretation written by the medieval commentator known as the Ritba, who mentions cases in which walking to do a mitzvah is considered not just preparation but part of actually performing it. What his examples—carrying the dead to burial, welcoming a bride to her wedding, and ascending to the Temple in Jerusalem for the Festivals—share in common is that they are grounded in the nurturing of relationships. Wherever the content of a mitzvah is the relationship itself, the journey toward it is an expression of that closeness; it is already part of the mitzvah. Walking to the post office is functional; walking to a shiva house or to spend time with a suffering and lonely friend, or to support a picket line, is already part of the mitzvah experience.

The same may be said of burying the dead: Proper burial is one of the greatest of mitzvot. It is described in Rabbinic literature as the “truest form of kindness”—“chesed shel emet”—since there is no possibility of being repaid by the recipient. Halakhot abound regarding not only the burial, but also the escort of the dead to the place of burial. Every effort made to treat the dead with dignity is an essential kindness, so if the Israelites knew of a proper burial place for their leader several stops back at Mount Hor, it was appropriate for them to turn back in order to bring him there.

This attitude toward death is not a given. In 1915, the labor organizer Joe Hill wrote to a comrade before he was martyred by the state, “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!”—a sentiment that has been abridged into a common movement refrain. The idea is that the urgency of political work leaves no time for indulgences such as grieving. Keep moving forward, no matter what; all hands on deck; the work is greater than any one of us. But our movements have learned the hard way that in the long term, “don’t mourn; organize” does not lead to liberation. Our grief is not a luxury. Grief gritted through and suppressed erupts in burnout, in hostility and conflict with those we love, in deterioration of mental health. And the greater our political losses, the more urgent our need for both organizing and mourning. After all, the horrors surrounding us—the myriad cruelties of Project 2025, the ICE concentration camps, the poison pipelines, the genocide in Gaza, and on and on—are, at their heart, mass death events that we have not been strong enough to prevent.

For the monster of capitalism, death is ungrievable because the machinery of profit for the few may not be interrupted. When our organizing makes no room for mourning, our movements inadvertently adhere to that same script of the unrelenting, forward march of progress. “This is why,” writes Sarah Jaffe, “grieving collectively becomes revolutionary. What is a radical politics without consideration of these universal pains and struggles? What is it without making space for joy, yes, but also pain? What is it if not a demand that we stop that murderous process in order to acknowledge the toll it has taken?” To refuse such logics, we must be present in our grief—backtracking if necessary, if that’s where grief guides us, together.

When our relationships precede our tasks, the steps we take along the way are themselves in the service of closeness, of relationship. The spiritual reward they yield is so profound that a journey that is problematic on its own, such as turning backward toward Egypt, is praiseworthy when it is a journey of loving relationship, toward providing a deceased elder a dignified burial place. Indeed, relationships of care with our dead loved ones—inherently non-transactional and thus illegible to capitalism—are the model for how we might show care to the living, what a life of lovingkindness, resource-sharing, and mutual aid can look like. Grieving, then, is not just a necessary respite from movement progress; it is movement progress. “Yes, grief flattens, it erases, it traps,” writes Jaffe. “But it also, in moments, opens up a vast space of new possibility.” The movement that appears to be backtracking is actually the most forward movement—when it resiliently centers the relationships of care, the preciousness of life, and the scandal of its erasure.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.