Parshah Commentary
This week’s double parshah, Matot-Masei, concludes the Book of Bamidbar. The Israelites, condemned to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, are nearing the end of those peregrinations. God instructs Moses to write down the Israelites’ journeys: a long, plodding itinerary, containing such scintillating recollections as, “they set out from Rithmah and encamped at Rimmon-perez; they set out from Rimmon-perez and encamped at Libnah; they set out from Libnah and encamped at Rissah.”
Oddly, Ashkenazi tradition specifies that this section be read in a distinctive, elevated trope. Why the extra pomp for the biblical equivalent of someone scrolling through endless photos from their road trip through Kansas? Even more puzzling, many of these campsites were never mentioned previously. Not a few, like “Rimmon-perez,” are hapax legomena, terms that appear exactly once in the entire biblical corpus. In fact, according to the medieval Andalusian commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, the scriptural story skips from the first to the fortieth year, relating “no event or prophecy” from the middle 38. What happenings at these places, too insignificant to mention when they occurred, retrospectively justify their being name-checked?
Drawing on an earlier midrash, Rashi answers with a parable. A ruler took their sick child to a distant place to heal. When they were returning, the parent began to recount their experiences, saying to the child: “Here we slept, here we were cold, here you had a headache.” The parent, it seems, is overcome by a retrospective rush of sentiment as they remember the journey—and so it is with God. Sure, as per ibn Ezra, there was “no prophecy or event” during the 38 years. But there was life and relationship: resting, catching cold, illness, and care. When the Torah records our foundational laws and narratives, it skips that stuff. But when God, Moses, and Israel are reminiscing together like old friends, they might savor these quotidian, unremarkable details. Indeed, it is precisely the memories’ irrelevance to a general audience that signals their private meaning. The message for later readers (that is, us) is the lack of a decipherable message—an overheard tenderness, irreducible to homiletics, heretical to paraphrase.
Yet even as Rashi answers one question, he creates another: The parable describes a back-and-forth journey—one way to get medical care, and the other to return home—while the Israelites’ journey is linear, moving from Egypt to Canaan. When do Israel and God retrace their steps? The answer lies in the biblical verse in which Moses describes the Israelites’ wanderings, which I translate in all its literal awkwardness: “Moses wrote their starting-points to their journeys as directed by God, and here are their journeys to their starting places.” The text’s repetition flips the order: starting places to journeys, then the opposite. From that inversion, the parable imagines God rewinding through the wilderness journeys and dictating a travelogue. The parable’s voyage out is literal, but its return is literary, the stuff of ink and parchment rather than of feet and tents.
Whenever I teach this midrash, someone invariably corrects me. They insist that the first leg in the parable represents Jacob and his family’s passage from Canaan to Egypt, while the second leg represents the Israelites’ return from Egypt to the Promised Land. This “correction” is mistaken, because it ignores the fact that the biblical verse quoted is about a single journey and the act of writing it down, not two journeys, and because the Israelites do not take the same route back to Canaan that their ancestors did from it. But I understand the temptation. First, the two trips in the suggestion neatly parallel the pair in the parable, avoiding the confusing trick by which we pass from real to written journeys. And substantively, one hears the language of return and almost involuntarily assimilates it to the grand biblical plot of restoration to the Land.
The misreading thus clarifies the parable’s actual, counterintuitive radicalism. Moses finds the journey’s end by writing every step of the road, rather than by reaching the land. And so the parable’s refusal to assign the scriptural text an actionable moral feels like a desire to linger in the wilderness and not to move on to what comes next: In Devarim, Moses delivers a series of hortatory lectures, to prepare for Joshua’s war of conquest. Uncorking a cliche, in the hopes that it might breathe and deepen, we might say that the parable teaches us that it is not the destination, it is the journey—or if you prefer, not the homeland, but the text. Both the itinerary’s curious emptiness and the parable’s weird, meta-literary move (that is, shifting from a real to a recorded journey) register the affinity between an unrooted, wandering sensibility and a certain literary formalism. For sometimes, the text takes a recursive, pervasive interest in its own structure and composition, at the expense of its ostensible purpose. (Most simply, diaspora and literature are linked by the pun that constitutes this book, the echo between “midbar,” or “wilderness,” and “davar,” or “word,” which both share the Hebrew root “d-b-r.”) The parable is gesturing toward the strange theology of exiles forgetting to return, of scriptures declining to instruct, of rulers who secretly cede their crowns to writers.
Among literary theorists, formalism often gets a bad rap as apolitical, or even conservative: Just the text, never mind about messy, contentious history. But reading this midrashic parable today, one sees how an interest in form might be yoked to sharp, diasporic critique. One encounters, to borrow English professor Susan Wolfson’s term, an “activist formalism,” an aesthetic abstrusity with polemical bite. For as the text insists on its own prerogatives, refusing to be merely a vestibule to the Promised Land, it reminds us of truths about our Torah so fundamental it is incredible that they need recollecting: that the Law was given in the wilderness; that neither the Pentateuch nor its prophet reach the destination; that our world remains unredeemed, messianic fantasies of homecoming notwithstanding; that we are still living in those four looping and eccentric decades; and that consequently, we had better learn to cherish the wandering.
Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, is out now.
