CHAOS AND ORDER

The Book of Bamidbar is an extremely exciting and action-packed section of the Torah. There are insurrections, rebellions, incredible miracles, great battles, evil sorcerers and courageous heroes and heroines. We learn about the suspected adulterous wife; the Nazirite; the dedication of the Tabernacle; the way in which the Israelites travelled in the wilderness; the manna; the appointment of the first 71-member Sanhedrin court; the punishment of Miriam for slandering Moshe; the sin of the spies; the uprising of Korach; the red heifer; the curses and blessings of Bilaam; the bravery of Pinchas; the war against Midian; the appointment of Moshe’s successor, Joshua; and the borders of the land of Israel. The subject matter of Bamidbar lends itself to great storytelling and potential material for feature films. And yet its opening parsha, also called Bamidbar, seems to be rather dull and technical. Moshe is instructed to take a census of each Tribe separately and then the entire nation, at least the men of military age. We are then told how the Israelites are divided into four camps, each consisting of three tribes, and in what direction they must camp and march relative to the Tabernacle. The Levites and their families are to be counted separately, from the age of one month, as are the firstborn of all the Tribes. The Levites replace the firstborn as the priestly tribe of the Nation. The parsha ends with a description of what items from the Tabernacle the Levite family of Kehat are to carry and how those items are to be packed.

All of this seems rather mundane and administrative. It’s almost like a Master of Ceremonies who begins his address with some housekeeping notes: where to find the canteen and the toilets and how to pay for your parking. Why is it important to know all of this information? It always amazes me that of all the shiurim I have given over the years on the weekly parsha, I have the most notes on parshat Bamidbar! It is within those seemingly unnecessary details that so much information is revealed, if one knows how to look for it.   One notices certain patterns in parshat Bamidbar (for example, the order in which the Tribes are listed), and when those patterns are slightly different than the previous one, these anomalies lead to some fascinating insights.

For the purposes of this essay, I will not dwell on the micro aspect of the parsha but rather on what it is teaching us on the macro level. Bamidbar is about order. At the beginning of the book, there is a mass of people – 603550 men over the age of twenty. Add to that women, teenagers and children and you probably have close to 2 million people, if not more. There are 2 million individuals but how does one transform them into a community, a nation? To do that, the Torah creates order out of chaos. Each person is assigned to a particular tribe based on their patrilineal descent. Each tribe is then assigned to a particular camp and each camp has a designated area adjacent to the Tabernacle. The Tribes have their own flags, their own identities and their own missions. The same is true of the Levites – each Levite is assigned to a particular family and each family has its own duties. Everyone knows where he/she belongs and what he/she should do. We also see that God does not want the Jewish People to be homogenous, one large amorphous mass. Rather He desires a Nation that is heterogeneous and varied. We see this also in the blessings of Jacob at the end of Bereishit and the blessing of Moshe at the end of Devarim: Every tribe has its own personality and their differences are emphasised rather than downplayed.

The Torah actually begins in a similar way to the portion of Bamidbar. In Bereishit (1:2) we read, “The earth was astonishingly empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep…” In Hebrew, the words used to describe the primordial universe are tohu va’vohu, complete and utter chaos and disorder. As Creation unfolds, God puts everything in the proper order (see Rashi 1:14): first He creates light; then He separates the water and the earth; then He causes the vegetation to sprout; then He places the heavenly bodies into their orbits; then He forms the birds and the fish, and finally, He brings forth life on the dry land, from the most simple organisms to the pinnacle of Creation, man Himself. The universe is by nature chaotic. It is God who brings order to it and He commands man to do likewise (Bereishit 1:28), “God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea, the bird of the sky, and every living thing that moves on the earth.”

For the Jewish people, it is the Torah that creates order. This is noted by the Sages in a very powerful passage in the Talmud (Shabbat 88a), “Reish Lakish said: What is the meaning of that which is written: ‘And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day’ (Bereishit 1:31)? Why do I require the superfluous letter heh, [the definite article, which does not appear on any of the other days]? It teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, established a condition with the act of Creation, and said to them: If Israel accepts the Torah on the sixth day of Sivan, you will exist; and if they do not accept it, I will return you to the primordial state of chaos and disorder.” It was built into the very foundations of Creation that, should the Torah not be accepted, the world would revert to chaos. Indeed, we see what happened when the Israelites believed that Moshe had died and would not be returning to lead them. Without the Torah that he was about to give them, they reverted to chaos. They constructed the golden calf, worshipped it and sunk into depravity.

The Torah itself, if not properly organised, can also appear chaotic. It is endless, a wide and deep ocean. Like any massive body of information without an index system and categorisation, it is rendered useless. The great Sages were acutely aware of this, not least of all, Rabbi Yehudah HaNassi (known as Rebbi, the rabbi par excellence) who undertook the herculean task of writing down the Mishna. He was the recipient of generations of oral Torah study. In order to make the information useable and accessible, he organised the oral law into six Sedarim, orders or sections. He then divided each order into approximately ten tractates (there are 63 in total). He then divided each tractate into chapters, each with its own topic and then each chapter into mishnayot, relatively short statements of Jewish Law, philosophy or ethics. Thus, for example, one of the six orders is Moed, meaning “appointed times”. This, in turn, is divided into 12 tractates, each one dealing with a different holy day, such as Shabbat; Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Chol Hamoed and so forth. His brilliance was not just the way he condensed an enormous amount of information but how he categorised it. In later generations, the master of such categorisation was the Rambam. He divided the entire Oral Law into 14 books in his magnum opus, Mishneh Torah. Each book has many subsections, dealing with a different facet of Jewish law and each section has many chapters. Rambam’s choice to include a particular law in one book and not another is never coincidental and is always cause for much study.

In the 21^st century, we are bombarded with the largest collection of information that has ever been available to humankind – the internet. It is full of essays, articles, videos, images, podcasts, stories, news reports, guides, books and so much more. The problem is that there is almost no order to this information. There is no hierarchy, no censorship, no filtering, no boundaries and no way of telling what is true or false, what is reality and what is a hoax. It is chaos in its purest form and the result is a chaotic generation that does not know up from down, left from right or good from evil. It is our task to make order of the chaos.   

Lee, Chani Merryl & Naomi join me in wishing you Shabbat Shalom.

Rabbi Liebenberg

Rabbi’s YouTube messages. For the parsha: https://youtu.be/czlXvQUSZ34?si=fmt1cC5KlTn7pVrf

For Shavuot: https://youtu.be/eXMpkBrveuE?si=j_0aHdv2JDYl8Xta