Making Sense of the Sedra: Bamidbar
We care more about continuity than buildings
The British Council’s (worldwide) Cultural Protection Fund, in partnership with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, recently announced that it would support seven new heritage protection projects. The projects, costing £700,000, are scheduled to begin in July 2023 and will hopefully be completed by January 2025.
For various reasons, we Jews are not famous for protecting buildings. We do and indeed we should try our best, but our collective communal and/or national circumstances force us to prioritise different projects ensuring our continuity. Nevertheless, the remarkable relationship between buildings of the past and Jewish continuity for the future is beautifully drawn in this week’s parsha, Bamidbar.
Living a proactively Jewish life is more than a lifestyle choice. It is also an exclusive entrance to immortality. Through our own Jewish lives, even our distant ancestors continue to live today. Similarly, by ensuring Jewish continuity we will remain alive within the Jewish journey of future generations.
This is how our existence in this world exceeds the confines of a limited time in history, or in the words of our Yamim Noraim liturgy, “like a breath of wind, like whirling dust, and like a dream that slips away”. Rather, we are indeed transcendent and immortal.
This idea was beautifully expressed by Moses in one of his last messages to the nation. When speaking of the covenant, Moses highlighted that not only with the people present was God making a covenant and an oath, “but with those standing here with us today before the Lord, our God, and also with those who are not here with us on this day” (Deuteronomy 29: 14). Our covenantal community is cross generational. The dead, the living, and the yet to be born, are all equal and active members of the covenantal community at any point in time.
This weeks’ parsha explores in detail how the tabernacle was carried and transported during the journey through the wilderness to the promised land. Indeed, as time passed, the generation which now carried the tabernacle became a new generation which did not originally build it. This symbolises our modern Jewish responsibility, expressed more in our values than in our buildings. Each new Jewish generation loyally carries the tradition of the past through the never-ending Jewish journey through new unknown pastures towards promised times
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