Bamidbar - June 7, 2024

I have a friend whose last name is Guggenheim (nickname: “Googee”). No relation to the Guggenheims. However, he once visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, so he recounts, the ticket desk attendant got wide-eyed and asked if he was part of “the family.” Googee shrugged, said yes (why not?), and he was given free admission and a personal tour. At the end, the docent brought him to a private room and pulled out a family tree of the (regal) Guggenheims. She pointed and asked, “Where’s your line?”

An excessive concern for one’s tribe, the purebred of one’s slobbery pooch, or the underwhelming predictability of one’s long-awaited 23andme report (e.g. “nope, we don’t have any Kings in our line, but we are 200% Ashkenaz”) can sometimes seem silly, but caring to know one’s genealogy and family role is near universal. Dynasties have been scrupulously tracked since time immemorial, and every major religion has some form of lineage recitation - for significant teachers, prophets, and/or clergy - as a humility ritual that bookends worship. Most of this week’s parasha, Bamidbar בְּמִדְבַּ֥ר, is a formal bookkeeping of the 12 tribes still wandering together:

“The descendants of Reuben, Israel’s first-born, the registration of the clans of their ancestral house, as listed by name, head by head, all males aged twenty years and over, all who were able to bear arms - those enrolled from the tribe of Reuben: 46,500” (Numbers 1:20-21).

Deeper than these tribal roots, there’s a semiotic tree within the opening words of Bamidbar, the 4th Book of the Torah (“the Book of Numbers”), that alludes to its predecessors:

Bereishit בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית, the first book (Genesis), often translated as “in the beginning,” can also connote “in the head” - בְּ means “in/on/with” and רֵאשִׁ֖ means “head.” This first word has been creatively interpreted in 10,000 ways, so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to offer that rei רֵא, is a short-form of the verb for seeing/perceiving. Also, the opening of Bamidbar says, “שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כׇּל־עֲדַ֣ת, Take a sum of the whole community” (a common translation of rosh in this particular phrase). In turn, Bereishit could be read as “in the sum/total,” i.e. in the pre-verbal, solely perceived, composite of the pre-Big Bang cosmos condensed into (according to physicists) a throbbing particle the size of a pencil’s rubber eraser.

(Some mystics interpret the first line’s eit אֵ֥ת, a basic Hebrew conjunction, as implying Alef to Tav, the first and last letters of the Hebrew AlefBet, such that divine speech preceded the universe: “In the beginning, God created the A to Z of heaven and the A to Z of earth; בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ.”)

Shemot, the second book (Exodus), is “names.”

Vayikra, the third book (Leviticus), is “to call.”

There’s a progression here, that of a consciousness relating to the world through evolving sign systems: first, bare sight and reception of the sum of things, the A-Zs hovering untapped in the background (that good ol’ oneness we know and love); then naming things; then being called and recognized by established names and avatars; and in this fourth book, we’ve entered the midbar מִדְבַּ֥ר, the place “from words/things/schema.” Its alias, the Book of Numbers, comes from the word mispar מִסְפַּ֣ר, like a twin of מִדְבַּ֥ר, previously conjoined by the letter Mem מִ. Dbar דְבַּ֥ר is “to say,” whereas spar סְפַּ֣ר is “to recount,” i.e. making concepts and retrieving memories.

In his seminal essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” environmental historian William Cronon writes that our contemporary notion of “wilderness” (the most common translation of midbar) is “entirely a cultural invention . . . As late as the 18th century, the most common usage of the [word] referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives [like] . . . ‘deserted,’ ‘savage,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘barren’ - in short, ‘a waste,’ the word’s nearest synonym . . . [It] was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling.”

Later, Cronon quotes travel journals of Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Muir, each encountering a first-time wilderness in an age prior to Google Image previews, and he reflects that “all three men are participating in the same cultural tradition and contributing to the same myth: the mountain as cathedral . . . Wordsworth [favors] an awe-filled bewilderment, Thoreau a stern loneliness, Muir a welcome ecstasy - but they agree completely about the church in which they prefer to worship.”

A veritable wilderness, in all varieties, invokes speechlessness. The midbar is thus an ecological desert as much as a semiotic desert.

Without dropping any spoilers, this opening bit foreshadows a book full of social discord and theological revolution from within the pack. Once we’ve established the place (or lack thereof), what’s the time?

“On the first day of the second month, in the second year following the exodus . . .” (Numbers 1:1). Two twos! Plus, the Zohar notes that the word “Sinai” has the same numerical value (130) as the word for “ladder.” Whereas Jacob dreamed of a ladder for one prophet receiving messages between heaven and earth, Sinai is a ladder - a cathedral - for an entire prophetic people who stand in a paralyzing state of twoness. The statues and commandments of Exodus and Leviticus have been proclaimed, and now their meaning will be reconciled and tested in the desert laboratory of the midbar, to see if they can bloom among the factions and fractals of many family branches. To see if their names honestly match up to their assigned roles in the formal census and genealogy.