Parashat BeHa'alotekha: On Not Going it Alone

Torah – Jewish life -- is not a solitary project. No one can do it alone. It requires an entire camp of 12 tribes to carry the Torah in its midst.

In this week’s parsha, we see what happens when the Torah is carried by one person alone, even if that person is Moshe. All around him, the people start complaining. They have left Mount Sinai and begun their long journey through the great wide desert – and they have lost faith. How will we eat? How will we survive? Their “souls” are “dry,” they say; even though they are daily fed by the manna, they are restless and faithless malcontents.

The Torah cannot exist in such an environment of general faithlessness. Even Moshe can’t maintain his faith surrounded by such voices of negativity – When God tells him the people will eat meat, Moshe is uncharacteristically incredulous: There are 600,000 of them; how are you going to provide meat for so many? See how low even Moshe’s faith has sunk through the general malaise of the camp! Indeed, God is angry: Hayad Hashem tiktzar? Why are you underestimating Me?

There is only one response to such pervasive faithlessness – to increase the number of people carrying the spirit of God, the spirit of Torah in the camp. Moshe cannot carry this alone; even to maintain his own faith, he needs the support of a community of believers. (Maybe that’s why Jewish prayer is generally done in a minyan; a community of people praying together helps support each other’s faith).

And so 70 elders are picked to receive a piece of the ruach, the “spirit.” Note that the elders are not appointed, as elsewhere, to help Moshe judge the people or care for them in some practical way. They are given some of Moshe’s divine spirit, so that they can support a sense of hope and faith in the camp. Their job is to improve morale.

Moshe has a deep understanding of the nature of the divine project. He knows that he cannot do it alone; he understands that the Torah was not given to an individual, but to a nation, and that it is the nation as a whole that must carry it forward. And so, when he hears about Eldad and Medad – two men prophesying within the camp, outside of his supervision – he does not punish them (as Joshua suggests), but celebrates them. Umi yiten kol am Hashem nevi’im. If only the whole people of God were prophets! This is a people of God, not a people of Moshe. The more Torah, the more divine spirit within the people, the better, whether or not it goes through me, says Moshe.

Moshe exults in the spread of the divine spirit because he understands that this is what it is all about, creating a community in which God’s spirit resides; he, as an individual, cannot do it alone. Perhaps he is especially pleased that it is a pair of prophets working together; working together is the only way to maintain the faith, to carry the Torah in one’s midst.