The summer is coming to an end, and with it, on this Below the Bible Journey, The Book of Wilderness winds down with these last chapters, listing not just the restlessness of the people but also the places where they found rest.
Chapter 33 is one long list of 42 locations, some familiar from previous chapters and some only shown here for the first and only time, recorded by the chief navigator, perhaps as prep for his swan song:
וַיִּכְתֹּ֨ב מֹשֶׁ֜ה אֶת־מוֹצָאֵיהֶ֛ם לְמַסְעֵיהֶ֖ם עַל־פִּ֣י יְהֹוָ֑ה וְאֵ֥לֶּה מַסְעֵיהֶ֖ם לְמוֹצָאֵיהֶֽם׃
Moses wrote down the starting points of their journeys as directed by God: These are the journeys, starting at each starting point: Ba 33:2
The chapter evokes a captain’s log or personal diary - where we traveled to and from, stop by stop. But what’s the purpose of this chapter in the first place? What history is it supposed to serve? Art Green, quoting the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov writes:
“The forty-two journeys about to be listed here have a mystical meaning..They correspond to the hidden forty-two letter name of God. They seem to represent the totality of human journeying.”
42 indeed keeps showing up in mystical literature as one of the Divine names responsible for the creation of the world. It’s even a big deal in modern literature and pop culture: The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy claims 42 is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years.
Oddly enough, The Gutenberg Bible is also known as the "42-line Bible", as the book contained 42 lines per page.
Numbers aside, Green ponders not just the number of stops on the Sinai journey but what the meaning of journeys recorded in detail may mean to us:
“If there is a new Kabbalah to be revealed among Jews in our age, I have long suspected that its biblical basis will be these seemingly obscure concluding chapters of the Book of Ba’Midbar. Imagine Moses writing them down as he completes the Torah, just before giving his great final speeches. He knows that he is not to enter the Promised Land, that he will have no part in what lies ahead. Instead, he chooses to leave his people with a list of all those places in which they had camped along the way, back when they were still just wanderers. But this record of travels, seemingly meaningless and perhaps confused meanderings around the desert wasteland, is not written down just as a memento for future generations. There is something sacred in the list of place names—a secret yet to be revealed.
Journeys, wanderings. We Jews have been wanderers for a long time. How did Moses know that this was to be the fate of his people, thousands of years into the future, wandering from place to place? He gave us a zigzagged, back-circling map of forty-two places where we had camped.
Some of the old desert place names seem to have meaning, and might be translated that way:
They journeyed from Community and camped at Mount Beauty. They journeyed from Mount Beauty and camped at Trembling. They journeyed from Trembling and camped at Choirs. They journeyed from Choirs and camped at The Bottoms..
Others still puzzle us, but the new Kabbalah will undoubtedly find in them sublime secrets, not yet revealed.”
As we begin to say goodbye to this book, and to this summer, what places stand out as significant, what stories, sites, memories? What meaning do we make of what we’ve been through as we take the time, listing the highlights, destinations, locations - and what we’ve learned along the way? Elul, the month of consciousness, invites us to sit down and reflect on the journey - and what will we take with us into the new book and the new year, coming soon, one step and chapter at a time.
Below the Bible Belt:
929 chapters, 42 months, daily reflections: Join Rabbi Amichai’s 3+ years interactive online quest to question, queer + re-read between the lines of the entire Hebrew Bible, with daily reflections, weekly videos and monthly learning sessions.
#wilderness #bookofnumbers #42 # #journeys #pitstops #Bamidbar33 #bamidbar #thetorah #hebrewbible #whowrotethebible? #ArtGreen #Hitchiker’sguidetothegalaxy #Gutenbergbible #42-linebible
#hebrewmyth #929 #torah #bible #hiddenbible #sefaria #929english #labshul #929project #myth #belowthebiblebelt #postpatriarchy
42 was the answer that Deep Thought provided… the question, however, in very Jewish fashion, is the greater mystery and so Deep Thought (the second-most-powerful computer ever created) set out to create the truly most powerful computer to find the question. The name of that computer? The Earth. These 42 locations metaphorically span the entirety of the planet, that in every place and every stage of the journey one can find traces of the question, and only in seeing the journey as a whole can one constellate the outlines of primal curiosity…
I have a question about what in fact and historically this wilderness might have been, for there is a difference between calling it a "desert" and a "wilderness". The former is barren, the latter unsettled. But with all these place names, it seems to be something else, and we know there are wars and skirmishes, so the "land" is contested. There are climatological reconstructions that can tell us just what fertility the land might have had at the presumed date of the wandering. Granted B'midbar is a liminal space, a psychic and spiritual domain, but the very precision of place names suggest one could have a different picture in the mind of what the Israelites went through.