Parshas Beha’aloscha 5786
It’s early May, and your team is already in trouble.
They’ve stumbled out of the gate, dropping more games than they’ve won, and to make matters worse, another team in the division has been absolutely on fire. Twenty-five wins in their first thirty games. The pitching is airtight, the lineup is raking. Ten games back, and the calendar hasn’t even turned to summer.
Would it be absurd, at this point, to assume the division title is already out of reach?
Maybe not. Sure, hot streaks don’t last forever. The ace’s ERA will climb and the cleanup hitter will go cold for three weeks. But that still won’t be enough. To overtake them, it’s not enough for them slow down. Your team needs to speed up.
In Parshas Behaaloscha, Sefer Bamidbar is interrupted by two pesukim so significant that Chazal designated them as a sefer unto themselves. These are the pesukim we know best from the opening and closing of the Aron Kodesh in shul: Vayehi binsoa ha’aron and Uvenucho yomar. The two pesukim, Rashi notes, serve to separate two troubling episodes: the nation’s hasty departure from Har Sinai — characterized by the Gemara as the flight of a child running from school — and the Mis’onenim, the bitter, aimless complaints that immediately follow.
But perhaps these pesukim do something more than interrupt. Perhaps they illuminate. Serving not only as a wedge between two failures, but as a window into the pathology that produced them both.
Consider the first of the two pesukim. When the Aron would travel and Moshe feared it had moved too far ahead of the people, he would cry out: “Kumah Hashem — Stand, Hashem.” Stop. Go no further. The gap between us has grown too wide; do not move beyond our reach.
The gap between the finite and the infinite is not merely geographic, it is existential. There has never been a moment in the history of the Jewish People — or in the life of any individual Jew — when that chasm was fully closed. Religious life is defined precisely by this gap, by the distance that exists between ourselves and perfection, ourselves and infinity, and the chronic imperative to span it.
Thankfully, we are not alone in this struggle. Hashem accepts responsibility alongside us. He lowers Himself, as it were, making the infinite accessible to the finite. Hashem cloaks Himself in human language, accepts words emerging from human mouths and sacrifices offered by human hands. He is close, present, immanent. He “stays.”
It is a gift, but one we can’t take for granted. Because the responsibility to make contact is ours as well. To ascend. To reach. To demand more of ourselves in forever pushing the boundaries of what is easy and comfortable in the interest of spanning that impossible gap.
But what happens when we rely too heavily on the first? When Kumah Hashem becomes such a frequent mantra that we forget that it is only half the battle? When the great gift of Hashem’s reaching out to us makes us sluggish in our reaching out towards Him?
The answer, I would suggest, is the twin catastrophe of Parshas Behaaloscha.
A nation that has outsourced the responsibility for closing the gap grows comfortable — dangerously so. When Hashem is always close, always accessible, always the One who does the traveling, there is no longer any urgency to the journey. The people who sprinted from Har Sinai did not do so because they were irreverent. They fled because they were comfortable. They knew Hashem was available, present, and wholly invested in their welfare. So why linger? Why stay for more mitzvos, more obligations, more demands? Haven’t they already arrived?
What happens when we take for granted that the responsibility for the relationship falls more heavily to the other party? We become familiar. And familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt. We expect the other party to make all the provisions, solve all the problems, to serve up our comforts on a silver platter. We complain.
This is not only a thing of the past.
We live in a moment of extraordinary spiritual creativity. The frum world has, in many ways, expanded its understanding of where Hashem can be found. In the joy of Shabbos and the intimacy of family life. In the creativity of the baal tokea who is also an artist. In the warmth of a shiur that begins with a laugh and ends with a tear. In the music, in the gathering, in the story told over Kiddush. Much of this is genuinely beautiful. Those who might otherwise have been swallowed up by the chasm have found handholds. They have said, in the most meaningful way, Kumah Hashem — You are here, You are near, You are present in the fullness of my life. And they are not wrong.
Is that issue corrected? Is it only a thing of the past? Far from it. The casual nature of the contemporary world, the near obsession with self-expression and self-truth at the expense of objective standards is an attitude that has bled heavily into the frum world. And that is not without its blessings. Those who would otherwise have been swallowed up in the abyss that separates them from the Divine have discovered value and meaning in areas of spiritual life that come more naturally to them.
We have said “Kumah Hashem”—don’t go too far, be accessible. But there is also profound danger in that. Because when I discover the holiness in my work and my home, in my relationships and my recreation, in my art and in my song, how much avodah is necessary? As I replace awe and grandeur with familiarity and fondness, as I pivot from rigor to relaxation, insisting that Hashem is accessible in the latter as much as the former, have I put too much of the onus on Hashem to come to me, rather than on me to come to Him?
Religious life is a game of forever playing catchup. But unlike the baseball standings, the willingness of the One ahead to slow down, to permit those behind to surge ahead, is ever present. We need only remember that if we are to enjoy a gap that’s been closed as narrowly as possible, we can’t just tell Hashem to stand. We must be prepared to go.