Is Life a Highway, Really?

Sermon Shabbat Matot-Masei 5783

This week we complete the Book of Numbers with the double parsha of Matot-Masei.  While there are five books in the Torah, and Bamidbar, Numbers, is just the fourth of five, the end of the book really completes the great journey of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery to the borders of the Promised Land.  The final book of the Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy, while it is a fascinating and very powerful text, is just a recapitulation of the events of the previous three books, a reinterpretation of the story told in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.  There isn’t much new under the sun in Deuteronomy.  So, this sedrah, Matot-Masei at the conclusion of Bamidbar is a good time to assess the meaning of the journey of our people.

On a superficial examination the people of Israel have made enormous progress over the 40 years covered in these books.  Early in Exodus our people are enslaved and remain human chattel for many generations.  The traditional count is 400 years of slavery, near the end of which a genocidal program is advanced by the Egyptian king to destroy us.  Moses is called by God and emerges as an effective revolutionary leader, assisted by his brother Aaron, and through God’s power the people of Israel are redeemed from slavery and given the gift of freedom.  After surviving an attempt to re-enslave them, the Israelites enter a covenant, a contract with God at Mt. Sinai, and are taught a way of life structured by moral law and ethical action, mitzvot.  They are progressively organized into a structured, mobile community, are given social rules for successful human society, taught how to centralize religious worship in a unifying way, and forged into a growing young national group, and directed towards their own homeland.

The nascent nation is then brought through a variety of challenging experiences, some imposed from outside opponents, others the result of internal conflicts and struggles, and eventually arrive at the borders of their land-to-be as a strong, young, energetic, impressive people, organized and powerful.  It is a success story in a world in which few emerging nations, then as now, successfully make the transition from overthrowing oppression to building a positive, powerful, cohesive national identity.

Given the nature of this narrative of the formation of national identity and coherent peoplehood it is puzzling that the Torah breaks off the story here, just as the Israelites are about to enter the Promised Land of nationhood.  In other words, we reach the borders of the land that will become Israel, but before we can rejoice as our people is brought to the full redemption of creating a nation of their own in a land of their own, the story stops and the journey is paused.  And not briefly paused, either; the entire Book of Deuteronomy is interposed, and we don’t find out just what it’s like to actually enter Erets Yisrael, the Land of Israel, until the Book of Joshua.  In fact, since the Torah concludes with the death of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy and the Book of Joshua isn’t included in the Torah or any regular reading cycle, we never really see the Israelites get into the Land of Israel. 

It is an unusual choice for our tradition to make.  It is as if we were taught the story of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolutionary War but never were told who won the war.  It is like following the entire World Cup soccer tournament, discovering the final was between the Argentina and France, and never learning who won the crown.

So why does the Torah leave us at the borders of the Promised Land but never bring us in?

The easy answer is a familiar one: the journey is the destination.  Like Moses, we don’t enter the Promised Land because we need to learn that it’s not the arriving that counts, but journeying, not what we find when we get there but how we travel along the way.  This transit of the Sinai Desert is a metaphor for our own lives, an object lesson on just what it is that truly matters.  As a familiar poem by Rabbi Alvin Fine puts it: “Birth is a beginning/And death a destination/ But life is a journey:/From childhood to maturity and youth to age… /looking backward or ahead we see that victory lies/ Not at some high place along the way/ But in having made the journey, stage by stage/ a sacred pilgrimage.”

Like the Israelites, we are all on a journey, a life voyage, and how we grow and change and learn and develop, the adventures we experience along the way, are far more important than what seem on the surface to be our ultimate accomplishments.  We will never enter the Promised Land at all.  We are not supposed to do so.  What we are supposed to do, what we are taught by our Torah, here in Matot-Masei and elsewhere, is that the adventure is the journey itself, that our goals and accomplishments are in advancing that expedition.

Or as Winston Churchill, “You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”

This is not exactly a new message.  In fact, it might be the essential message of all honest religious traditions: how we live, how we get there is far more important than where we are going.  Life is a highway, as it were, and we are going to ride it all life-long… and who we really are is much more a function of the way that we travel that highway than where we garage our car.

Or something like that.  I mean, that is the point, right?  It doesn’t really matter where we end up, but how we get there, no?

To be honest, sometimes I’m not so sure about that.  I don’t know how many of you enjoy attending graduation ceremonies, but I once had the unenviable responsibility of attending, in a one-week period, nine different graduation ceremonies.  Let me rephrase that: one year I had the delightful privilege of attending, in a one-week period, nine different graduation ceremonies.  I believe my favorite moment in all of them was hearing a fine high school musician sing a medley of all the favorite graduation tunes of recent years as though they were, essentially, one song.  “Another fork stuck in the road/ as we go on we remember all the times we had together/ I’ll remember you/you’ll never walk alone/kiss today goodbye and point me towards tomorrow/I hope you had the time of your life” and so on.  It highlighted the essential cliché, true but trite, of the fact that when we arrive at moments of great accomplishment what we realize is how precious the journey has been, how much we love our friends who have travelled with us, how we have grown and changed over the time we have been journeying.  Etc.  Yaddah yaddah yaddah…

Look, it’s true that, as Matot-Masei makes clear, the journey shaped us as a people, for better and for worse.  How we get there makes us who we are.

But doesn’t it also matter a great deal what we do when we get to the Promised Land?  I mean, what if we manage to reach our goal, and we’ve had a great trip and all, but we don’t act in good ways that build holiness into our lives and our world?  What if we fail to take the steps we need to take to create a better, holier life? 

Certainly, the journey matters, and in particular, how we act and treat each other along the way. And whenever we get to what we perceive of as our own promised land, the work we do when get where we want to be is just as important.  The goal is not to rest on our laurels, to congratulate ourselves on how well we have done getting there.  The ultimate purpose, which our ancestors ultimately come to understand, is to move into that Promised Land and create a life, and institutions, that best express our values and ideals.

You see, life may well be a highway.  But it’s not just how we get there—it’s what we do after we get there that also really counts.  The message is to travel well: but also to make it matter when you get there.

So, over this final Shabbat of Numbers, may we think not only about how we have progressed to this point in our lives, but how we can make the place we are now into something truly special, good, and holy.