Life is a Highway
Sermon Shabbat Matot-Masei 5782
Do any you watch those streaming TV shows which always have cliffhanger endings? You know, like Game of Thrones a couple of years ago, or Ozark last year, or Stranger Things, or Yellowstone, or Better Call Saul, or Outlander? Those shows where each episode ends with the protagonists in grave danger, uncertainty abounding, and dramatic music plunging you into the final credits?
There’s a good reason those shows are so wildly popular. They drag you into the next episode without giving you any time to think about what you actually should be doing instead of watching the next show… You just have to see what will happen in the teaser before they let you skip the opening credits and you are back on the roller-coaster of drama and suspense.
I am here to tell you that this literary device is not a new thing, and it started in books and stories, not on video. And we find it expressed vividly in this week’s Torah portions.
This Shabbat we complete reading the underrated Book of Numbers with the double parsha of Matot-Masei. While there are five books in the Torah, and Bamidbar, Numbers, is just fourth of five, the end of the book completes the great 40-year journey of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery to the borders of the Promised Land. The final book of the Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy, while a fascinating and 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. To paraphrase a later book of the Tanakh, there isn’t much new under the sun in Deuteronomy. So, this double sedrah, Matot-Masei at the conclusion of Bamidbar, is a good time to assess the meaning of the journey of our people.
On superficial examination, the Israelites have made enormous progress over the four decades covered in this book. Early in Exodus our people were enslaved and remained human chattel for many generations. The traditional count is 400 years of slavery, near the end of which a genocidal program was advanced by the Egyptian king, the pharaoh, to destroy us. Moses was called by God and emerged as an effective revolutionary leader, assisted by his brother Aaron, and through God’s power the people of Israel were redeemed from slavery and given the gift of freedom. After surviving an attempt to re-enslave them, the Israelites entered into a covenant, a contract with God at Mt. Sinai and were taught a way of life structured by moral law and ethical action, mitzvot. They were progressively organized into a structured, mobile community, given social rules for successful human society, taught how to centralize religious worship in a unifying way, forged into a growing young national group, and directed towards what will become their own permanent homeland.
The nascent nation was then brought through a variety of challenging experiences, some imposed by outsiders, others the result of internal conflicts and struggles, and eventually arrived 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 national identity formation 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, after all this drama, all the sturm und drang, we finally reach the borders of the land that will become Israel. But before we can rejoice in the full redemption of the people 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 even included in the Torah or in any regular, public reading cycle of Bible, we never really get to see the Israelites enter 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 American Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War but never told who won the war or how the nation turned out. It is like following the entire World Cup soccer tournament, discovering the final was between, say, France and Croatia, and never discovering who won the crown. It would be like watching the entire major league baseball season, all 162 games, and never finding out who won the World Series, or even who made it to the World Series.
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, who dies on Mt. Nebo in today’s Jordan without ever getting into Canaan, the Israelites don’t enter the Promised Land because we, their descendants, need to learn that it’s not the arriving the counts, but the journeying. It’s not what we find when we get there but how we travel along the way that matters. In this view, the long 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, the people we meet and befriend and love, the enemies and obstacles we overcome, these are all 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 even 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, serving with honor, journeying well and courageously.
As Winston Churchill put it, “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, although it was a lot newer when the Torah was written than it is now. Still, 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.
When my kids were in an elementary school chorus here in Tucson, they sang a setting of a pop song that was featured in the animated movie “Cars”; its lyrics were, “Life is a highway, I’m going to ride it all night long…”
Life is a highway, as it were, and we are going to ride it all our lives long… and who we really are is much more a function of the way we travel that highway than where we will ultimately park our car.
It reminds me of a joke about a couple of rock songs on that theme: “If there’s highway to hell, and only a stairway to heaven, it says a lot about anticipated traffic numbers.” But perhaps I have taken a detour…
In any case, the idea that the Torah is teaching us by a kind of graceful omission, by a chosen form of cliffhanger, that it is the journey, not the destination, that truly matters, is beautiful. As deeply connected as we feel to that Promised Land of Israel—and we are planning to go there in November of this year, God-willing—as important as the end-result is for any human accomplishment, we will likely spend much more time getting there than being there. Even the word for Jewish law, Halakha, simple means “The Way,” the path we walk to achieve goodness in our lives. The path, the road, the highway.
When we formed Beit Simcha back in 2018, we made a mutual commitment that we would seek to make this a true house of joy, a place where we enjoyed being together and working together and praying together and making music together and, of course, eating together—but also cleaning up together. It was, and remains, exceedingly important to us that the process to be joyous and good, and that the things that aid that celebration of Judaism, and our community, will always be emphasized. And that commitment has been a true blessing for us.
Look, we wouldn’t even have the Torah if we had not ultimately succeeded in conquering the Land of Israel and making it our own. But over the long course of Jewish history since then we have learned, again and again, that how we travel this road, this path, this highway, makes all the difference in our lives, and in our people’s life.
May we find ways to celebrate our own travels in this world, and may we learn to fill each day with goodness and blessing, and so appreciate our own journey.