Chapters of Life
“These were the journeys of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron…The Israelites set out from Rameses and encamped at Succoth. They set out from Succoth and encamped at Etham, which is on the edge of the wilderness. They set out from Etham and turned about toward Pi-hahiroth, which faces Baal-zephon, and they encamped before Migdol…” (Numbers 33:1)
Numbers 33 is a chapter that lists place after place where the Israelites encamped in the wilderness. The great 11th century commentator Rashi immediately asks, “Why are these journeys recorded here?!” Like other chapters that exhaustively list seemingly unimportant details, there must be some deeper significance to unfold - so let us start gathering clues!
Normally when describing our travel, we might say “first we went to x, then to y, then to z”, an itinerary of destinations. But this chapter doesn’t frame the list as “these are the places they stayed” but rather “these are the journeys”. In other words, it emphasizes the movement rather than the idling.
The early 20th century poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, translated by Ulrich Baer)
Perhaps at each encampment some inner movement was happening that reverberated into the more apparent physical action of marching on to the next place. Inner work needed to happen in order to unlock the next wave of forward momentum, of spiritual growth as well as physical travel.
The founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov (18th century Ukraine), notes that if you count up the number of journeys, “they are 42, and these [segments] correspond to each person from the day of their birth until their return to their [soul’s ultimate] world. And understand… that birth is like the Exodus, and you go on journey after journey until you reach the land of supernal living (i.e. the Promised Land, which is a metaphor here for the afterlife). The encampment relates to contracted consciousness (mochin d’katnut) and the journeying relates to expanded consciousness (mochin d’gadlut)” (Sefer Baal Shem Tov, Masei 1)
All of this rather dense language suggests that our life has chapters. The ancestors wandered 42 times in the wilderness, and in our lives we too have 42 chapters. Some are long, some are short. Some begin in ways we can anticipate, such as graduating from high school or getting married. Some begin without much warning, such as the death of a loved one. Some chapters we don’t realize we were in until we are into the next one already. Each chapter has its own work. While we are “encamped”, we may appear idle, stable, stuck, in a groove or in a rut. While “journeying” we are in a place of expanded openness and possibility, which comes with its own mix of exhilaration and anxiety.
The Jewish spiritual practice of Mussar strikes me as one way to describe what we are doing while encamped and journeying. In Everyday Holiness, Alan Morinis describes mussar in two ways: “(1) it offers us a “map” of the inner life and (2) it offers us a body of practices we can employ to transform our inner ways” (p. 17).
The mussar map consists of naming and working with inner qualities called middot (singular: middah), such as patience, anger, humility, and trust. So much of how we yearn to move forward in life requires awareness and skillfulness with our own personalities and temperaments. Mussar takes each middah one by one and focuses us on how to bring it into balance, to be more or less patient, for example, depending on which one you need to have more of in your life. Perhaps different chapters of life will benefit from different ways of expressing patience!
No matter how we live, with mindful intention or in a state of constant distraction, we will move through the 42 chapters we get. The promise of mussar (and of course other spiritual/ethical traditions as well) is to bring more compassion to the aspects of the life journey that we have little control over and more deliberate agency in those aspects where we do have influence. The goal - to live a more conscious, present, and responsible life, and in so doing experience the shleimut, wholeness, of being human and our unique selves and alive.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
