Moving Forward-Rabbi Boris' Blog

Parshat Pinchas-2021

(How much has changed since last year...)

So here we are, nearly a year and a half after our synagogue officially closed its doors to end person gatherings. It's been an unbelievably strange year filled with more than our share of difficult moments and challenges, but also this has been a year of gaining an unbelievable sense of perspective. There's no way that you can make your way through a pandemic and such an experience of separation without rethinking how we function in relationships and the place that community has in our lives.

It's been mentioned more than enough that what this pandemic has brought to light is so much of what has been hidden in our lives and in our society-about places of vulnerability and pain that have been pushed aside or left  unnoticed.  You don't need to be a religious person to see this experience as a profound test, or in the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the UK who died last year, “a revelation for even an atheist”. And now as we have signs that things will soon return back to normal, such as our being able to gather together today, we have the time to simply appreciate how everything has been so incredibly changed by this experience.  It's time to take an accounting of this time

The beginning of this week's Torah portion Pinchas, describes an accounting, a moment to check in with the community, that ends the Israelite's forty years of wandering through the wilderness. Interestingly, as we read about at the end of last week's Parsha the census takes place at the end of a plague which has killed 24,000 people.  Of course we have encountered another important census in the Torah, one that was in fact found at the beginning of the book of Numbers which conveniently gives its name to the English book Numbers. This first census took place an entire generation earlier than the one to read now, as the Israelites were leading Mount Sinai to it begin their journey in the wilderness

We are given a few explanations for why the Torah offers us these two censuses. One of them is found in the midrash and says that  each of the censuses is an opportunity to examine Moses and how well he's led the community. Moses, who is often compared to a shepherd counting his sheep, the Jewish people, as they go out in the morning to the pasture to eat, and then at the end of the day, he counts them again as they come home, not only to see if anyone is missing, but also to see simply "how well they are doing".  In a sense, the census of the Jewish people is considered then God counting Israelites at the beginning of their journey, and then again after the years of wandering and challenges that they have experiences as a community.  It is a check in to see how we are doing as we finally head home after a long day.

Yet it's interesting to note, that while the count is essentially the same before and after their journey, beyond the numbers, the Israelite people are not the same.  This is now a community that had heard the stories of a generation past who experienced slavery, but has also lived through many challenges of  their own. They were forced in so many ways to make sense of the meaning of community. They were challenged to try to understand the notion of leadership, and who could be trusted to guide them through the desert. They had to learn how to figure out their roles in their community, both for the building at the mishkan and for the general well-being of all the people. There were moments of deep connection and joy, but if you've been reading the Torah over the past few months, one could argue that it was primarily challenge that the community had overcome.   A hint to all the adversity that the community overcame can actually be found and how  this most recent  census is introduced: “Vayehi acharei hamagefa – and it was, following the plague.”  It wasn't just a physical plague that changed the community, because something deeper also had taken place.

And this is where we have to stop for a bit. In fact this is where we can reflect on our own experience of how taking a moment to reflect is so important.  We can examine what we have learned from our experiences, and to hold on to the perspective we have gained to see how we move forward.

As we sit here today, the small group of people gathered in the sanctuary, and more here on Zoom, it's obvious that something still is not fully right in our world. Things may be getting better, but the pandemic is still part of us, and there's still a long way to go until things fully return to normal. Most of us have been vaccinated, and slowly, slowly this virus is it being weakened  and as we are told the best we can hope for is that eventually it will just become like a common cold. Experts are working hard to stop this plague that we are experiencing, but we also need to do the hard work to stop so many of the other challenges that this experience has brought to light.  At this point, we don't want to just leave this experience virus free, we want to also be able to re-enter a society that is more whole, more compassionate, and more stable. We want all of the protests, all of the difficult revelations of the past year--political, cultural, everything to lead not to more suffering but to inspiration and hope.  This can only happen if we use this delicate time, this in-between space before we re-enter society fully, to reflect and to offer up a census.

Going back to our Torah portion, our tradition teaches us that it is in fact the census itself, this moment of check-in and counting, that ends the plague. On a physical level, who knows what specifically happened to stop the sickness, but on the community and spiritual level, the people needed to stop to examine themselves before they would be able to move forward.  

According to the commentators, the sickness, the plague, was a sign of all the challenges they were experiencing. The idol worship, the cruelty, the lack of communal strength. The physical sickness,was a sign that the individuals and the society in general were sick. Of course, saying this about our current pandemic is treading on dangerous ground. It is not entirely true that we are being punished for our sins in the way that some of our ancestors might understand it.  But hidden beneath this more scientific understanding of sickness, is unfortunately a little bit of truth. We will experience another pandemic, we will experience more suffering, unless we take this time of check-in, this time of census seriously and commit to living differently.

By counting and accounting for each of the Israelites, God and Moses reaffirmed the intrinsic value of each individual as well as their place and purpose within the larger collective – and it was that reaffirmation, both of people and of principles, that ended the plagues.

Our census too needs to be an accounting of our own behaviour, and what we allow our society to do to each other in the world. It's an accounting of our leadership, and the words and actions that we have let flow freely in our society.  All of our leaders, but also all of us, have to look at the “numbers”, the reality that we are given as we take the census, look at the state of our society and decide whether we want to move forward and make things better or whether we want to  continue on the same path.

Caring for each other is more than just a decision, but it begins with understanding that we are all part of a society of individuals that need each other to survive. The only thing that will guarantee an end to this plague, is a delicate dance of reopening, and working hard to re-enter society better than we left it. Like Moses looking over his community, now is our opportunity to not only honour what we need for ourselves, but also to never stop working for the greater needs of our society. We need to make sure that our story has a happy ending.