Parashat Midbar – Beyond the I-We Dichotomy

From the Cardozo Academy Writers Guild

With this week’s parashah, we enter Sefer Bamidbar, the Book of the Wilderness. As our parashah opens, the Israelites are poised to set out from Sinai, where they have been encamped for the past year. A journey of no more than eleven days separates them from their entry into the Land of Israel. Sefer Bamidbar is the story of a great test: Can the disparate tribes of Israel put into practice the lessons learned during the revelation at Sinai and the subsequent building of the Mishkan. Can a band of escaped slaves forge themselves into a nation capable of conquering their ancestral homeland and building a just and lasting society?

We readers know that they will fail the test time and again. The journey of eleven days will become an arduous adventure lasting 40 long years, during which an entire generation will be consumed. This tragic outcome is not portrayed as inevitable; rather, it is the result of internal tensions, lack of vision, and above all, a lack of unity.

Pluralism in Unity

The theme of unity is highlighted in the opening passages of our parashah:

The need for the census is couched in terms of a great call-up: a setting apart of all the men of military age. According to the Rashbam, the term, “kol yotzei tzava,” should be understood as those who “go out to war,” or more colloquially as those capable of bearing arms. Thus, the census is a “call to arms”—a draft of military-aged men as the nation prepares to conquer Canaan.

However, Rabbi Chanoch Waxman presents a persuasive argument that the phrase should instead be translated more broadly as “those who go out to assemble”.

But assemble for what? What is the purpose of the national census? A case can be made that the census isn’t so much a national call to arms, but rather, a national call to “pull themselves together”, to see themselves not just as individuals belonging to “their clans and their ancestral houses”, but as part of something greater—the union of pluralities that we call a nation.

Solidarity and individualism

And yet, neither the individual nor his family or tribal identity is sacrificed to achieve this unity. In a thoughtful essay, Rav Yair Kahn emphasizes that the camp of the Israelites was not a melting pot; the individual tribes preserved their own identity, each under its own flag. As for individuals:

[…] the Torah stresses that every person was counted “le-gulgilotam,” by his head – that is, as an individual. In other words, the singular characteristics exclusive to each individual are not to be suppressed and destroyed, but protected and only then integrated into the national whole. The ideal of “machane Yisrael” rejects both individualism, in which the particular denies his communal obligations and responsibilities, as well as uniformity, which forces the individual to conform and thereby deadens his singular characteristics and qualities.

Jewish society lacks what Western society calls “independent realms of experience”. Instead, individual, clan, household, and nation are all linked, forming a society that is organic, without sharp distinctions between public and private spheres. An interesting corollary to this integration is that the individual is made more, not less, important. The lack of any single individual can impact the functioning of the entire organic community, and hinder it in the completion of its mission. Thus, any threat to individuals is seen as a threat to the whole. Solidarity becomes an actionable imperative.

The Covenantal fellowship formed at Sinai is not a voluntary undertaking: once the Israelites have accepted the Torah and its strictures, they are bound together by bonds of legal—not emotional—solidarity.

This involuntary status marks one distinction between Jewish organizational dynamics and that of Western societies. Jewish Law emphasizes that the individual is not the be-all/end-all of society, neither in ethics nor in existential reality. The individual is part of a larger whole, to which he or she is held accountable. This worldview takes as axiomatic that every individual has free will and that this freedom has a transcendent sanctity. The individual has no inherent right to do or be anything. Rather, he has an obligation to do and to be, stemming from his status as a created, embodied being. This means that every human being is of inestimable value, every individual is a representative of the Divine will.

More than a thousand years after the national call-up in the wilderness, the Talmud will note that “all Israel are guarantors one for the other”. This view transcends the simplistic individualistic/collectivist dichotomy; Jewish political organization is both, and neither.

Transcending the “I-Society”

The tension between collectivism and individualism can be a great spur to creativity. It fuels growth and achievement in a society. But the danger is that in most advanced societies, individualism eventually wins out. The result is an “I-society”: I want… I’m too busy to raise a family… I have to accomplish something great before I die…. The emergence of products with names like “iPhone” and the like in our generation is symptomatic of this trend. We often see increasing individualism—at the expense of communal well-being—in societies that on the brink of demographic decline.

The census at the beginning of Bamidbar is a warning against such a slide into an “I-centric” state of being.

But it is Sefer Bamidbar as a whole that provides the object lesson. We see exactly what happens when a nation is at odds with itself, when leaders lack vision (the sin of the spies), or when they seek their own aggrandizement at the expense of the national good (Korach’s rebellion). Sefer Bamidbar is a veritable textbook on what can go wrong on the way to peoplehood.

We, reading the story, are meant to learn from the misfortunes of the Generation of the Wilderness. We learn vicariously by experiencing the trials and failures with them. This vicarious memory provides far more intimate knowledge than would the most erudite lecture.

Life is never all-or-nothing; reality is not black-and-white. One cannot build a just society upon the notion that only the individual matters. Nor can a healthy society quash the needs and distinctions of individuals. Instead, human beings must be counted “by their heads” and “according to their families and ancestral houses”, even as they “assemble” themselves into a nation with a single destination.