The Book Between the Books Thoughts on Parashat Beha’alotecha

It is always strange to me, as a Jew, to watch Christians and atheists engage in fierce debates over the existence of God. I think, for instance, of the now-famous exchange between Professor John Lennox and Richard Dawkins: one arguing that God’s existence is a matter of logical deduction and moral necessity, the other declaring God a moral monster and a dangerous fantasy. The fervor is undeniable. The stakes, apparently, are very high.

And yet, in all of Jewish history, one finds no serious debate about whether or not God exists. In all the pages of the Talmud—overflowing with discussion, dissension, and dialectic—there is not a single sustained argument over the very existence of God. It is, in our world, a non-starter.

Why?

Because the Jew does not ask, “Does God exist?” The Jew asks: “How does one live in the presence of God?”

In one of our most well-known prayers in the synagogue service, we begin with “Ein ke-Elokeinu”—“There is none like our God.” After that we ask “Mi ke-Elokeinu “—Who is like our God?  First, we make a statement: God exists.  Only afterwards do we ask: Who is like our God? But we don’t receive an answer! Because it is the question itself which is the answer. We need God, not to understand the why, but to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore; to give meaning to the Universe.[1]

We do not speak about God. We speak to Him.

This is not a theological sleight of hand. It is a radical reorientation. For Judaism, God is not a proposition to be proven. He is a presence to be responded to. He cannot be defined. He cannot be quantified. He cannot even be spoken of with accuracy. As the Rambam writes in the Guide for the Perplexed, “All descriptions of God are mere negations.”[2] At best, we speak in hyperbole, metaphor, approximation. Even God’s “attributes” in the Torah are not descriptors but revelations of how He acts toward us—never of what He is.

The Measureless Ark

This radical notion is embodied in the mysterious Ark of the Covenant, central to this week’s parashah, Beha’alotecha. The Ark is described in precise terms: gold-covered, acacia wood, poles and rings. And yet, in Tractate Yoma, the Talmud declares that the Ark “did not take up space”—it was present in the Holy of Holies, and yet the measurements of the room did not change because of it.[3]

In other words, it was present, and yet not. It existed, but did not occupy space. It carried the Divine Presence, but itself defied the laws of physical presence.

This is like God and strikingly, like the Jewish people.

The A-Historical People

The Book of Bamidbar, in which this parashah is found, is framed as a book of movement, of wilderness journeys, of transition. And yet most of those forty years in the desert are shrouded in silence. We hear about a few revolts, some travels, the occasional census or miracle—but the vast bulk of the Israelites’ time in the desert is not described. Entire decades are swallowed in a silence that seems to deny historical time altogether.

This is not accidental.

The desert is not just a place—it is a spiritual condition. In the wilderness, time stands still. History is suspended. The people of Israel are not in history, they are beyond it. As Emmanuel Levinas might have said, they exist in the ethical dimension of l’infini—the infinite that refuses containment, measurement, or reduction.

The Jews were always a people outside of history. “They were dying, but never died”. In the exile, they were seemingly absent from the world stage—and yet remained intact, unchanged, waiting. They reentered history only in 1948, and the cost has been staggering: the more Jews became part of the flow of political and national time, the more they seemed to forget who they are and what sustains them.

The Book Between the Books

Nowhere is this idea more powerfully symbolized than in two cryptic verses in this week’s Torah portion:

And it came to pass when the Ark set forward, that Moshe said: “Arise, O Lord, and let Your enemies be scattered…” And when it rested, he said: “Return, O Lord, to the myriad thousands of Israel.”[4]

These two verses are framed by upside-down or backward Hebrew letters—two nuns that bracket them off from the surrounding text. The Talmud in Shabbat 116a–b famously notes that these two verses constitute a separate book unto themselves. That is, what we think of as the Five Books of Moses are really seven—this interjection forming its own cryptic “book.”

Why?

The nun (the letters framing the passage) is also the Aramaic word for fish. Reversed, it suggests a fish swimming against the current—non-conformist, countercultural, audacious—like the Ark, like the Jew, like God.

The Ark, which “carries itself” (Sotah 35a), is not bound by location. It exists in tension with time, just as the Jewish people do. Their march through the desert, bookended by this mysterious “book,” is not linear progress. It is an existential journey—a confrontation with nothingness, and a preparation for covenant.

The placement of these verses is “wrong,” the sages say, because this entire book is “out of place.” And it is rightly so.

Swimming Against the Current

To be a Jew is to swim against the current; not merely to be different, but to defy the very idea that the world as it is should define who you are. The upside-down nuns are not a footnote—they are a theological manifesto. They declare that eternity trumps history, that stillness speaks louder than action, that absence can be more real than presence.

It is no coincidence that the Torah’s holiest object—the Ark—contains not only the second set of tablets of the covenant, but also the first set, the broken ones. The covenant is not linear. Revelation is not progressive. The Divine is encountered not only in light, but in rupture.

Modernity has taught us to measure progress by visibility, success by outcome, identity by alignment. But the Torah, especially in Beha’alotecha, reminds us that the deepest truths are hidden, bracketed, and unmeasurable.

Return to Silence

We are a modern people. We count, we record, we argue. But perhaps the Jewish people’s truest identity is still found in that suspended silence of the wilderness; in those days where “nothing happened,” but everything mattered. It was a time when God was present by being absent, when the Ark defied logic, when the nun swam backward, and when exile meant not extinction, but preservation of purpose.

It is tempting to return to the great debates of theology—to “prove” God, to reason our way to transcendence. But as the Sefat Emet teaches, truth cannot be grasped, only received.

To speak about God is to miss Him. To speak to God is to begin the journey. And that journey, like the Ark, is not carried—it carries us.

Notes:

[1] Miguel de Unamuno, Love, Suffering, Pity and Personality, 1913.

[2] Guide for the Perplexed, I:58

[3] Talmud Bavli, Yoma 21a.

[4] Bamidbar 10:35–36.