From Mountain (Text) To Wilderness (People)

On The Double Meaning and Double Direction of Sinai

As the Lord had commanded Moses, so he counted them in the wilderness of Sinai. (Numbers 1:19)

We must take note that instead of the Torah first writing ‎that Moses had carried out God’s command and had counted the ‎people, and then adding that he had done so in accordance with ‎God’s instructions—which would have been the normal syntax— ‎the Torah first emphasized that Moses did exactly as instructed. ‎Why did the Torah depart from its norm? We must remember ‎that when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people, the collective ‎soul of the Jewish people was considered as the “body” of the ‎Torah, seeing that the Jewish people comprised 600,000 souls ‎equal to the number of letters in the Torah. Each Israelite may be ‎viewed as representing one of the letters of the Torah. ‎‎According to the Zohar then, one may ‎allegorically equate Torah and the Jewish people. We may ‎therefore understand Moses’s having “counted” the Jewish people ‎as another way of saying that he had taught the Jewish people ‎the Torah. (Kedushat Levi)

You’re teaching Othello in prison. Do you start with a quotation from Shakespeare or do you start by asking, “What’s your biggest challenge?” The first mode is the mode of Mount Sinai, the second of the Wilderness of Sinai. Let me explain.

Sinai refers to both the name of a mountain and the name of a desert. It is the locus of Revelation, but also the problem space wherein a wandering people finds itself. One Sinai marks an event, the other an endless expanse filled with the grumbles of “are we there yet?” In the Torah’s ordering, “the wilderness of Sinai” appears before and after “Mount Sinai” to remind us how hard it is to convert religious experience into worldly savvy and success. A sense of wilderness abides even after God reveals the Torah.

The Torah connects being in the wilderness to counting—for when you are in a state of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, it can be soothing to count what you can count. Headcount serves as buffer from the anxiety of facing more existential questions. Measurable things provide the illusion of certainty in a world governed by low conviction. An assemblage of facts, a barrage of spreadsheets, can obscure the heart of the matter: the wilderness, the vulnerability.

According to the Kedushat Levi, counting the people is akin to teaching the people Torah. Ironically, the count is not about tallying quantities, but finding a synthesis between the individual and the collective. Each person is a letter—atomic and insignificant in itself—but whose combinations prove meaningful. Moses is a teacher not only of text, but of people. Mount Sinai is where Moses teaches from the text to the people. The Wilderness of Sinai is where Moses teaches from the the people to the text. Both are Sinai. In one, Moses is a decipherer and transmitter of first principles (beyn adam l’makom), in the other Moses is a decipherer and transmitter of human need (beyn adam l’chavero). In Exodus, Torah expresses itself vertically. In Bamidbar, it expresses itself horizontally.

Counting people means reading the room. Counting letters means reading the book. But in both cases you are trying to find patterns; hermeneutics and social psychology should reinforce each other. But not everyone has time for hermeneutics. Not everyone has energy. The people are hungry, tired, suffer low morale. What does it mean to teach them Torah? The Kedushat Levi points to a radical reading: What if teaching the people Torah is done not by reciting words they don’t follow, but by leading them through the desert? If Torah = people, and studying Torah means counting people, then Moses proves a sage not by giving moral or legal instructions, but simply by accompanying the people through the desert. On the flip side, what sustains, or should sustain, the people through their wandering in the desert? Torah. Although they are weak, the people are “counted,” that is, they are buoyed by a leader who seeks to meet them where they are. The people refuse to ascend the mountain, but have no choice but to cross the desert. So be it, Revelation will have to occur there.

Bamidbar expands the meaning of Torah to include life experience. There is the Torah of books and the Torah of observance. One is studied, one is lived. Ideally, the two are harmonized. We live lives committed to study. Our lives are bettered by study. Our study deepened by life. But even when they are not harmonized, we can offer that there is Torah in the experience of being lost, of being disoriented, of doubt. Wisdom is always available even when we reject because we are too shut down. Wisdom is available even to those who just want to keep count, who find comfort in analytics, no matter the quality of the data.

As we lead up to Shavuot this week, consider that Torah includes not just the words of Scripture, but the words of the Jewish people, and the lives of the Jewish people. Consider that Torah expands not just because of those who study it, but also because of those who “count” the people. Teachers without substance (Mount Sinai) have nothing to offer. Teachers without students (The Wilderness of Sinai) have nobody to offer it to, or learn it with.

This year, may we be blessed to enjoy both great textual insights and great life moments, great intellectual inspiration and great partnership. We no more know what the Torah means by counting letters than we understand what the Jewish people means by counting Jews. But sociology, ontology, and theology are intertwined. Bamidbar, particularly through the lens of the Kedushat Levi, asks us to find theological significance in sociology. We need to be able to seek wisdom in a census. We need to count the letters (Si-n-AI) not to quantify them, but to understand that a word transcends its constitutive letters. Similarly, a people is more than the sum of its parts. And a wilderness (life, history) is more than what can be written of it. The people that can be counted is not the eternal people. The Torah that can be cited is not the eternal Torah.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Shavuot Sameach,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh