Unfamiliar Territory
Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism in Bamidbar
These are the generations of Aaron and Moses at the time that the LORD spoke with Moses on Mount Sinai. (Numbers 3:1)
But [subsequently] it mentions only the sons of Aaron! But they also are called the sons of Moses because he taught them the Torah. This tells us that whoever teaches the Torah to the child of his fellow Scripture regards him as though he had begotten him (Rashi, citing Sanhedrin 19b).
“The essence of home only reaches its luminosity abroad.” (Heidegger, “The Language of Johann Peter Hebel”)
The Book of Numbers (Bamidbar) begins with the commandment to take a census of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Torah records that the “people camped by their flags, and so they marched, each with his clan according to his ancestral house” (2:34). The preponderance of flags suggests that Israelite identity was not a monolith. Take any group and put it under the microscope and you’ll find yet smaller groups within it, ad infinitum. (We might even say that a person contains at least 12 tribes within herself.) The 4th book of the Chumash emphasizes the fortified population growth of the people, but also their idealized unity-in-separation. Israel is presented as a federation, a meta-tribe, or family of families. If the lesson of the Tower of Babel is that abstract, totalizing universalism is the enemy of the individual, and thus of human dignity, the opening of Bamidbar offers a strange attempt to move beyond the tendency to social conformity and soul-crushing collectivism.
People are social and political creatures who belong to groups, but they cannot be reduced to them. Read charitably, the Torah’s foregrounding of 12 tribes suggests that Israel must contain multitudes if it is to avoid the pitfalls of Babel.
But isn’t containing multitudes—to use Whitman’s phrase—still a kind of hegemony, since there is one overarching entity (Israel) that contains and regulates the multitudes? Why can’t there be a thirteenth or fourteenth tribe, formed by dissidents who don’t like their existing options (and want to eat avocado toast all day)? Why can’t people switch tribes, the tribes of Israel being tied primarily to blood and ancestry? Can a Gadite convert to a Naftaliite? So you’ve avoided totalitarianism at the macro level by allowing people to sub-divide, but aren’t you still endorsing some totalizing and essentialist view at the local level? Localists are right to be suspect of imperial tyranny, but cosmopolitans are right to worry that the removal of an imperial superpower will simply empower local tyrants to fill its void. It’s easier to cry against hegemony and essentialism than to thwart them, because if you cut off the head of a large monster ten smaller ones grow back—and few can or want to spend their lives decapitating monsters.
If the Torah really is so concerned for the individual why have any form of tribalism at all? For that matter, why even have nations/peoples at all? Of course, this line of questioning is anachronistic, enforcing a modern, liberal paradigm on a text and culture that long pre-date the discovery of “individualism.” Yet there is one tribe, Levi, the priestly tribe, that stands apart from the other tribes in that it serves the entire people. The Levites do not own land, do not bear flags, do not take “pride” in their Levite identity. They belong to the holy. Their flags, as it were, are the sacred objects they carry, the Tabernacle beams they shoulder. A Benjaminite can experience tribally-rooted pride and shame; a Levite’s pride would be both disqualifying and incoherent.
Insofar as the priests are a microcosmic reflection of what the other tribes should aspire to, namely, to be a nation of priests, the Torah wisely offers us a split screen. On one side, it shows us human nature as it mostly is—tribal, kin-based, self-involved. On the other, it shows us human nature as it occasionally is—broad, values-based, other-centric. Israel is a composite of both human nature as it is and as it might be. It is itself a microcosm intended to be a “light unto other nations,” so that peace and thriving on earth are presented to us as a fractal picture of human beings simultaneously accepting and transcending their givens.
The tension between accepting and transcending one’s givens is best captured through the difference between one’s family of origin and one’s family of choice. The tribes represent the idea that genealogy is destiny, or at least, that one has a responsibility (if not simply an involuntary compulsion) to pass on a lineage, to tell one’s family story, to carry on its values, temperaments, genetics and epigenetics. But, the reality of “conversion,” especially as expanded and illuminated by rabbinic Judaism, means that inclusion in the people is not determined exclusively (or even ideally) by biology or history, but by choice.
The parasha says “these are the generations of Moses and Aaron,” but tells us only the names of Aaron’s children, leaving out Moses’s. One can give a variety of responses that neutralize this strange detail, but Rashi takes advantage of it to give a mini-sermon about the power of education. Teachers are parents, in some sense, of their students. (It’s also possibly a sad sociological observation that, very often, great teachers and leaders leave their own children behind because they are concerned for the people as a whole and have no time for or interest in self-serving favoritism).
If teaching is a form of parenting, and if Torah is a form of belonging, Rashi and the Talmud are suggesting that it is a radical force that undermines the primacy of kinship bonds. This is the fear of every family—that the teacher will steal their childrens’ loyalty. We know the nightmare version from phenomena like Mao’s Cultural Revolution in which children informed on their parents. We also know the theoretically dystopian version from Plato’s Republic, in which children must be ripped away from their parents to be raised by “guardians” if society is to become better, less limited by the values of common folk. Here is Jesus, according to Luke, 14:25— “if you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life!” These words are archetypal of the tension many feel between the family of origin and the community of choice.
The Torah isn’t anti-family nor is it simply pro-family. Rather, it highlights a potential tension between the family (the given, the familiar) and Torah (the choice, the transcendent). The Torah tells us that we have an obligation to honor our parents (an obligation to honor teachers is not one of the Ten Commandments); yet the Talmud instructs students to mourn the loss of their teachers as if they were parents; it instructs students to return the lost objects of their teachers before returning the lost objects of parents. The rabbinic justification for putting teachers ahead of parents is that “parents prepare us for this world, while teachers prepare us for the world to come.” And yet we live in this world. And so to diminish our givens and rush headlong into the world to come is to risk calamity.
If we are bound exclusively to family then we are condemned to the lowest common denominator of whatever it happens to believe and value (even when it’s wrong). But if were are not bound by family at all, we lose accountability, tethering, a primordial sense of relationship, story, and trans-historical time, that are portals to the divine. We may be right, but we are groundless. The move from our givens to our own discoveries and reworking of our givens can take many forms. In some, it takes the radical form of an Abraham “leaving his father’s house.” But for most, God and Torah need to be places where one can bring one’s family along, no matter how fraught or complicated or limiting.
Ultimately, the twelves tribes and their strife—which occupy a good part of the Tanakh—are no longer part of our memory. Today, there are only three categories of Jew, Cohen, Levi, and Israel. That is, the only category that exists today is priest or non-priest. A solidified sense of one’s clan or micro-group, rooted in a sense of shared ancestry, lost out, for myriad reasons. Yet, today, if we no longer identify as Jews who descend from a particular ancestor, we nevertheless sub-group by geography, synagogue, denominational affiliation, political leaning, theology, custom, and more (e.g., Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi; Hasidic vs. Litvish; American vs. Israeli, etc.) Western modernity has seen—and effected—a decline in the value of familial kinship, but not in the inevitable value of sub-groups. Coats of Arms may change, but flags are here to stay. In a broad sense, then, the Torah’s core tension between sub-group rooted in self-interest and larger group-rooted in a sense of higher purpose and Godly focus remains alive and well.
One could argue that the Torah’s project of bringing all twelve tribes together failed, so that the Tower of Babel story reads not just as a tale about humanity but also about the foibles of “Jewish unity,” the paradoxical need for a “Babylonian exile,” for a cacophony of Jewish voices, groups, Judaisms. The census we read about in Bamidbar, and that frames the book, must be read in light of the alienation we feel at lists of names and numbers that seem not now to be inoperative. Yet if the rabbis discovered prayer as a substitute for sacrifice (which I discussed in my commentary on Leviticus), they also discovered education and Torah learning as substitutes for family custom. We should feel ambivalent about the wholesale replacement of family custom by rabbinic law. On the one hand, there is no substitute for the warmth of familial love, the intuitive ease of learning by mimetic example; on the other hand, the notion that one might travel anywhere in the world and find people with whom one might learn and forge connection simply by sharing the same texts and practices, rooted in those texts, is profound.
With Shavuot approaching this Sunday night, we prepare to re-stand at Sinai, to experience Torah as something that individuates and collectivizes us, that speaks to us as members of a family and a meta-family, a family of tight bonds, but also family that welcomes the stranger and loves the convert. As we celebrate with our “tribe” (however defined) we consider that Torah isn’t given to this tribe or that tribe, but to all. The Midrash records that Torah is given in the wilderness so that no group can claim it as exclusively theirs. The Torah cannot be owned; it is a radically unsettling force that disturbs our sense of belonging and ownership—but it is an unsettling that helps us settle, a disturbance that helps us belong.
Revelation is an other-worldly event that should motivate our love for the world. Torah teaches us that our love should both include and transcend our need for the familiar.
Shabbat Shalom (and Chag Sameach),
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—Check out my new poem, published this week in The News Station.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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