As a Jews, where are you headed?

RABBI SAM THURGOOD

Beit Midrash Morasha, Sea Point

When you are heading out somewhere, do you think in terms of “I’m leaving here” or “I’m going there?” All the more so in our case, where the journey was not simply towards a geographical location, but towards the homeland and destiny of the Jewish people.

The Malbim (one of the great Torah commentators of the 19th century) answers this by explaining that the purpose of the extended 40-year journey in the desert was because Hashem had seen that the Jewish people were simply not ready to enter the Land of Israel.

They still had too much of the Egyptian mindset, were still too attached to the values and cognitive filters that they had picked up during their exile, and that they would need to shed themselves of these paradigms before they would be ready to be who the Jewish people are truly meant to be.

He gives an analogy (which I have adapted somewhat) of a diver deep underwater – he cannot simply surface immediately; his body will be injured by the change in pressure. He must rise a little, wait and adjust, rise a little more – until he is finally ready to surface.

The journeys of the Jewish people were not, in fact, journeys towards Israel – for that one journey would have sufficed. They were journeying away from who they were to whom they needed to become.

So the point really, according to the Malbim, was not the external journey, but the internal one. The external travel was necessary to provide the context, but as the philosophical cashier told the customer trying to break a R200 note: “Change comes from within”.

That is why the description of the journeys ends with the point being made that these journeys were done “according to the word of Hashem”. G-d, the ultimate guide in our lives, was determining the path of our journeys.

And now we need to think about this in our own lives – where is our journey from and where is it taking us to? What do we need to move away from – pride? anger? selfishness? resentment? What do we need to shed before we can meet our own destiny and embrace the incredible potential that lies within each one of us?

Many times we are lost even though we know exactly where we are. We are lost because we don’t know the path of our journey, have no context to tell us where we’re coming from and going to. Hashem guides us through our own lives and at every stage there is an opportunity for us to grow and move forward to the next level. Where are you headed?

Shabbat Shalom