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| Artwork: Horizon Canopy, by Michael Komarck |
Parashas Mattos/Masei: Seduced by Particulars
Bnei Yisrael had just vanquished the Midianites and were preparing to finally enter Eretz Yisrael. However, not everyone is so keen about settling in Eretz Yisrael proper. The Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven approach Moshe Rabbeinu with a request: they would like to settle outside of Eretz Yisrael, across the Yarden, where the land is ideal for their abundant livestock.
They said, "If we have found favor in your eyes, let this land be given to your servants as a heritage; do not bring us across the Yarden" (Bamidbar 32:5).How does Moshe take this? Not very well. He condemns the Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven in no uncertain terms, even going so far as to compare them to the sinful generation of the Meraglim who angered Hashem and caused Bnei Yisrael to wander in the Wilderness for 40 years:
Moshe said to the Bnei Gad and the Bnei Reuven, "Shall your brothers go out to battle while you settle here? Why do you dissuade the heart of Bnei Yisrael from crossing to the Land that Hashem has given them? This is what your fathers did, when I sent them from Kadesh-barnea to see the Land. They went up to the valley of Eshcol and saw the Land and they dissuaded the heart of Bnei Yisrael not to come to the Land that Hashem has given them. The wrath of Hashem burned on that day, and He swore saying, 'If these men who came up from Egypt - from the age of twenty years and above - will see the ground that I swore to Avraham, to Yitzchak, and to Yaakov ... for they have not followed Me fully ... The wrath of Hashem burned against Israel and He made them wander in the Wilderness for forty years, until the end of the entire generation that did evil in the eyes of Hashem. Behold! - you have risen up in place of your fathers, a society of sinful people, to add more to the burning wrath of Hashem against Israel. For if you will turn away from after Him, He will again let it rest in the Wilderness, and you will destroy this entire people (ibid. 32:6-15)
To an impartial reader, this might seem like an overreaction. Was the request made by Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven really as bad as Moshe makes it seem? Moreover, what are we supposed to learn from their cheit?
As usual, the Ralbag provides a unique perspective on this cheit. He writes:
[From here we learn] a lesson in middos, namely, that it is not proper for a person to be seduced by the particulars to choose one thing over another, except after great deliberation. We see that because Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven had abundant livestock, they were seduced into choosing the land to the east, over the Yarden, since that was a good location for cattle. However, this caused them to later regret [their decision] after the land had been conquered, for they saw that this might cause their descendants to stray away from Hashem. This, in turn, caused them to build an [illegal] altar, as it is stated at the end of Sefer Yehoshua (Chapter 22) [which led to major problems for them]. Additionally, they would be more vulnerable to Israel's enemies. For this reason you will find that the first people to be exiled by the king of Assyria were these tribes. Moreover, the Moabites - whose land we took over from Sichon - were continually like a thorn which afflicted Israel, as we see from the events of Yiftach, the Giladi.
According to the Ralbag, the main take-away from the cheit of Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven is not about the particular decision to settle outside of Eretz Yisrael per se, but rather, it is an insight about decision-making in general. Their mistake was allowing themselves to be "seduced by the particulars" in their decision about where to settle. As a result of that seduction, they were blind to the harm they would be causing to themselves, their brethren, and their future descendants.
Some might find this lesson to be too obvious for the Ralbag to highlight. Indeed, according to Saadia Gaon, the entire Sefer Mishlei may be viewed as a guidebook to avoid making this very mistake. Shlomo ha'Melech sums up this idea himself, saying: "There is a path which is straight before a man, but at its end are paths of death" (Mishlei 14:12). Then again, Saadia Gaon would also say that although this idea might be clear and obvious "in the eyes of the intellect," that is not the case "in the eyes of the emotions." We are all prone to being blinded by our emotions and being "seduced by the particulars." It is for this reason that we need to review and reinforce this lesson as much as possible.
But it is important to note that the error of the Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven did not occur on a personal level of decision-making, but on a societal level. It would seem that they had the best interests of their tribes and families in mind. They just weren't "thinking fourth-dimensionally" - that is to say, they weren't thinking about how their actions would affect future generations of Gadites and Reubenites. It is difficult enough guarding yourself against "seduction by the particulars" in your own lifetime, but it is even more difficult to do so when thinking about future generations.
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| "Gad! Reuven! You're not thinking fourth dimensionally!" |
This isn't the only instance where the Ralbag draws our attention to a poor decision made by a group of people to settle in a bad location. The Ralbag learns that this is the very reason why Hashem scattered the Dor ha'Haflagah (Generation of the Dispersion) by mixing up their language. The pesukim state:
The whole earth was of one language and of common principles. And it came to pass, when they migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there (Bereishis 11:1-2).
The mainstream view is that Hashem intervened because the society of the Dor ha'Haflagah was evil and corrupt, in one way or another. The Ralbag takes a radically different approach. He learns that Hashem intervened to save the human race from potential devastation. Ralbag writes:
Hashem saw that for all of mankind to be gathered in a single location would be detrimental for the continuity of the human species, for it is possible that a catastrophe would occur in that location - whether an earthquake that originated in the bowels of the earth, or a tornado that smashed mountains and broke stones, or by a meteor shower, or a flood, or other such catastrophes. If the entire human species were located in a single location on earth, there is a chance that they would be wiped out if that portion of the earth were destroyed. For this reason, it was necessary for mankind to be scattered throughout all parts of the earth, so that the species would last, and that if a disaster happened to one part, the species would be preserved through the other.
Thus, according to the Ralbag, the error of the Dor ha'Haflagah was similar to the error of Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven: both groups were "seduced by the particulars" when choosing a location to make their home, and both groups were blind to the danger they posed to their offspring - a physical danger to the entire human race in one case, and a spiritual (and physical) danger to their tribes in the other case.
At this point you might be wondering why I have chosen these two seemingly disparate incidents in Chumash as my focus in this blog post. Well, it just so happens that I was confronted with a similar situation in my own life this week. An article entitled The Really Big One was published a few days ago in The New Yorker. The article is an exposé on what is known as "the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami" - a seismic event of epic proportions which will inevitably happen sometime in the near future. Here is the picture painted by the author:
When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater ... The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy.FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.
Later on in the article, the author reports that "the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten." Those odds are not good, to say the least.
As you can imagine, this article caused somewhat of a commotion on the West Coast. Judging by the other articles I skimmed, some people accepted these predictions at face value; other experts reported that the science was correct, but said that the disaster scenarios weren't nearly as bad in all areas as this author made it out to be; others preferred to believe that this disaster was still along ways off - too far off to worry.
This article hit my emotions on a very personal level. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. My family and many of my friends still live there. I, myself, have seriously considered moving there when I'm ready to settle down. That being said, you can imagine the conflict I felt upon reading this article.
I immediately began thinking about these findings from a practical standpoint. I found this to be much trickier than I expected. As we go through life, we become more and more adept at making cost-benefit analyses and weighing the various pros and cons. But every once in a while, we are thrown a curve-ball consideration - such as this one - which is so unique that it becomes difficult to factor into our long-term planning.
Shortly after reading this article, my mind went to the two excerpts from the Ralbag cited in this blog post. I wondered: Am I being seduced by the wonderful particulars of the Pacific Northwest? Am I rationalizing my desire to one day move here? Am I making the same mistake that the Bnei Gad and the Bnei Reuven made when they thought that it was a good decision to settle on the other side of the Yarden? Am I exposing myself and my future progeny to physical danger in the same way as the Dor ha'Haflagah?
For now, I believe that more investigation is in order before making any dramatic decisions. Nevertheless, I learned a valuable lesson from thinking about this article during the same week I thought about Bnei Gad, Bnei Reuven, and the Dor ha'Haflagah, namely, it is very difficult not to be seduced by the particulars when contemplating very long-term consequences which may or may not even come to pass during one's lifetime. Reading the Ralbag's lesson was one thing, but relating to it by considering this local, personal issue made that lesson much more real to me.
This, in turn, made me realize how many of the problems facing the Jewish community are plagued by this same cheit of decision-making. Whether it's problems from within (e.g. the Jewish Day School tuition, the Shidduch crisis, the polarization of Jews to the extreme right or the extreme left) or the problems from without (e.g. U.S. relations, the Palestinians, Iran), it seems that "seduction by the particulars" inevitably exerts its sinister influence. And like the examples in Chumash, the problem is magnified by the fact we are forced to make decisions which affect us, but also shape the lives of future generations.
I don't know what the solution is, but being the first step is always to recognize the problem, as the Ralbag did in his analysis of the events in our parashah. That is one of the many things I like about the Ralbag's approach to Torah she'bi'Chsav: not only does he bring out deep and lofty ideas in Torah and metaphysics, but he also extracts the humble practical lessons from the narrative. By contemplating and reviewing these lessons as they appear in Torah she'bi'Chsav, we can - with God's help become more adept at applying them to our everyday lives.
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