SIVAN TORAH
Our parshiot in Sivan take us finally away from Mt. Sinai and on the move towards Canaan, the promised land. The scouts as representatives of the people utterly fail the spiritual test put to them, and our readings close with the generation born into slavery being compelled to die in the desert. Why? They lack faith in the divine because their liberation from Egypt was an external liberation only; they retained their slave mentality, longing for the ease and lack of responsibility of their enslaved life in Egypt. The failure of the scouts and the lack of trust in the divine leads to a challenge to the leadership of Moses by Korach, which echoes the challenge to his leadership by Aaron and Miriam just a few short chapters earlier. The portrait that emerges of the people is a dispirited and ununited people led by a great man who is an inadequate leader in Moses. It is not a pretty picture.
I’m going to discuss four themes, one from each parsha.
· When is one an adult male? (sorry for the sexism) (Naso)
· Moses and leadership (B’halotecha)
· The scouts as a failed spiritual test (Shlach Lecha)
· Is there one right way to worship the divine? What makes something a wrong way to worship?
When is one an adult male? This parsha and the previous one provide an answer for what our ancestors thought. The census in these two parshiot counts adult males in two ways. One is for army service (see Numbers Chapters 1 and 2) and counts males twenty years and older. The second approach is limited to the Levites serving the mishkan and counts males from ages 30-50 (Numbers 4:3, 21 etc). So a 22 year old male is good enough for the army, but not presumably mature enough for the sacred service to the mishkan. And, of course, women are completely excluded.
These approaches are both strictly based on age. There’s no test of any kind of developmental maturity. There’s no qualification based on being married or having children. We have the same thing in the United States. Age 18, you can vote or go to the military (women too). Age 21 you can buy alcohol. Certain ages, varies by state, you can get married.
The chronological approach is both completely understandable and utterly bypasses the question of psycho/spiritual maturity. All of us know far too many people who look like adults and behave like adolescents (or younger). Traditional societies, at least for boys, tended to demand clear signs that the boys were mature enough to take their place as young adults before they received the privileges of adulthood such as marriage and a place in the community council. They did this by putting them through some kind of strenuous tests that always take place in the context of the more than human world.
If our ancestors had some kind of way of having a boy prove that he was ready to be an adult, it has not been preserved. There is nothing obvious that we can reclaim. What do I mean by a psychospiritual adult? Here’s a definition, drawn from Bill Plotkin’s work. An adult is A person who knows their unique purpose on this planet and has developed a delivery system to share that unique purpose with a targeted community of folks.
I want to note that I think, contrary to Plotkin, that there is both a human centric developmental wheel and an ecocentric one. That is, I think it is possible to have a unique purpose on earth that is targeted only at the human community and a human only delivery system. Plotkin believes, on the contrary, there is only ecocentric development and that human development is necessarily stunted if a person does not find their unique place amongst the human and more than human world.
Let me offer my take on my own psychospiritual development as an example. I’m actually moving towards or am an elder in the human oriented developmental wheel. I believe that my unique gift for my human oriented focus was my ability to run an organization and my delivery system was running CITE, my teacher training business. This delivery system only manifested after my business partner’s death in 2012 when I was 54. Before that, I probably had the ability to run an organization, but I never had, so I had no delivery system.
My ecocentric development is a bit less straightforward. At one point I thought my unique purpose was to steward a piece of land with a delivery system of rotationally grazed grass fed beef. I do have a true ability to listen to pasture land and to cows and connect with the nexus of grass and cows. But I really don’t care about selling the beef so the delivery system wasn’t quite there. Further, I left the farm where I raised grass fed beef. So somehow that wasn’t quite it. Now I think that my ecocentric purpose is this reclamation of Animist Judaism and my delivery system is my teaching and writing. So these days I feel like an ecocentric adult—but that is a very recent development based on the parsha class I teach and the people my website reaches.
I’ve been highly concerned with understanding what it means to be an adult because of the lack of adults and consequently elders in our society—you can’t be an elder if you aren’t first an adult. I think we suffer greatly from the pervasive psychospiritual immaturity of our society.
Answer these questions from either a human centric perspective or a broader one that centers the more than human world. What is your unique purpose on this planet? Who is your target community for your expression of this unique purpose? How will you share this purpose with this community?
Moses is a reluctant leader with no natural feel for leadership. I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about and being a leader. I can say with great confidence that good leadership makes a difference and that it involves a variety of skills, some of which come much more easily to some of us than they do to others. I’ve been around enough bad leaders to also know that bad leadership can sink institutions that would be stable under even mediocre leadership. Leadership matters.
Moses was raised around leaders, growing up in the Pharoah’s household, but he has no feel for leadership. He also has little desire to lead. In my experience, people being forced to lead who don’t want to is something that really does not work. Moses lack of desire to lead is reinforced in this parsha. This has been a throughline in his story, from his very initial reluctance to accept the job of freeing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. You’ll also recall that at first in Exodus he is trying to be the judge for all cases, big and small, until his father in law (Jethro in this case), tells him “the thing you are doing is not good.” (18:17) and Jethro tells him how to organize the legal system (18:17-26). Now in our parsha, after the people complain to Moses about YHVH’s fires and Moses successfully intervenes, he says to YHVH “I’m not able, I, by myself, to carry this entire people, because it is too heavy for me. And if this is how you treat me, kill me, if I have found favor in your eyes, and let me not see my suffering.” (11:14-15). Obviously, there is some hyperbole here, but it seems to me that this is a man who is desperate to be shed of his leadership role.
Too many leaders are in it for the power or the paycheck or the ego gratification of being the top dog associated with being a leader. Both Israel and the United States have a leader or aspiring leader who is largely motivated by staying out of prison. But that’s not Moses. When prophecy is granted to the elders, as we’ll see below, Moses is relieved. When Aaron and Miriam are angry because they think Moses is hoarding the prophetic power, he isn’t mad at them at all (YHVH is, but that’s a different story).
There’s way too much top down leadership where leaders believe that what they are supposed to do is tell other people what to do. But that’s not Moses either. I can think of no example where Moses speaks in his own name and demands obedience; it is always about YHVH.
Then there are people in positions of leadership who lack a vision of where the organization should go and how they can help facilitate that—and those people wind up being buffeted about by the other egos present. I certainly have experienced that as a person put into leadership positions at times in my life. This feels closer to the issue with Moses. Does he have a vision of a holy people? The only vision that seems authentic to him is his intolerance of the oppression of his people by the Egyptians, but otherwise it seems like he is some kind of pawn in the hands of YHVH, the actor who has a vision.
Great leaders spend a lot of time listening and validating everyone with whom they work. They are able to articulate a vision that they can successfully sell to their constituents whom they gladfully serve. They are able to create cohesive organizations that mostly share an orientation towards common goals and thus minimize the grumbling of the ever present discontent. Does any of that sound like the Moses we’ve seen so far? Spoiler alert, it doesn’t get any better.
Now, I know this isn’t the usual reading of Moses, the greatest prophet who ever lived, the man closest to the divine, the lawgiver of Israel. Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our Rabbi. But a person can be a great prophet and a lousy leader.
Do you agree with my assessment about Moses and leadership? Why or why not? In what contexts, if any, do you see yourself as a leader and in what contexts does leadership sound like the last thing in the world you would ever want to do? What makes someone a good leader? Great leader? Think of the examples you’ve known in your life.
Here’s the myth of the scouts. The parsha begins with the assignment of the task of scouting the land of Canaan. They leave the encampment towards the land, and ten of the 12 scouts are completely frightened by the giants they encounter. They conclude that the Israelites cannot conquer the land. Only Joshua, the eventual conqueror, and Caleb, from the tribe of Judah, advocate for trusting in YHVH’s promise and power, and thus moving forward with the conquest. Caleb’s pro invasion stance is important because David is from the tribe of Judah and the editors were proponents of the rule of the house of David.
The people harken to the words of the ten scouts and bemoan their fate saying “If only we had died in the land of Egypt. Or in the wilderness…Let’s appoint a chief and go back to Egypt.” (14:3-4).
YHVH gets angry and tells Moses that he will strike them all with an epidemic and then raise a new people for Moses to lead (14:12). Moses calms him down, recycling the argument that it will look bad to the people of the world and hurt YHVH’s reputation. This is the same argument he has used before with the Golden Calf episode (Exodus 31:11-14). YHVH calms down but still resolves to have the adults all die in the wilderness (14:29) after wandering for forty years. He then kills the ten scouts who persuaded the people to not continue to Canaan (14:37).
The people then repent, say they will go up to Canaan, but Moses says it is too late, it won’t work. Some of them proceed anyway without YHVH, Moses and the ark of the covenant. The result is predictable; they are crushed. (14:45).
My view is that the scouts were sent on a certain kind of spiritual quest; this wasn’t simply a question of a catalog of the state of the land of Canaan, even though the text presents it as a straightforward scouting expedition. What supports this interpretation that it is a spiritual quest?
Our first hint is that the scouts are gone for exactly forty days (13:25). This is the same time period that Moses spent on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:28), Elijah in his vision fast after he flees from Ahab and Jezebel (1 Kings 19:8), the same time a certain Jewish shaman from the Galilee engaged in his own quest (Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-13).
Second, the structure of spiritual initiations always involves some kind of separation, a liminal or intermediate period where the initiate is tested, and then a return to the community with a gift for the community. The story perfectly conforms with this structure. The scouts leave with the assignment to bring back some typical fruit (this is the gift) (13:23)
However, the scouts bring back the fruit in an effort to fake success at their mission. They failed to actually assess the strength of the people and then lied about it. They report “The people who live in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified, very big.” (13:28), only they have no way to know if this is true because they didn’t go far enough into the land to find out. Simply put, they got scared by the giants; “we were like grasshoppers in our eyes” (13:33) and decided the best course of action was to bring back something so they looked good.
The scouts gave into their fear rather than face it. In all the deep spiritual work I’ve done, there is always a point of fear where it feels like there is no way for me to succeed, I’m going to die and all I want to do is quit. And not just me; I’ve never met anyone for whom this isn’t true. We must find some way through the fear.
We can fail our spiritual quests in one of at least two ways. One way is by not engaging in them. Volunteering to be totally alone without any food for 2-4 days—that’s not a vacation even if you are using vacation time to go. Sitting in silence for a week is not like sitting on the beach. How many of us have shied away from the challenges life has offered us? If that’s you, find a suitable challenge and go do it. Big or small. One vision fast I participated in a woman pitched her tent within sight of the house—but it was a much bigger stretch for her than it was for those of us who followed instructions and placed ourselves deeper into the wilderness.
Another way we can fail a quest is by not seeing it through and not bringing back any kind of boon or gift. In our scouts’ case, they gave into their fear and did not find the way through it. The way through involves trust, and we’ll discuss this more shortly. Our scouts gave up and returned to base camp rather than face their fears. I know this one intimately. I was given a great spiritual gift in the mid 90’s and my effort to bring forth that gift to the world has waxed and mostly waned since then. All with good reason, of course, and at least I have persevered, which is more than we can say for our ancestors.
Have you shied away from suitable spiritual challenges? If so, find a suitable one and go do it. Are there challenges where you have stopped or are stuck in the middle? Gifts you haven’t managed to quite bring back? Find ways to reengage in the process.
Is there one right way to worship the divine and what makes something a wrong way? Korah says to Moses and Aaron “You have much. Because all of the congregation, all of them are holy and YHVH is among them. And why do you raise yourself up over YHVH’s community?” (16:3). Nahmanides, a prominent medieval commentator, argues that what has been taken from Korah, Dathan and Abiram is the right to offer sacrifices that they used to be able to offer as the eldest in the family (commentary on 16:3). Korah is a Levite, but he is not a priest (16:8-10). This apparently means that he is not part of Aaron’s family, and thus there are priestly things that he cannot do because they are reserved to Aaron’s family. Dathan and Abiram are from the tribe of Reuben who were able to offer sacrifices as clean heads, but are disenfranchised from making offerings in this new way of worshipping YHVH.
Korah, it seems to me is NOT rejecting YHVH, but rather a certain way of worshipping YHVH, following Nahmanides. We’ve seen this with the Golden Calf. The community absolutely believed they were worshipping YHVH by dancing around the Golden Calf—they declared it a festival for YHVH (Exodus 32:5). Aaron and Miriam’s complaint in Numbers 12 is the same—they are not rejecting YHVH but complaining about how Moses, in their perception, is hogging the attention of YHVH and acting as the only prophetic spokesperson of the divine (12:2)
Korah and his followers, and previously the people in the Golden Calf incident and Miriam and Aaron—they are all rejecting a change in the worship of YHVH. Indeed, the day after Korah and his immediate followers are swallowed up by the earth, “and all the congregation of the children of Israel complained the next day against Moses and against Aaron, saying “you killed YHVH’s people.” (17:6). This sounds much more like a rejection of a certain way of worshipping YHVH than a rejection of YHVH.
Why is this significant for us reading this text more than two thousand years later? It raises the key question of the boundaries of what is permissible worship and what is not. For instance, Jesus was undoubtedly born and died a Jew, but the Messianic Jews who worship Jesus as divine and wear tzitzit seem to me to be outside of the bounds of Judaism. There’s this whole group of them that belong to a Facebook group of Jewish homesteaders. Whenever they post about Jesus as Messiah, I’m like, what are you doing in this group? They may call themselves Jews and want to come and participate and proselytize at Jewish events, but the idea of calling them Jews leaves me completely queasy. On the other hand, the idea of worshipping YHVH as a male deity with his Goddess consort Asherah is something our ancestors absolutely believed in, as testified to in the archaeological evidence. This belief, to the extent that they know about it, would leave most or almost all mainstream Jews just as queasy as I feel about Messianic Jews.
What is out of bounds in worshipping the divine such that if you believed and practiced it, you would be stepping enough outside of the tradition that you would no longer be Jewish (or Catholic or Buddhist or Animist etc)?
QUESTIONS
Answer these questions from either a human centric perspective or a broader one that centers the more than human world. What is your unique purpose on this planet? Who is your target community for your expression of this unique purpose? How will you share this purpose with this community?
Do you agree with my assessment about Moses and leadership? Why or why not? In what contexts, if any, do you see yourself as a leader and in what contexts does leadership sound like the last thing in the world you would ever want to do? What makes someone a good leader? Great leader? Think of the examples you’ve known in your life.
Have you shied away from suitable spiritual challenges? If so, find a suitable one and go do it. Are there challenges where you have stopped or are stuck in the middle? Gifts you haven’t managed to quite bring back? Find ways to reengage in the process.
What is out of bounds in worshipping the divine such that if you believed and practiced it, you would be stepping enough outside of the tradition that you would no longer be Jewish (or Catholic or Buddhist or Animist etc)?
