Sermon for Shabbat Naso

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 6 June 2020

‘Brutal’ was the word Peter Bachman used in the Alyth Thursday Lecture to describe the effect of Covid19 and lockdown on Restaurants, Quick service outlets and Pubs. It was a masterful presentation of yet another area of life that might never return to the ‘normal’ that we assumed, barely 6 months ago, was here to stay. It’s hard to take in the impact of the crisis we are living through.

Harry read to us from chapter 11 of the book of Numbers. The first 10 chapters of the book described a census of the people (hence the name ‘Numbers’); some priestly stuff; the menorah in the Tabernacle; getting the camp organised for the journey across the desert and so on.

The book is ‘Numbers’ in English, but in Hebrew it’s ‘Bemidbar,’ meaning “In the desert” because in the coming weeks we’ll be reading about the Israelites’ journey across the desert. But we could argue that it should be renamed ‘The Book of Crises’ – plural. Barely a Shabbat goes by without some crisis or other in the Torah reading. And it all begins with Harry’s sidra. He read about a food crisis. It’s not the first time that the people have grumbled about food but this one feels different. Curiously they seem to have forgotten that they were slaves and never actually had the fantastic foods that they claim they enjoyed in Egypt. They’re the sort of people who give nostalgia a bad name –“nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be” but then whenever was it? That food crisis is resolved in a pretty dramatic way but then along comes another. Two men, Eldad and Medad, are acting like prophets. Joshua thinks Moses’ authority is being challenged. Crisis No 3 – Miriam and Aaron ‘speak against’ Moses because, they claim, he ‘married out’ with a Cushite woman. Strange because Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite woman. But they seem to be challenging Moses’ authority, “Has God spoken only through Moses?” they ask. Between the lines that means, “and why not through us?” Moses takes a more sanguine approach – maybe there’s truth in what they’re saying? he reflects. And crisis continues all the way through the book, with some really serious challenges to the purpose of the journey, the people’s relationship with God, Moses’ authority and so on.

But just what do we mean by ‘crisis’? Living as we have been doing for the past 3 months, it’s hard not to see ’crisis’ as anything but negative – a series of bad things happening, one after the other.

The word ‘crisis’ comes into English via Latin from Greek. My friend to whom I turn when I want to understand a Greek word tells me that in Greek it signifies ‘discrimination,’ ‘decision.’ It’s a separating, a pulling apart, what we might call a ‘tipping point.’ Indeed, that’s how it’s used when talking about an illness. We say that the patient’s fever has reached a crisis, a critical point: things could go either way – to recovery or to death.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that its figurative use suggests “a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; now applied especially to times of difficulty, insecurity, and suspense in politics or commerce.”

What were those Israelites saying in describing the wonderful food they had in Egypt? Something like “give us back our past – because the present is not tolerable and the future seems even worse.”

All you or I can say about what our future will be like is that it won’t be like the past, not the distant past, nor even the recent past we thought we could rely on just 6 or 7 months ago. So what will sustain us in these times?

There’s a story – it might be Chasidic but I’m not sure – of two brothers who have adjacent farms. Each morning they meet and chat, and it turns out that, for several nights, they’ve both been having a very similar dream: if they eat the corn of this year’s harvest they will go mad. They’re both so perplexed by this recurring dream that they go and speak to the village elder: “maybe there’s something in his experience which can help us?” They tell him about their dream. He does remember a similar time, just about 100 years before. “There’s nothing you can do to avoid eating the corn,” he says. “You will eat it. You will go mad. But what you can do is to take a rope, make some knots in it, and tie it around your waist. So that when you eat the corn, and feel yourselves going mad, you should look at those knots and remember that you’re going mad.”

I imagine few of us are not having something like that recurring dream: insecurity and a sense of living in a world gone mad, aided and abetted by our leaders who – unlike Moses in the book of Numbers – don’t really know how to show leadership. Other events are no more reassuring: what the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis brought to the surface in the USA is not limited to that country, for example. That such things can still happen 20 years into the 21^st century continues to astound and leave a deep, deep sense of dismay, even of despair.

Yet in the midst of the negative dimensions of the crisis we are all living through and with, how can we hold on to that sense of crisis as critical point, turning point? We know very well that things can go one way or the other. Are there any knots in that rope which remind us that we are going mad? The sense of solidarity with others has been one; the sense of caring that Covid19 has brought to the surface; a sense of connection with community in all its senses and levels. The numbers of our members, for example, who have found a new sense of meaning in the word ‘community’; the appreciation of nature; the simple fact that so many people have looked again at what do we really think is important in our existence? A reassessment of our values, a reordering of priorities – if that is the crisis, the turning point, the critical moment, that may already be something. There’s no cheap false hope to offer here. We will get through this but it will be hard. And we will get through it if we can hold onto those knots when things seem like they are falling apart.

Keyn yehi ratson.