Parshat Matot-Masei begins with what at first appears to be a cryptic list of the places where the Israelites camped during their 40-year journey through the wilderness, as one generation gave way to the next before entering Eretz Yisrael.
Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, the Ohr HaChaim (18th-century Morocco), notes the somewhat unusual and repetitive language that introduces this itinerary. He explains that the Torah is revealing something unexpected: Moses did not compile this list all at once at the end of the journey. Rather, he recorded each stage as it happened. When God first instructed the Israelites to depart from Egypt, Moses began keeping a written record. He noted the departure from Raamses, then, when the people encamped at Sukkot, he recorded that stop, and so on throughout the wilderness. Only when the Israelites reached Arvot Moav, poised to enter Eretz Yisrael, did God instruct Moses to incorporate these personal notes into the Torah itself.
In the Ohr HaChaim’s reading, Moses had been keeping a diary ever since the Exodus — a deeply human chronicle of the twists and turns, triumphs and setbacks, of a people undergoing profound generational and spiritual transformation. Standing at the border of the Promised Land, God declares that this personal record belongs within the eternal text of Torah. The messy, contingent experience of history is revealed to have been Torah all along.
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We, too, are living through a period of profound change and disruption. In an era of rising — and, God willing, soon falling — authoritarianism, Jewish and non-Jewish publications alike are filled with debates over the boundaries of Jewishness, Zionism, and liberalism. Our communal institutions devote enormous energy to questions of what Jewish ideas are acceptable and who belongs in our synagogues, rabbinical schools, and even the halls of Congress.
The Ohr HaChaim’s reading invites us to see this complex and sometimes painful journey as Torah as well. Every step on this winding path, every apparent setback, may someday be understood as part of a larger process of spiritual transformation. That does not diminish the pain of the present. At times, our communal struggles descend into exclusion, disrespect, and cruelty. Yet it is precisely in those moments that I return to a remarkable teaching by Rav Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin (19th-century Poland).
Writing on Parshat Matot, which falls during the Three Weeks — the period of mourning and reflection leading to Tisha B’Av — Rav Tzadok teaches:
Precisely within these days (the Three Weeks), in the midst of concealment, the deepest work takes place. We see that it was specifically after the destruction of the Temple that the Oral Torah began to spread and flourish through the Tannaim and Amoraim who arose afterward. Likewise, the Midrash teaches that the essential revelation of the Oral Torah comes precisely through suffering and affliction. Of this it is said: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” (Isaiah 9:1)rbal confession has a double power. Acknowledging our faults aloud affirms that we stand transparently before Hashem. At the same time, confession becomes a practice of spiritual formation, habituating us toward greater honesty and responsibility.
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It was the shattering of the Temple that created the conditions for the flowering of Judaism’s greatest treasure: the Oral Torah. Only through an experience of disintegration and ferment did something new and beautiful become possible. Our tradition insists that moments of moral and spiritual darkness can become the soil from which extraordinary light emerges.
May we one day be blessed to look back from the Divine perspective and recognize that each step of this journey — even the ones that seemed like missteps — was Torah all along.
Rabbi Jonah Winer (he/him) is T’ruah’s director of learning. He was born and raised in Toronto and, after earning a BA in Religious Studies at McGill University, was ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York. While there, he worked as a Rabbinic Intern at NYU’s Bronfman Center and the Kehillah of Riverdale. After ordination, he spent three years working at Hillels, most recently as Senior Jewish Educator and Orthodox Rabbi at Brown RISD Hillel.