Parashat Mattot 5768

When I was a teenager, my family moved to a small town called Clever, outside of Springfield, Missouri. We lived, quite literally, in the “middle of nowhere.” My father, who grew up on a small farm in rural Kansas, delighted in exposing my family to the finer sides of country life. One of his favorite games was to stop his pickup truck directly over the well soiled cow path that ran across our country road, open the car windows, and as the cows milled about, eating hay, say, “Do you smell that country?” Of course, we would all obligingly shriek, lunge for the window controls, and scream, “Eww…that smells so bad!” Let’s just say I was not all that great at the finer points of country life.

This childhood memory comes to mind as I read this week’s Torah portion. In this week’s parashah, Mattot, the Israelites come to the lands of Jazer and Gilead. These lands are very near the banks of the Jordan River and, according to the Torah, “were a region suitable for cattle.” It is not surprising, then, that the Reubenties and Gadites, two of the Israelite tribes that possessed cattle, looked upon these recently conquered lands hungrily. They said to Moses, “‘the land that Adonai has conquered for the community of Israel is cattle country, and your servants have cattle. It would be a favor to us,’ they continued, ‘if this land were given to your servants as a holding; do not move us across the Jordan’” (Numbers 32:4-5). I can smell the cattle land now.

Moses is less than thrilled with this idea. The entire purpose of the Israelites’ journey for the past almost forty years was to reach the Promised Land. The slave generation had been denied access to the land because they were unable to lose their slave mentality. Now, this new generation, on the verge of crossing the Jordan River seemed to be losing sight of the end goal as well. Moses balks. He tells the Reubenites and the Gadites that they must first cross the Jordan, help conquer the land, and then they can return to dwell in Jazer and Gilead. The two tribes agree.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla suggests that the central issue with the Reubenites and Gadites’ initial proposal was that they were only interested in their own personal gain. They failed to realize that their community needed them in order to evolve, in order to reach their final destination.

In response to today’s secular society, in which the individual and the individual’s needs are often valued over all else, Jewish tradition teaches us a very different value. Al tifrosh min ha’tzibur: Do not separate yourself from the community. In order for our community (whether “our community” is Temple Beth Sholom, the city or county we live in, our country, our world, or the Jewish people etc.) to advance, we must remain in tune with communal needs. Sometimes, this week’s Torah portion teaches us, this means delaying or setting aside our own personal gains.

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, I saw a different side of country life. As my family sat shiva, neighbors from the surrounding dairies, farms, and houses entered our home to grieve with us. From my life in Missouri I learned that cattle land may be important, but community is much more so.