Bulletin CHUKAT

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Shabbat Parshat Chukat
7 Tamuz 5784 • July 13, 2024
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Torah & Haftarah Readings:
Shabbat Chukat: Numbers 20:1–21:10 (Cycle 2) (Etz Hayim p. 883)
1. 20:1-6 2. 20:7-13 3. 20:14-17 4. 20:18-21
5. 20:22-21:3 6. 21:4-7 7. 21:8-10 M. 21:34-22:1 (p. 892)
Haftarah: Judges 11:1–23 (p. 910)
Torah Commentary
D’var Torah:
Where You Go, I Will Go – Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
The Book of Numbers is a tragic book. It starts full of promise, with
a census of the Israelites in all of our might. But by the incident of the
spies, that census becomes a list of all of us who must die before our
wandering is over, before our children can enter Canaan. By the time
we get to the end of the book, a whole generation has died. We are
now in the stories of our deaths, the tales of our disobedience and its
punishment. One way or another, by the time we get to the end of the
book, the entire first generation, except for Moses, Caleb, and Joshua,
will have died off. And by the end of the next book, Moses will be gone
too.
The question stands then, why should Moses or Aaron or Miriam have
thought they were immune from God’s decree over the sin of the spies?
God had told us that the corpses of our entire generation would rot
in the desert. Indeed, in our parashah this week, Miriam and Aaron
both die. Yet in our parashah, an alternative story is told for Aaron
and Moses’s deaths. It is not enough that they are from the wrong
generation, that they too were cursed to die. Rather, God singles them
out for having failed to sanctify God before the Israelites in the incident
of getting water from a rock.
In Deuteronomy, when Moses retells the reason for his death, this
explanation is gone. Rather, in his version of the spy story he says,
“Against me, too, the Lord was incensed because of you, saying, ‘You,
too, shall not come there. Joshua son of Nun, who stands before you, he
it is who will come there.” Moses makes it seem as if just as the children
will enter the land but not the first generation on account of the spies,
so too Joshua will enter the land but not him.
If we take Moses’s account at face value, the Book of Numbers becomes
yet more tragic. After the sin of the spies, Moses was doomed to die in
the desert. God had first offered to make a new great nation of him, but
Moses rejected that offer. He chose to remain with the people. And so,
he remains with them too in their punishment. Moses does not realize

this. It doesn’t click for Moses that he too will not enter the promised
land. It is not until his sister dies that his own mortality becomes real
for him. The story of striking the rock occurs in order for God to let
Moses know he will die, that the decree against the people is also a
decree against him. It is not just they who are rebels. Moses rebelled as
well. Moses has had a death sentence as long as they have, but he was
not aware of it until now, he was not aware that he had chosen it for
himself until now.
The midrash in Bemidbar Rabbah 19 picks up on this and takes it in
two different directions. The first possibility is that even though Moses
and the people are given the same sentence, the crimes they committed
were different. Numbers mentions Moses’s crime explicitly here so that
we do not think that he is caught up in the greater crime of the people.
The second possibility is that God encouraged Moses to go down with
the ship, as it were. God says to Moses, “Is it to your credit that you took
out six hundred thousand, buried them in the wilderness, and you are
taking in another generation?... Rather, remain alongside them and
come with them.” There is a time when a leader has to recognize that
the world has moved on without him. When Moses buries Miriam
and Aaron, he buries part of himself too. The striking of the rock is
the wake up call Moses needs to hear the sentence decreed against
him after the sin of the spies. His calling is to step aside for Joshua, to
remain alongside the generation of the desert.
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