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187  thirty-four How to Construct a Community Parashat Bemidbar (Numbers 1:1–4:20) David Greenstein Parashat Bemidbar (“in the wilderness”) opens the fourth book of the Torah and gives us a record of God’s Word to Moses “in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting ” (Num. 1:1). This juxtaposition of the open wilderness with the enclosed Tent signals that in this parasha, we will experience a series of seeming opposites—exposure and sheltering safety, openness and consolidation, precariousness and strength. Thirteen months have passed since the Exodus from Egypt, and as the Israelites continue their journey to the Promised Land, God serves as their guide and protector, addressing their many fears and desires. The Israelites’ anxieties, borne of their sense of vulnerability while traversing immense and forbidding spans of desert terrain, coexist alongside a growing sense of community fostered by their very isolation and dependence on God and one another. Responding to this dual sense of community building and simultaneous vulnerability , God instructs Moses to conduct a census of the Israelites, “according to their families, according to their fathers’ household” (Num. 1:2), counting all the Israelite males eligible for military service. By enumerating the Israelites’ numbers, the collective is reassured of its might and of its organizational coherence. After presenting the results of the census, each of the twelve tribes is assigned a fixed location around the central shrine, the Mishkan, three tribes on each of four sides. Reinforcing the image conveyed by the military census, the Israelites are portrayed as a strongly disciplined marching machine that is both blessed with the Divine Presence, concentrated in the Tabernacle, and also entrusted with the solemn duty of guarding that fragile sanctuary.1 This tightly closed configuration of twelve tribes produced a well-defined communal space. For those within it, this was a positive factor in their daily lives, reinforcing their sense of belonging and security. But the establishment of boundaries also makes it possible to determine what and who may be regarded as out of bounds—as “other.” Thus, for example, creating a bounded camp made it possible to send lepers outside its borders. The Torah reports that when Miriam was temporarily stricken with tzara‘at (a skin condition commonly translated as leprosy)2 she, too, was sent out of the camp. But “the nation did not travel until Miriam was brought back in” (Num. 12:15). Is the implication, then, that in cases of less important people, the Israelites 188 David Greenstein broke camp and moved on while the other lepers, nameless in the Torah, were left behind?3 This tension between insider and outsider existed within the encampment as well. The camp is really shaped like a kind of rectangular donut, bounded on the outside by inhospitable wilderness, and with the Mishkan at its center—an inaccessible inner core of sacred space. The sanctuary had to be protected, not only from desert marauders but from trespassing Israelites within the camp as well. So the Tabernacle is encircled by an inner ring of guardians, the families of the Levites. They are sentries watching lest an Israelite draw too near to the Holy Space, cross the sacred boundary line, and incur the penalty of death. Left unexplained is why any Israelite would want to try to step over the line, given the severity of the consequences. But, perhaps, that is the point: boundaries are made to be crossed. The mutability of boundaries and locations continues as a theme in this parasha, and throughout the Torah. The structure established among the twelve tribes in the years of wandering is completely reshuffled once the Israelites enter the Promised Land. For example, the tribe of Levi, once given the privileged position of inner proximity to the Tabernacle, is later dispersed throughout the land, in scattered cities far from the central shrine, without any tribal territory, as was given to the other tribes. And the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, placed at the front and back of the desert camp, historically become intertwined and establish their territory as the new inner core of the people’s physical and spiritual geography. A more striking case of the fluidity of this structure involves the role and place of the tribe of Dan. Dan is assigned to march along the northern flank of the camp. Yet this tribe is also charged with the task of collecting the stragglers (and the lepers left behind?) who cannot keep up with the pace of...

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