June 15, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Nasso
College Hunks, Biblical Style
June 15, 2024 — 9 Sivan 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Do you remember those times in your life when you had to move? You moved from one house to another. Or from one city to another. Or you helped your parents move from the home they had lived in for 50 years as they downsized? Young couples deal with moving when they move into their first home together. College kids, and their hapless parents, deal with moving as they move from their home to their dorm room and from their dorm room back home, filling living spaces, basements and attics with college stuff. What a tzimmus.
The good news is that we can purchase a solution to all this headache. I have found a moving company with the best name in the history of moving companies. College Hunks Hauling Junk. I cannot vouch for the company, how good they are. But I can vouch for the name. This ad is from their web site:
Sit back and relax—the College HUNKS have you covered.
We can manage your entire move including packing, moving
supplies, junk removal, assembly/disassembly, and other services
as needed.
Let me tell you who really needed College Hunks—biblical Israel. Last week we started Bamidbar, which tells of our ancestors’ wanderings in the wilderness. The Israelites lived in 42 different locations. They had to pack and unpack 42 times. That is a lot of moving. And here is a problem: At the heart of the community was the wilderness tabernacle, the Mishkan, which was big and unwieldy and heavy and made of boards and planks and posts and had an altar and a ramp leading up to the altar and dolphin skins and yarns and curtains and priestly garments and all the ritual items like the bread plate and the washing station and the ark of the covenant that contained the ten commandments. All this stuff had to be assembled, disassembled, reassembled, 42 times.
If God had really loved the Jewish people, God would have provided biblical Israel with college HUNKS. Let the Israelites sit back and relax—the College HUNKS have the Israelites covered.
And the answer is, God really did love the Jewish people, because God provided a biblical College HUNKS, a group of Israelites whose job it was to be the sacred schleppers. The Biblical version of College HUNKS were three families of Levites called Gershonites, Merarites, and Kohathites. And God provided moving equipment in the form of six carts designed to carry heavy things, and twelve oxen. The carts containing the boards, planks, posts and other Tabernacle equipment were so very heavy it took two oxen to carry each cart. Therefore six carts, 12 oxen, to carry all this stuff, 42 different times.
Now, let me step back with you. Very often the drier the passage, the juicier the message. The more seemingly boring the passage, the more totally compelling is the life lesson. Case in point:
Moses took the carts and the oxen and gave them to the Levites. Two carts
and four oxen he gave to the Gershonites…and four carts and eight oxen
he gave to the Merarites.
The commentary on this verse notes: The planks of the tabernacle carried by
the Merarites were bulkier than the tabernacle curtains carried by the Gershonites.
Therefore, the Merarites were given four carts, and the Gershonites, two carts.
The passage concludes: But to the Kohathites Moses did not give any
carts or oxen; since theirs was the service of the most sacred objects,
their porterage was by shoulder.
This passage is not only about biblical movers. It is also very much about us. It asks this question: How do we carry what is heavy, hard and holy? Moses offers us two very different options.
The Gershonites and the Merarites carry heavy stuff. But not directly. At the end of the day, there is a healthy and happy remove between the Gershonites and the Merarites and the heavy things they shlep because they put it all in carts, and have oxen to do the work. They guide. They cheer. They worry. They think about it. But they are not sweating and straining under the burden of what they carry because they are not actually doing the heavy lifting.
And then there are the Kohathites. Bkatef yisau, they carry the heavy and holy objects on their shoulders. They do sweat. They do strain. Their shoulders do get sore. Their knees do buckle under the weight of what they carry.
All of us here, right now, are carrying things on our shoulders. It’s personal. It’s emotional. It’s on us all the time.
If one of our children is struggling, we carry that child, and their pathos, and their promise, and their fragility, and their beauty, and their pain, on our shoulders.
If one of our loved ones is elderly, and is struggling with the infirmities of aging, we carry the pathos of their aging, their frailty, the fact that they are not who they used to be, on our shoulders.
If we are trying to launch a business, or see our business through a tough time, we carry the business and its fragile trajectory on our shoulders.
If we are a healer, we carry the welfare of the ones we are charged to heal on our shoulders.
If we volunteer for a non-profit near and dear to our heart, like this synagogue, as well as so many other worthy organizations, we really care. It really matters. We carry it on our shoulders.
And there are times when carrying a weight on our shoulders becomes too long, too hard, too much, becomes debilitating and not sustainable. We need to preserve ourselves for the long haul. So there is a time to channel the wisdom of the Gershonites and Merarites, to find our oxen and carts, to give ourselves a bit of a remove from all the heaviness so that we can stay vibrant and helpful through the years.
To channel Kohelet, there is a time to carry on our shoulders, and there is a time to carry with carts and oxen.
There is a time to be all in, all the time, and there is a time for carrying with some remove so that we can renew.
These different categories of carrying just are.
But there is a whole other way that this ancient passage above Levite movers speaks to us today with fresh urgency. Question: What is the essential difference between the Israeli condition and the American Jewish condition? Answer: Israelis are Kohathites. They carry the burden of the Jewish people’s story on their shoulders. They are the ones on the front lines. They have been on the front lines in Gaza all these months. They faced live fire as they rescued four hostages from Gaza last week. We don’t. North American Jews are Merarites and Gershonites. We do our carrying with oxen and carts, at a remove. Yes, we care. Yes, we call. Yes, we go to Israel. Yes we give to Israel. Yes we lobby for pro-Israel policies with our elected representatives. All this work is critically important. But the burden of fighting for a Jewish homeland in a world that is hostile to a Jewish homeland is Israeli, not ours. The intensity is Israeli, not ours.
So how do we make meaning out of the heavy things we carry, and the different ways in which we carry them? The midrash flips the script on these sacred schleppers. Aron nosei et nosav. What we carry, carries us. What we carry, gives meaning and purpose to our lives. What weighs us down also lifts us up. We know the midrash is right based on our own lived experience.
If you are a parent, you know the truth of the teaching in pirkei avot tzaar gidul banim, the kishka that comes with raising children. But those children are also infinite joy and blessing.
The Fifth Commandment that we got at Sinai says honor your father and mother, which the Talmud interprets to mean principally taking care of them when they can no longer take care of themselves. That is heavy. And that heaviness that also uplifts. More people than I could count tell me: I would give anything to have just one more cup of coffee with my late father or mother.
All of us have felt the heaviness of being Jewish this year. For the first time in our lives we have been made aware of the outer markings of being Jewish—whether wearing a kippah or a Jewish star or reading a Jewish book on an airplane—that we had never even thought about before. But being Jewish gives our lives meaning and purpose and blessing and joy and resilience every single day.
So too the heaviness of being an Israeli, being the Kohathite of the Jewish story, carrying it on their shoulders, lifts up Israelis and endows their lives with infinite meaning. Danny Gordis tells the story of going to the funeral of Chief Inspector Arnon Zmora, who died while rescuing the four hostages last Shabbat, at Har Herzl in Jerusalem. It was beyond crowded. Thousands upon thousands of Israelis gathered on a hot day to pay their love and respects. Danny and his brother went in an Israeli uber, called Gett, and after the car dropped them off, while walking to the service, his brother realized that he had left his cell phone in the car. They messaged the driver and asked him to return the phone to Danny’s home, and of course they would pay him whatever he charged. When the lengthy and emotional funeral was over, they got back to Danny’s home, and the phone was there, returned safe and sound. Danny’s brother texted the driver: how much do I owe you. I’ll venmo you. The driver texted back: “There’s no need, but thanks. You went to Mount Herzl to pay respects to a great warrior.”
The things we carry carry us. And the heavier they are, they not only weigh us down, they also lift us up. Shabbat shalom.