Let’s Get Organized

Let’s Get Organized
By Rabbi Ari Lorge

Is anyone here a bit type A?

One of my family’s mottos is “Let’s get organized.”

In fact, Alexis and I didn’t realize we said it all that much until we were getting ready for a trip, and our son, at age 3 said: “well let’s get organized.”

If you’re like us, then this parshah, this Torah portion, is for you.

God has Moses and Aaron count all the people, establish a beautifully diagrammed camp where every group has its own place, and finally label everyone with flags and banners. All of this organization so the Israelite tribes are ready to set off on their journey.

Reading about all the care and attention to detail, we would think that the journey through the wilderness is going to go very well.

But this book of the Torah proves that an organized camp does not translate into an organized journey.

Sefer Bamidbar, the Book of Numbers, is a catalogue of failures, setbacks, rebellions, and infighting.

We’re left wondering: where do things go wrong?

Did they not have enough packing squares?

This entire book of Torah is, in many ways, an extended examination of how to structure and set up a successful society. And even at the outset, God is trying to teach the Israelite tribes how to transform themselves from bands of slave families into a cohesive community.

The ultra-orthodox commentator Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky notices one detail that lies at the crux of God’s main message to our people.

When describing the layout of the Israelite camp, first God establishes the Mishkan, the ancient sanctuary, in the center. Only then does God allow the tribes to hang their unique banners.

This is not an accidental detail - it was meant to be a vital lesson.

Only when there are central purposes and shared values that bind the tribes all together, only when there is an established unifying force, do they then add the flags that mark and highlight their divisions.

God signals through the camp’s organization: “first we are Israel, one people serving God, and only then are we individual tribes.”

Unfortunately, the Israelites missed the importance of this critical detail. Because of that, we can look forward to weeks of stories where our ancient ancestors struggle and fail. These failures will sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, set the people back on the journey to the Promised Land. But in the final chapters we will witness the tribes of Benjamin and Gad live out this lesson, signaling that the Israelites have internalized this mentality and way of ordering themselves.

Rabbi Kamenetsky identifies the core lesson of this book of Torah: For a society to function, let alone thrive, it must prize and prioritize its common identity and common project. Only then should it highlight the tribal personas and sub-identities.

Now both are necessary. We Jews know more than most that a society that tries to establish an exclusively monolithic identity will turn to totalitarianism and often then to extermination. But a society where individuals see their subgroup as the greatest priority will quickly break down, devolving into sectarianism and often civil violence or civil oppression.

The task of safeguarding that balance between the common identity and the particularistic identity requires constant cultivation, and when it is derailed, it can spin farther and farther out of our grasp.

This lesson feels instructive as Jews in America.

America isn’t so different from the ancient Israelite camp.

Like the ancient Israelites, America has a Mishkan, a sacred Sanctuary of ideas and ideals that form our shared project as a nation. The American Mishkan is the aspirational center piece of this exceptional country. Though we’ve not always lived up to it, we are at our best when we steer the ship of state according to its compass.

The American Mishkan includes many ideas such as:

Equality under the law.

Separation of Church and State.

Meritocracy.

That we are building a pluralistic nation where “bigotry is given no sanction and persecution no assistance.”

The universal application of these ideas have allowed for incredible Jewish flourishing.

And like the ancient Israelite camp, America also has tribal banners. We are a mosaic of religious traditions, ethnicities, regional identities, political inclinations, races, and more. And America is powerful because of its unique ability to acculturate communities and identities while also honoring what Rabbi Sacks called, the “dignity of difference.”

This too has also led to Jewish flourishing. It is what allowed us to increasingly live proud and unapologetic Jewish lives.

When America has struck the balance detailed in the Torah: where every division within American society recognizes that our first and foremost goal is to devote ourselves to the greater American project and bring our uniqueness to bear upon it, the entire nation has flourished. Within these conditions we have built, over generations, the most successful, integrated, Jewishly literate, Diaspora community. And at the same time, we toiled to do the same for our neighbors and for the stranger.

Knowing all of that, our job is clear. We have to guard against the forces trying to destabilize the precious balance. We have to confront those who would take a hatchet to the principles at the center of the American project, for the sake of raising their tribe’s banners above everyone else’s. And we have to defend ourselves against those who tell us that because we are Jews or because we believe in the self-determination of our people, we are somehow outside of the camp entirely. As if our banner doesn’t belong alongside all the others. Both forms of attack appear to be gaining momentum in America. They threaten American Jewry, but they also threaten the American project.

We can advocate across the country for the wisdom God gave our people when we were forming a nation out of a fractured community.

Set the common cause in the center.

Make it the goal of every part of the nation.

And only then set up the tribal banners which can bring unique gifts to the cause of the greater good. That is how we return to a well-functioning society. That is the way we leave the wilderness and reach the borders of the Promised Land.

That road will be long and winding, but as my family says, “let’s get organized.”