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Light
from the Sidra |
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How grateful we
should be that the Most High does not leave his people in darkness and
ignorance. In this Sidra we read of the many ways in which he guided
Israel. There was the lampstand, which pictured the light of
understanding he gives us from the Torah. The Levites, set apart for
his service, were to study God’s word and teach the people, as we find
them doing at various points in Israel’s history. As Israel moved
through the “great and terrible wilderness” about which they knew so
little they were not left to decide for themselves where to go. The LORD provided for
them the pillar of cloud and fire which indicated when the people were
to move and where they were to go next. God provided the trumpets so
that Israel’s movements should not be disorganised but should be done
in an orderly way. What more could
Israel have asked for? God provided for their need abundantly. He does
the same today by the light of His truth in his word, the Holy
Scriptures. We live our lives under very different circumstances, but
we are not left in ignorance. The Word of God guides us as we wonder
about his plans for our lives and teaches us when we wish to know what
pleases him. But there are
many who would say that the LORD seems so far
away. Does God really care anymore? Does he really guide his people
now? One reason why God may seem far off is because we have fallen into
the sins of complaining and being ungrateful. In this Sidra we
see plenty of ingratitude and complaint! We read in chapter 11 that the
people were in a complaining mood. Then they murmured about the lack of
Egyptian-type food. The last straw was when even Aaron and Miriam
grumbled because they were not being recognised as God’s prophets as
they ought to be; they seemed to think that too much importance was
being attributed to Moses. Some commentators say that those who murmured were the mixed multitude, other non-Jews who joined Israel when they came out of Egypt, and not the Israelites themselves. However, a straightforward reading of the Sidra shows that interpretation to be completely wrong. In Numbers 11:4 we do indeed read of this mixed multitude–the non-Jews–complaining. But the children of Israel grumbled about the same things. All were guilty. To make it even plainer, we read of the sin of Aaron and Miriam in this matter of complaining. Two members of Israel if ever anybody was! No, many of the people of Israel were guilty then, and suffered the consequences, and it is the same today. Each must ask
themselves the question: Am I guilty of this sin? Guilty of ingratitude
to the LORD? Guilty of
complaining? Do you sometimes think deep inside that God has been
unfair to you and to Israel? Do you feel he could have done much more
for you than he has? If so, you are guilty of the sin of ingratitude,
and just like the Israel in the wilderness, you deserve only his wrath.
How can you murmur against him in your heart when he has granted you
blessings you don’t deserve? There is so much ingratitude to God in the
world, but the worst example of it is when it is in his people whom he
has blessed so much. Maybe you think,
“Look at the history of the Jews. Where are the blessings? We have
suffered so much!” Indeed, the
affliction of the Jewish people throughout the centuries have been
awful and overwhelming. But God is not unjust. There must be a reason
for Israel’s tragic history. The rabbis have struggled to find a
cause-and-effect answer to Jewish suffering and many relate it to
Israel’s failings. An extreme example is Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef who
suggested that those who perished in the Nazi Holocaust were the
reincarnated souls of sinners. Most recently Rabbi Meir Porush told the
Knesset that the reason for the collapse of the Versailles wedding hall
in which 24 people died and more than 300 were injured was, “We do not
behave as we are ordered by God to behave”. Rabbi Reuven Levy, told the
Kol ha’Ir newspaper,
“The main lesson to learn from the Versailles wedding hall disaster is
that all mixed dancing is incest … Every time a woman dances with a man
she’s not married to, both are punishable by death”. Whatever we may
think of those statements, there can be no doubt that in our Sidra the
nation’s sufferings were directly linked to ingratitude and murmuring.
Is Israel still guilty of ingratitude? If there is a direct link
between suffering and ingratitude, what can account for the scale of
suffering experienced by the Jewish people over the last two millennia?
Consider the little value most Jewish people set upon the Scriptures.
The Bible is one of God’s greatest gifts to the Jewish people and yet
how many Jewish people, secular or Haredi, read the Tanakh in their own
homes and in the privacy of their own rooms to discover the will of the
Most High? The greatest gift
of all to Israel was the Messiah, the true manna from heaven, the true
lamp of truth. The greatest tragedy for so many in Israel is that they
have despised and rejected him. What greater demonstration of
ingratitude could there be? |
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