Every Stop Along the Way

On Wednesday morning we drove the AIC group to Ben Gurion. Returned the rental car. Hugged everyone. Watched them walk through the crowds and disappear into the liminal space that is an airport.

Then my husband and I got on a train to Jerusalem.

We were supposed to be leaving too. The tickets were booked. The backpacks (traveling light so our baggage allowance could be utilized to shlep supllies over from Atlanta) were packed. But sometime the day before, sitting in a Tel Aviv Airbnb with the fridge emptied and the donated supplies gone and the Kosher Ducks distributed to their last home, we looked at each other. We're not done.

So we called the airline. Paid the change fee. August 3rd instead. Ten more days in Israel, with no itinerary. No delegation. No schedule. Just us, the country, and whatever we can carry — which right now is not much more than ourselves. But we can give labor. We can buy supplies. We can still help.

The parsha this Shabbat is Matot-Massei, a double portion that closes the Book of Numbers. Massei opens with something unexpected: a list. Not a law, not a story. A list.

אֵ֜לֶּה מַסְעֵ֣י בְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָצְא֛וּ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם לְצִבְאֹתָ֑ם בְּיַד־מֹשֶׁ֖ה וְאַהֲרֹֽן׃

These were the marches of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron.

— Bamidbar 33:1

Forty-two stations. They set out from Rameses and camped at Sukkot. They set out from Sukkot and camped at Etham. On and on. Most of these places appear nowhere else in the Torah. At many of them nothing is recorded as having happened. They camped. They moved on. They are listed anyway.

Why bother recording all of this? Rashi's answer is a parable. A king whose child was sick took him on a long journey to be healed. On the way home, after the child recovered, the father pointed to each stop along the road. Here we slept. Here you were cold. Here you had a headache. The father recounts the journey not because the stops were remarkable — but because the child was. Every station mattered because his child was there.

The listing of the journeys, Rashi says, is an act of love.

Matot, the first half of this double portion, opens with a different kind of weight:

אִישׁ֩ כִּֽי־יִדֹּ֨ר נֶ֜דֶר לַֽיהֹוָ֗ה אֽוֹ־הִשָּׁ֤בַע שְׁבֻעָה֙ לֶאְסֹ֤ר אִסָּר֙ עַל־נַפְשׁ֔וֹ לֹ֥א יַחֵ֖ל דְּבָר֑וֹ כְּכׇל־הַיֹּצֵ֥א מִפִּ֖יו יַעֲשֶֽׂה׃

If anyone makes a vow to GOD or takes an oath imposing an obligation on themselves, they shall not break their pledge; they must carry out all that has crossed their lips.

— Bamidbar 30:3

Lo yachel devaro — he shall not profane his word. The Hebrew root is chalal, meaning to hollow out. A broken vow doesn't just break a promise. It empties the words themselves.

Nobody swore an oath in that Airbnb when we elected to change our flight. But somewhere in the arithmetic — the need still here, our hands still available, the days accessible — going home would have hollowed something out. The mission would become a trip. A thing we did, past tense, finished. Staying made it a station on something longer.

The train from Ben Gurion to Jerusalem takes about twenty-five minutes. It climbs through the hills and drops you deep under Yitzhak Navon Station. Far underground. Then you walk up into the light and the heat and the city is just there.

We checked into a small place near the Old City. We davened at the Kotel that evening. Hundreds of people at the wall, the low murmur of prayer layered on prayer, the stones warm from the day.

Roughly two months ago I stood at that same wall for the first time as a Jew, ten days after my conversion, wrapping tefillin I had just bought in Bnei Brak. That was a beginning. This felt different. Not a beginning and not an ending. A station.

The sign at Ben Gurion, from each previous trip, still says the same thing — ברוכים הבאים, welcome — but I keep reading it differently. Two years ago it was a greeting. Now it feels like a fact.

Massei lists forty-two stations. Rashi's parable says the father pointed to each one out of love. Something sharper is there, too. The father also said: here you caused me grief. Here you made me angry. Here you complained. The list includes everything — the miraculous and the mundane, the faithful and the rebellious. All of it counted. All of it named.

The last thing this book does, before the people cross the Jordan, before the story moves forward into Deuteronomy and the speeches and the arrival, is look back and name every place they have been. Not the highlights. Not just the miracles. Every camp. The ones where they rested. The ones where they failed. The ones where nothing happened at all.

As if to say: before you arrive, remember where you walked.

Ten more days. The next stations do not have names yet. But we are here — in the city where the stones are warm and the prayers are old and the welcome sign at the airport turns out to have been right all along.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham