By Rabbi Joshua Dorsch
SAN DIEGO — This week we read the double portion of Matot and Masei. The Torah lists each individual stop that the Israelites made during their forty years of wandering in the desert. The text doesn’t tell us what happened at each one of those places, or if anything of any significance took place there, yet feels the need to specifically mention all of these seemingly irrelevant locations by name, and I would like to suggest a reason as to why that might be the case.
I think that, like the Israelites, we are all on a long journey. Hopefully, we will ultimately be able to get to wherever it is that we want to go, but odds are that just like the Israelites, our route will not be as direct or as efficient as we would have preferred. Nevertheless, wherever it is that our journeys have taken us, each and every stop along the way played an important role in helping us get to where we are, and setting the direction for where we want to go.
Which is why it is my hope and prayer for all of this Shabbat and beyond, that like the Israelites and our Torah portion this week, we can appreciate that each and every stop we have made and everywhere that we have been, whether we wanted to be there or not, whether we recognized it at the time or not, was an important one, and that each place we go, however seemingly insignificant, brings us one step closer to our own promised lands.
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Rabbi Dorsch is spiritual leader of Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego. He may be contacted via joshua.dorsch@sdjewishworld.com