By Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D. in El Cajon, California
We live in a world that talks constantly about progress. We measure it by advances in technology, medicine, efficiency, and innovation. In many ways, that’s entirely appropriate. We accomplish today what previous generations couldn’t have imagined. But there’s another question we don’t ask nearly often enough: Are we actually becoming better people?
Progress in what we build is not necessarily progress in who we become. We can become more connected while feeling increasingly isolated. More informed while becoming less wise. More productive while losing sight of what truly matters. The Torah has always been far more interested in the formation of character than the accumulation of achievement.
That question stands at the very end of Sefer Bamidbar. After 40 years in the wilderness, the Jewish people are finally poised to enter Eretz Yisrael. One might expect the Torah to focus on leadership, military preparation, or the practical realities of nation-building. Instead, Parsha Matos opens with an unexpected subject: vows.
“אִישׁ כִּי יִדֹּר נֶדֶר לַה’… לֹא יַחֵל דְּבָרוֹ”—when a person makes a vow to Hashem, he shall not profane his word. Why begin here?
The Ramban explains that a neder transforms ordinary speech into binding obligation. Words become commitments. Once spoken, they create responsibility. But Chazal take the conversation even further. The Gemara in Nedarim is almost uncomfortable with vows, suggesting that, ideally, a person shouldn’t need them at all. Not because commitment lacks value, but because a person’s everyday speech should already carry enough integrity that his word is trusted without additional reinforcement.
The Torah isn’t simply asking whether we keep our promises. It’s asking what our speech says about the people we’re becoming.
Rav Soloveitchik observed that speech is far more than communication. It is the medium through which relationships are formed and sustained. Through words we comfort and criticize, forgive and wound, encourage and discourage, pray and commit ourselves to others. Speech doesn’t simply express our character. It steadily shapes it.
Shlomo HaMelech captures this with remarkable brevity: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
We don’t need convincing. We’ve all experienced words that stayed with us for years, sometimes because they lifted us, sometimes because they diminished us. Words outlive the moment in which they’re spoken. They become part of the emotional and spiritual landscape of another person’s life.
The Chafetz Chaim understood this deeply. He devoted his life to guarding speech not because people spend their lives saying outrageous things, but because most speech is ordinary. It’s the casual comments, the passing criticism, the subtle negativity, the conversations we barely notice, that quietly shape both our relationships and our own character.
Yet the Torah doesn’t present speech merely as something to restrain. It presents it as something profoundly creative. The Torah itself begins with speech: “And G-d said, ‘Let there be light.'” Pirkei Avos teaches that the world was created through ten Divine utterances. Hashem does not require speech, of course. The Torah is teaching us that words participate in creating reality.
Created b’tzelem Elokim, we reflect a measure of that creative capacity. We don’t create worlds, but we create trust or suspicion, closeness or distance, hope or discouragement. The atmosphere within a marriage, a family, a friendship, or a community is often shaped less by dramatic moments than by thousands of ordinary conversations accumulating over time.
Perhaps that’s why Matos begins here. Before entering a land, they must build and sustain, the Torah first asks whether they are becoming people whose words can be trusted.
Then the Torah shifts to Parsha Masei and records the 42 journeys through the wilderness. At first glance it seems like geography. Rashi, citing the Midrash, asks the obvious question: Why list every encampment? One answer is that each stop bears witness to Hashem’s constant guidance. Even when the nation believed it was wandering, they were never abandoned.
The Sfas Emes suggests something even deeper. These 42 journeys are not only Israel’s story. They are ours. Every life contains seasons of clarity and confusion, growth and apparent stagnation, movement and waiting. Often it is only years later that we discover the periods that felt least productive were quietly shaping us most.
Rav Kook writes that genuine growth is rarely experienced as growth while it is happening. It moves unevenly. It includes setbacks, uncertainty, expansion, contraction, and long stretches where little seems to be changing. Only in retrospect do we recognize how much Hashem was accomplishing beneath the surface.
Masei, then, is not primarily about geography. It’s about becoming. We are not defined simply by where we arrive, but by who we become along the journey. Perhaps that’s why every stop is recorded. The Torah reminds us that no stage of life is insignificant. Every experience contributes to the formation of the person we are becoming.
That may also explain why Matos and Masei are joined together. One speaks about speech; the other about journeys. But beneath both lies the same question: Who are we becoming? The way we speak shapes us. The way we travel through life’s challenges shapes us. Neither remains external. Both leave their imprint on the soul.
As Sefer Bamidbar draws to a close, the Torah leaves us with a powerful reminder. Before we arrive anywhere meaningful, we must become the kind of people capable of living there. Character always precedes destination.
If our words become a little more thoughtful, our journeys a little more purposeful, and we become a little more patient, honest, humble, and aware of Hashem’s presence within every stage of life, then perhaps we’ll discover that long before we’ve reached our destination, we’ve already begun to arrive.
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Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D., prepares a weekly D’var Torah for Young Israel of San Diego, where he and his family are members. They are also active members of Congregation Adat Yeshurun.