Shelah Lekha

Bemidbar 13:1-15:41

Tzitzit and Tekhelet: God's Guiding - Not Blinding - Light

Aryeh Bernstein, 5767

Written specially for this website

In translations throughout this devar torah, the single letter "H" indicates God's sacred, four-letter name, while "God" indicates the impersonal title "Elohim".

Our parashah begins with the harrowing story of the scouts' report of the perceived impossibility of conquering the fertile Land of Israel; the consequent national insurrection against the divine promise; God's furious punishment that they all die in the desert, leaving only their children to inherit the land; and the ill-fated attempt of certain regretful Israelites (known as "Ma‘apilim", which means something like "Defiant") to conquer the land anyway: lacking God's support, they are indeed routed, vindicating the Godless spies' dire predictions. The parashah ends with the apparently unrelated commandment that we attach tzitzit to our clothing (Bemidbar 15:37-41):

Somehow, attaching fringes on the hems of our garments, adorned with a royal-blue (tekhelet) string, should make us remember all the mitzvot and keep our lustful minds from wandering licentiously. Rabbi Meir famously explains the dynamic by which tzitzit and tekhelet connect us to God (Sifrei Bemidbar 115 ≈ Talmud Bavli Menahot 43b):

For R. Meir, seeing the tekhelet reminds us to fulfill God's mitzvot because its royal-blue hue triggers an associative chain reaction, eventually reminding us of God's glorious throne, which appeared in a similar color in the prophet Yehezqel's divine vision. That is, clothing - which at its core indicates earthly physicality and shame - brings the individual to a feeling of God's presence. R. Meir's formulation is strange, though. Why are multiple associative steps needed to connect the blue of tekhelet to the sapphire-blue of the Throne of Glory? Rashi (BT Menahot 43b) explains that R. Meir first links the tekhelet to the sea "for in it miracles were done for Israel" - "שנעשו בו נסים לישראל". The Sefat Emet showed skepticism toward Rashi's interpretation: whereas Rashi understood that all of the items in R. Meir's list look alike, so that the only reason not to connect the tekhelet and throne directly is because of the special value of the intermediate items, the Sefat Emet more simply explains that the tekhelet and throne of glory were not the same shade, and therefore, these intermediate steps were necessary to link the blue shade of the tekhelet to the blue shade of the throne.

This prosaic interpretation is possible, but it weakens the strength of R. Meir's statement itself. Are we to believe that the reason the Torah commands the donning of tekhelet is to remind us of the dissimilar color of God's throne via a game of "Six Degrees of Separation"? If conjuring up God's presence is the Torah's goal for us, this seems like an awfully roundabout way for it to do so! Instead, let's suggest that Rashi is making the following point about our strange midrashic statement: The aspect of God we are meant to recall via the tekhelet is God as Actor in our history. The consciousness of God that the Torah wants us to sustain is the awareness of God who liberated us from slavery at the sea, a notion which is borne out in the verses. A royal-blue string reminds us of that miracle, which, in turn leads us to the experience of God's glorious throne.

This circuitous route to God via signposts of history heads off the temptations of possessive spirituality. A more direct pipeline to God's presence might lead us to strive for personal, rapturous union with God, for a spiritual "high" so immediately intense that it shuts out trajectory, the kind of spirituality whose goal is itself, rather than steady movement toward better and deeper living. Hazal associate such a personal, undisciplined spirituality with Qorah, the eponymous villain of next week's parashah. In the Talmud Yerushalmi (Sanhedrin 10:1/27d-28a), Rav fleshes out the dynamics of Qorah's challenge to Mosheh's authority:

Qorah fashions himself a populist activist, railing against his cousin Mosheh's self-serving and disingenuous legal formalism. To Qorah, ruling that one tekhelet string suffices but an entirely tekhelet garment doesn't smacks of arbitrariness and indicts Mosheh's whole system as being a Godless power play. However, what spiritual assumption underscores Qorah's "all-the-more-so" reasoning? If one tekhelet string brings me God, it should follow that more tekhelet brings me more God! His other example fleshes this out: if one little section of Torah on the entrance to my house brings God into my house, how much more will God be in my house if I have more Torah there?! The more physical, religious stuff I have, the more I have God. For Qorah, relationship with God is about having "spiritual experiences". If a little tekhelet earns me God's shining light, then the more I jack up the symbols, the brighter the light will be. Qorah forgets, though: too much light blinds us; we see nothing outside of it. It stuns us motionless, like deer caught in headlights. The point is not to own God; the point is to live a redemptive life.

Without physical, visual representation, we risk forgetting God entirely: the world presents too many temptations. But physical symbols create another risk - the temptation to relate to God possessively. Another example of this phenomenon can be found in our relation to the Land of Israel. Rav ShaGa"R (acronym for Shimon Gershon Rosenberg), Rosh Yeshivah at Yeshivat Siah Yitzhaq, and one of Israel's leading Religious Zionist thinkers, wrote an article last year arguing that the laws of shemittah (letting the land lie fallow and canceling debts every Sabbatical year) are meant to alienate us from our land enough that we remember to relate to it as a conditional gift from God, and not as a possession. "In dialectic fashion, Am Yisrael can settle the land and protect its holiness only by way of internalizing exile within it. If not, this holiness is likely to degenerate into fetishism" (עת לדרוש 3, תשנ"ו). The Land of Israel and the mitzvah of tzitzit/tekhelet are given to us in order to effect closeness with God, in holiness; shemittah is commanded and the associations from tekhelet are circuitous so that we remember what we mean by holiness: social justice toward others, not a spiritual high for ourselves.

We should remember that Yehezqel's spectacular, divine vision of God in the blue chariot-throne, which R. Meir suggested was the associative object of the tekhelet, occurred in the Babylonian exile (Yehezqel chapter 1). The other, very similar collective vision of God also appeared outside of Eretz Yisrael, at Sinai (Shemot 24:10: "And they saw the God of Israel, and under His feet was like a work of sapphire pavement, like the very heavens in purity" - "וַיִּרְאוּ אֵת אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְתַחַת רַגְלָיו כְּמַעֲשֵׂה לִבְנַת הַסַּפִּיר וּכְעֶצֶם הַשָּׁמַיִם לָטֹהַר). That is, intimate visual encounter of God was made possible only in exile, where full-fledged intimate relationship was impossible. In the Land of Israel, God did not appear so powerfully, and the Mishnaic sages, in the Land of Israel, expressed significant, legal reservations about any attempt to re-enact or even understand Yehezqel's vision (Mishnah Hagigah 2:1):

In this light we can understand what the mitzvah of tzitzit/tekhelet is doing in our parashah. The scouts and their followers were exilic cowards, who saw themselves as grasshoppers and begged to die in exile (13:33-14:2). The Ma‘apilim were land-hungry. They thought that the scouts' sin was in rejecting the land, when in actuality, the sin was in rejecting God. The scouts' attitude carried the germ of nihilism, while the Ma‘apilim carried the germ of fascism. Both groups shared the same fatal flaw of orientation: they couldn't or wouldn't see their lives as redemptive. The mitzvah of tzitzit/tekhelet responds to both groups: to the spies, who wanted to forget God's word, the tzitzit/tekhelet are a reminder; to the Ma‘apilim, who crushed and distorted God's word into their land-fetish, the tzitzit/tekhelet restore context.

We do well to recall the gemara that tells that at the scene of God's intimate revelation of compassionate identity, God was wrapped in a tallit (Rosh HaShanah 17b, referencing Shemot 34:6):

The verse:

The gemara:

We wear our tzitzit to remember God's ways and behave properly, fulfilling the mitzvot; God also wears tzitzit, as it were, to remember God's ways and "behave properly", remembering the ways of forgiveness. This is the mark of a serious and truly intimate relationship - replacing lust with trust and ecstasy with patience, and affirming that deep love experiences the moment in connection with the future.

Shabbat shalom.