Parshat Chukat/ Num. 19:1-22:1
A few weeks ago I carpooled into San Francisco with a friend. As he began to take a few extra turns through neighborhood streets on the way to our destination, I asked: “Why the detour?” He answered, a little sheepishly, “Whenever I’m near my old apartment, the one where my first child was born, I just have to drive by. It’s a touchstone for me...good memories.” He slowed the car as we cruised by the place, stared up into his old apartment without words, and then we were back on our way.
What makes a place holy? What turns the mundane into the sacred? Scholars of religion teach us that when rituals or significant events take place at a site and the human participants in the events recognize them as extraordinary, as touched by holiness, that place becomes sanctified by the people. Think of Jerusalem. From ancient times, even before God’s call to Abraham, Jerusalem, a high place in a desert landscape, was designated as holy by those who worshipped many gods. Perhaps that aura of sanctity drew our Israelite ancestors to build not one but two Temples there. No coincidence, then, that first the Hebrew-Christians, then Christians who broke with Jewish tradition, and finally the followers of Islam, would add layers of holiness to this ancient site of sanctity. As the poet Yehuda Amichai writes, “The air above Jerusalem is saturated with prayers.
In this week’s Torah portion, both of Moses’ siblings, Miriam and Aaron, die. Of Aaron we are told in the Torah: “Setting out from Kadesh, the Israelites arrived at Mt. Hor. At Mt. Hor...God said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Let Aaron be gathered to his kin: he is not to enter the land that I have assigned to the Israelite people..Take Aaron and his son Eleazar and bring them up on Mt. Hor. Take Aaron’s priestly vestments and put them on his son Eleazar. There Aaron shall be gathered to his kin....When Moses and Eleazar came down from the mountain, the whole community knew that Aaron had breathed his last. All the house of Israel bewailed Aaron thirty days.” (Num. 20: 24 - 26; 28)
The rabbis of the Midrash took this story and embellished its meaning, leaving us a deeper understanding of holiness itself and the people and places that become sanctified to us in our lives. In describing the Israelites’ desert journey, the rabbis said that through a miraculous sleight of hand, God smoothed the landscape and “left no mountain, so that the land was level, lest the Israelites grow fatigued climbing up and down.” God left only three mountains and designated each for a holy purpose: Mt. Sinai for God’s gift of the Torah, Mt. Hor for Aaron’s burial place, and Mt. Nebo for the burial of Moses.
None of these mountains are soaring, dramatic Everests, just as my friend’s apartment finds no significance in its architecture or location. Their importance, their holiness, resides in the meeting between human and Divine, in the precious, dramatic, extraordinary knowledge that life, death, wisdom and community depend on the openness to an encounter with the Holy One, and the courage to retell, remember and relive moments of holiness. Surely our paths are made smoother; we imagine we can climb any height without fatigue when we know we are not alone.
This Shabbat, let us revisit in our minds the places we call holy and the moments of connection that brought a face of God into our lives.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Judy Shanks
Back