The children of Reuben and the children
of Gad possessed much cattle; and
they saw the land of Ya'zer and the land of Gilead, and behold, it was a land
for pasture... And they said [to Moses]: "If we have found favor in your eyes,
may this land be given to your servants for a possession-do not take us across
the Jordan... We will build sheepfolds here for our cattle, and cities for our
children"
Numbers 32:1, 5, 16
They spoke first of their cattle,
and only then of their children. Said Moses
to them: Not so! Make the primary thing primary, and the secondary thing
secondary.
Rashi on verse 16
In the 32nd chapter of Numbers, the Torah describes how the Jewish tribes of
Reuben and Gad came to settle the land east of the Jordan River.
The children of Israel were en route to the land of Canaan when they were
attacked by the armies of Sichon and Og, whose domain lay on the eastern bank of
the Jordan. Moses led the Israelites into battle, defeated the two kings and
conquered their land. The tribes of Gad and Reuben, who owned much sheep and
cattle, asked that they be given these territories, which were prime
pastureland, in lieu of their allotment in the land of Canaan, which lay
to the west of the Jordan.
Moses was extremely upset by their request. Forty years earlier, he reminded
them, the people of Israel had been poised to enter the land of Canaan. But
following a negative report by the spies sent to scout the land--they described
it as a "land that consumes its settlers"1--the children of
Israel spurned the land promised to their ancestors as the eternal heritage of
Israel. G-d decreed that they remain in the desert for forty years, until that
entire generation died out and a new generation, prepared to accept the gift and
challenge of the Promised Land, arose. And now, said Moses to the Reubenites and
the Gadites, you are repeating the sin of the Spies--a sin which condemned an
entire generation and stopped Jewish history in its tracks for forty years. Like
your parents before you, you are declining to take possession of the land deeded
to you by divine decree.
How did the two tribes respond to this accusation? They assured Moses that
they planned to settle and develop the land east of the Jordan, building
"sheepfolds for our flocks and cities for our children." They also promised that
they would enter the land of Canaan together with the other tribes of Israel and
aid them in its conquest; indeed, they would march at the head of the army and
bear the brunt of the battle. Only after the land west of the Jordan had been
conquered and settled by the other tribes would they return to the lands
allotted them in the east.
But how does any of this answer Moses' complaint to them? While perhaps a
fitting response to Moses' opening words ("Shall your brethren go to war while
you sit here?"), it doesn't seem to address the main point of Moses'
criticism--that, like an earlier generation of Jews, they were spurning the
divine mission to settle the land of Canaan. Surprisingly, however, Moses
accepted their proposal and gave them the territories which they requested. He
even arranged, at his own initiative, that half of the tribe of Manasseh
should join the tribes of Reuben and Gad in settling the lands east of the
Jordan.
Why this dramatic shift in Moses' view on the Jewish settlement of the
eastern territories? If the two tribes' petition initially struck him as
reminiscent of the sin of the Spies, what convinced him to endorse their plan
and even expand on it?
The Kabbalah of Nutrition
In the writings of Chassidism, a question is asked about the nature of human
nutrition: why does man derive his vitality from animals, plants and minerals?
How is it that the highest life-form in the physical world can be sustained by
these lowlier existences?
The Chassidic masters explain that the vital potential contained in the
so-called "lower" tiers of creation is in fact loftier than the human being's
own vital force. At the heart of every being is a "spark of G-dliness" which
gives it existence and imbues it with its particular qualities. And the
"lowlier" a thing is, the loftier its spiritual core. When a wall collapses, the
uppermost stones fall the furthest; similarly, in the "collapse" of the
primordial world of Tohu,2 the loftiest sparks of the divine creative force
fell farthest from their source and were incarnated within the most mundane
creations.
To our eyes, man is the most spiritual of earthly creatures, the animal
exhibits a more sophisticated vitality than the plant, and the mineral shows no
outward signs of "life" at all. In essence, however, the sublimity of the spark
of divine life in a thing is in converse relation to its manifest spirituality.
Thus the mineral nourishes the vegetable, both nourish the animal, and all three
sustain human life.
However, only man has the capacity to direct the vital energy in himself
toward a G-dly end. For man alone has been granted the gift of free choice. The
animal, vegetable or mineral cannot sin; their conformity with the divine will
is automatic and inevitable, and thus devoid of moral significance. Only man can
elect to do good; only a human being can, by the force of his or her
deeds, transcend the creature state to achieve intimacy with the Divine.
So when man consumes the resources of the physical world, a bilateral
transformation takes place. The slice of bread, piece of meat, or glass of water
confer their superior vitality to the person, imparting to him a spiritual
potential which he does not himself possess. At the same time, if the person
utilizes this vitality to perform a mitzvah, a divine deed, he elevates the
plant, animal or mineral he has consumed, releasing its vital soul from its
mundane encasement and reuniting it with its divine source.
A Shepherd's Insight
Chassidic teaching explains the sin of the Spies as resulting from their
reluctance to involve themselves with the mundanities of material life. The Jews
in the desert led a wholly spiritual existence: manna from heaven sustained
them, miraculous water from the "well of Miriam" slaked their thirst, and the
"clouds of glory" protected them and preserved their clothes. But they knew that
once they crossed into the land of Canaan the manna would cease, and they would
be required to till the soil and grow natural grain; the "well of Miriam" would
leave them, and they would be required to dig wells and cisterns; the clouds of
glory would evaporate, and they would be required to weave cloth, tan hides and
raise an army to defend their borders. Their spiritual commune would be replaced
by a state of farmers, artisans, merchants and bureaucrats.
The Spies wanted no part of that. Never mind that the material
existence contains sparks of divine energy far loftier than anything their own
spiritual lives could actualize; never mind that a symbiotic relationship with
the land could unleash the most potent potentials invested by G-d in His
creation. The risks were simply too great. "It is a land that consumes
its settlers!" How could they be sure that once they involved themselves with
the land, they would not be overwhelmed by its corporeality? How could they be
know whether they would indeed exploit its lofty potential and not instead sink
into the morass of material life?
But unlike the Spies and their generation, it was not the dread of the
material that drove the tribes of Gad and Reuben to ask for the territories east
of the Jordan. On the contrary: they wanted to settle this land, to build cities
and ranches, to raise their sheep and cattle on its pastures. Their plea, "Do
not take us across the Jordan" did not express a reluctance to seek out the
"sparks" buried in the land, but an attraction to even more remote--and thus
even loftier--pinpoints of divine energy.
After all, the land west of the Jordan, though material, was the "Holy
Land"-a land where even the most mundane pursuits are tinged with a spiritual
glow. Outside of the Holy Land, the physical world is more lowly, and thus
contains sparks that derive from an even higher source. The tribes of Reuben and
Gad were convinced that their mission in life was to pursue, extract and
elevate the sparks inherent in this more spiritually distant corner of creation.
So they said to Moses: "We will build sheepfolds here for our cattle and
cities for our children." You accuse us of emulating our fathers by shunning the
land; but what we desire is the very opposite of disinvolvement from the
material resources of G-d's world. We wish to engage in the development of an
even more mundane domain-the territories that lie beyond the borders of the most
sacred of lands as defined by our present mandate from G-d.3
This is why the Reubenites and the Gadites spoke first of the corrals they
would construct for their flocks, and only then of the cities they would build
for their children. Would it not have been more appropriate (as Moses indeed
points out to them) to speak of the human beings under their care before their
animals? But this, too, was in keeping with the nature of their petition to
Moses. The tribes of Reuben and Gad were motivated by the knowledge that the
most sublime deposits of divine energy are buried in the lowliest of places--
insight they gained from their vocation as shepherds, in which they recognized
that the spark of divine life in the animal hails from a loftier place than that
of the human being.4
The Dynamics of Need
But simply recognizing the lofty potential in a lowly place is not enough.
Not every soul can venture to any place with a mind to extracting the sparks of
divinity enmeshed therein. G-d Himself delineated the limits of our capacity to
sublimate the material, by decreeing, in His Torah, the 365 prohibitions which
proscribe all involvement with those substances, resources and experiences that
are beyond our ability to redeem. Even in the realm of the permissible, one must
employ great caution as to where one treads to ensure that one is indeed capable
of extracting a divine potential without falling prey to its corporeal
embodiment.5
The Spies were wrong to doubt their ability to develop the land of Canaan.
G-d had explicitly charged them with that mission, and G-d certainly knows the
limits and the capacities of each of His creatures. But the territories desired
by the tribes of Reuben and Gad were not part of the divine mandate to settle
the land; how, then, could they know that they were equal to the challenge of
this spiritually remote domain?
The first rule of material life (after distinguishing between the permissible
and the forbidden) is to distinguish between the necessary and the superfluous.
If a certain material resource represents a critical need for a person, he can
assume that he is capable of exploiting its G-dly potential; for if divine
providence has so ordered a person's life as to make necessary his involvement
with a particular thing, G-d has also provided him with whatever it takes to
properly deal with it.6 On the other hand, when
something is a luxury, serving to enhance rather than support life, a person
must be especially wary of involvement, lest he be consumed and coarsened by
that which he is attempting to consume and sublimate.
Thus the people of Reuben and Gad said to Moses: "The land which G-d has
vanquished before the congregation of Israel is land for cattle-grazing, and
your servants have cattle."7 Divine providence has dictated
that we earn our living by raising cattle, making this land suited to our
material needs; we are therefore confident that we possess the capacity to
properly develop it and exploit its lofty potential.
Spiritual Training
But even after a person has identified a particular corner of the material
world as his to develop, he must first "prove himself" by constructively
relating to its more refined areas of creation.
This is the deeper significance of "education": before a human being is
thrust into a coarse and mundane world, he is placed within a spiritual
environment of ideas and values, so that even when he ventures forth into
material life, his primary point of reference remains spiritual. This is why
Israel's entry into the land had to be preceded by a period of spiritual
existence in the desert.
And before the tribes of Reuben and Gad could settle the land east of the
Jordan, they had to participate in the conquest of the holier land to its west.
Indeed, because of the greater challenge posed by the eastern territories, their
commitment to the Holy Land had to exceed even that of the tribes that were to
settle in the west. Only after they had fought in the frontlines of the battles
for the Holy Land and aided their brethren in settling it, could they be certain
of their ability to take on the challenge of a more mundane land and unearth its
lofty potential.8
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