הרב אלון שליט"א
שיעורי הרב מרדכי אלון שליט"א
The taste of Shabbat – Parshat Masei 5776
The taste of Shabbat – Parshat Masei 5776
Rav Mordechai Elon
The Book of Bamidbar, the book of our journeys in the desert, reaches its end. This week's parsha is a summary of the journeys made over the forty years of wandering in the desert. It is interesting to note that this parsha is always read within the Three weeks. It describes in great detail the journeys and camps from Ramses in Egypt to the plains of Moab to the Jordan near Jericho. The wording is laconic, almost without 'interruptions' or additions .
Who came out of Egypt ?!
The parsha opens with the list of camps without mentioning hardly anything about what happened in between. Rashi opens the parsha with a classic question asked by most of the commentators:
Why are the journeys listed here ?
Why does the Torah attribute importance to each name of every place and every journey, including places we do not have any information about? Is this a short transcript of our people's history of forty years in the wilderness? Many answers have been given to this question. We would like to answer it via two more questions