The People and the Book: People of the tent

The ‘tent’ must be seen as idea, not abode.

By ESTHER ORENSTEIN LAPIAN
Painting by Pepe Fainberg (photo credit: PEPE FAINBERG)
Painting by Pepe Fainberg
(photo credit: PEPE FAINBERG)
The Torah portion Balak is read on Shabbat, July 4.
BLESSINGS OR curses? The question surfaces each year as we approach the Torah portion Balak. Most of Balaam’s utterances are either obscure or ambivalent. With time, however, many of his oracles have come to resonate with an eerie predictive nature.
In one such oracle, neither vague nor adverse, Balaam proclaims, “How pleasing are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwelling, O Israel.” What was so pleasing about the Israelite tents? Surely not the scouting expertise or artistic interior designs? The rabbis contended that Balaam, seeing that the entrances of the tents did not face each other directly, was impressed with their modesty and respect for privacy (Bava Batra 60a). Lovely, but perhaps a bit fanciful.
One needn’t look so far afield to unearth the suggested meaning of this puzzling oracle; the Bible itself provides the clues. Far from just referring to a temporary shelter, the word “tent” in many places refers to specific concepts vital to Jewish tradition. Here are three examples.
After a long and dramatic journey to a faraway place for the purpose of finding a wife for bachelor Isaac, we read one of the loveliest verses in the Bible: “Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife. Isaac loved her and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.”
The verse is centered on marriage, love, and closure, yet the opening words are devoted to location. We don’t really need to know where the coupling happened. But the tent of Sarah points to a much broader idea.
Rebekah is not just a marriage mate, she is a covenantal bride. She is chosen, in essence, by Abraham, and by his loyal servant – not by Isaac.
What does Abraham stipulate as condition for the marriage? A young woman willing to make the same journey he did, the lekh-lekha (going forth) experience, from Haran to Canaan, in order to be part of a covenant meant to be eternal.
Rebekah does not disappoint. She clinches the deal with one word – elekh, she says, echoing God’s command to Abraham and Sarah. “I will go.” And so she does.
After their initial meeting, Rebekah is brought into the tent of his mother.
The chapter is all about her worthiness to be there. All this is contained in the powerful words: “Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah.” Thus “the tent of Sarah” is not the location, but the tradition. It is concept, covenant, and continuity.
Let’s take another ‘tent’ much closer in time to Balaam: the Tent of Meeting. “And Moses would take the tent and pitch it outside the camp… It was called the Tent of Meeting, and whoever sought the Lord would go out to the Tent of Meeting.”
We sense verses fraught with significance, but are uncertain how to decipher them. Again, much detail about location: in the camp, outside the camp. Again, God is in the details, this time literally.
After the sin of the Golden Calf, God, furious with his nation, withholds his presence from the camp of Israel. Moses, according to the late Anglo- American biblical scholar Dr.
Nahum Sarna, employs what he terms “an extraordinary stratagem” to outwit God. He pitches the tent outside the camp. This is not the tabernacle, which is not yet constructed, but a private tent where Moses is meant to commune with God.
Moses, the one person who spoke with God face to face, who could easily have kept God for himself, relocates the tent “outside the camp,” thus enabling all the members of his wayward nation to commune with God. He relinquishes exclusivity for inclusiveness. “It was called the Tent of Meeting,” for the people, not just for himself.
The Tent of Meeting, in effect, is the precursor to the synagogue as it should be – a place of leadership, piety and humility, where an entire community can commune with God. Such a tent is surely goodly.
Yet the Tent of Meeting stands for something else too. The Bible informs us that Joshua, Moses’ attendant, a youth, “would not stir from out of the tent.” Again “tent” must be seen as idea, not abode. The student “attends” his mentor, is passionately devoted to him. We are looking at the Biblical model of a student-teacher relationship, a prefiguring of the ideal school or beit midrash – a teacher worth emulating, a student wise enough to know it.
Ironically, the “goodly tents” invoked by Balaam will eventually become the three pillars of Jewish civilization, home and tradition, community and synagogue, houses of teaching and learning.
We are often referred to as the People of the Book. Perhaps Balaam was redeemed in alluding to us as the People of the Tent. 
Esther Lapian is a teacher-educator at The Kerem Institute, a teacher- training college in Jerusalem, and directs Paces – an educational consulting service helping Anglo families navigate the school system