ByDAVID WOLPE
Updated:

Portable cultures rely on words. For Judaism, the centrality of speech began in the desert.

The title word of the book Bamidbar (In the Wilderness) is connected by rabbinic tradition with dibur (speech). There is clear intertwining of the book and the word in this week’s parasha, in which several different kinds of speech illustrate a range of values expressed in language.

First there is the speech of complaint, the ancient kvetch. The Israelites are unhappy with the manna and demand meat. According to the Rabbis, the manna could taste like whatever one wished, so why would they complain? An acute suggestion from R. Jonathan Eybeschutz explains that everyone collected the manna equally. Therefore, no one could be better than his or her neighbors. They claimed to be upset about food, but what really bothered them was social status. Even in the desert, some had a need to be better than others. It was not pure peevishness or even appetite alone, but something deeper.

The other instance of social status masquerading as complaint in the parasha is the gossip of Aaron and Miriam about Moses’s wife. For right after the complaint about his wife (12:1) they said, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us as well?” It sounds uncannily like the complaints of siblings about parental preferences: Mother always liked you best.

This illustrates a reality about gossip. People rarely gossip about those they consider their social inferiors. Employers do not gossip about employees, but employees do about employers. In Downtown Abbey, the servants gossip about the upstairs aristocrats, but the aristocrats do not gossip about the servants. Part of gossip is leveling – reducing the status, moral or social, of the one derided. Once again, as with the manna, negative speech is about social status.
 

Then there is the unelaborated but important speech of Eldad and Medad, two men who are prophesying in the camp. Although the Torah does not specify the particulars of their prophecy (the Rabbis assume they are prophesying about end times), it does not seem that it is about social status. For after this incident we never hear from them again. It was an outburst of inspiration.

In response, Joshua, who guards the prerogatives of Moses, complains that the two are offering prophecies. Moses gives a famous answer, the nuances of which are not always appreciated: Joshua says that Eldad and Medad are “prophesying” (mitnab’im) and Moses responds that he wishes all of Israel were prophets (n’viim). Moses does not simply wish that all of Israel would prophecy from time to time, as happens here. He rather wishes that the exalted status of being a prophet, a more permanent state of affairs, would be true for everyone in Israel. This is the speech of humility and purity.

Last week was the holiday of Shavuot, the holiday on which we celebrate the giving of God’s words. Central to the Jewish tradition is that God’s words are of infinite, inexhaustible significance. But the words of human beings are also more multilayered than we sometimes appreciate. Emerson wrote that to speak was to “roast your marshmallows on Vesuvius” – that is, language is capable of showing but a tiny bit of the deep fire within.

The Torah reminds us of the reach of language, from complaint to prophecy. This from a tradition that insists the world itself was created with words, as we say in our morning prayers – “God spoke and the world came into being.”

Now that Israel has received the words of God at Sinai, their education will be in the use of words to uplift, not to destroy. The Amidah begins with a prayer to open our lips to prayer and closes with the hope that our lips will be guarded from bad speech. We cannot achieve prophecy, but we can aspire to decency.

For life and death, as Proverbs teaches us, is in the power of the tongue.

The writer is Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of David the Divided Heart. On Twitter: @rabbiwolpe