Parashat Shelach

The end of this week’s parasha is an enigmatic story about the mekoshesh, the wood gatherer, who is executed for gathering sticks on the Shabbat. On the surface this seems incredibly harsh, inflexible, and autocratic.
Got sticks? You’re a dead man….
Of course, there is much more here than first meets the eye, so let’s dig a bit deeper together.
First, a little background.
Last week’s reading, Parashat Beha’alotcha, recorded some misgivings by the Israelites, complaining and asking to go back to slavery. Like modern day prisoners freed after decades behind bars, wanting to go back to the confined familiarity rather than adjust to a life of free choice, the Israelites, in a moment of weakness, have some second thoughts.
This led to the incident of the m’raglim (scouts) in the beginning of this week’s sidra, Parasha Shelach.

The m’raglim bring back a report recommending that the people NOT try to enter the promised land, “ …. a land that devours its inhabitants..” (Num. 13:32). A breakdown in faith led to the inability to see the big picture, and the Israelites tumble from their exalted spiritual heights. The slave comes out of Egypt, but Egypt will not come out of the slave.  It is decreed that the current generation would wander for forty years, and only their children, who did not know servitude to a human master, would take possession of the promised land.
“Your children, they shall be wanderers in the desert for forty years, and they will bear [the burden of] your dissoluteness, until the last of your corpses are in the desert. According to the number of days which you scouted the land; forty days, a day for a year, a day for a year you will bear the burden of your iniquity forty years, and you will know My displeasure.” (Num. 14:33-34).
But what of the covenant? What was the obligation of those exiled in the desert?

In the next chapter the Torah elucidates: “And if one day you should fall into the error that you no longer need to observe all these commandments that G-d has given Moshe; All that G-d has commanded you from the day that G-d gave His commandments, and onward to your descendants; Then it shall be if, by the eyes of the community, an act of inadvertence has been committed, the entire community shall prepare one bull each….” (Num. 15:22-24).
Our sages derive from the verses that the deviation was avodah zara, idol worship.
Denying the existence of G-d in the world by ignoring the covenant is a form of idolatry! (Talmud, Horayot 8a). Rabbi S. R. Hirsch explains that the prohibition of idolatry is the fundamental principle of all the Torah’s commandments, and the whole Torah stands or falls by the fulfillment of this prohibition.
Obviously, the deal still stands…
But, inadvertent deviations would require an offering.
And intentional violations?
“But as for the person who does this with an uplifted hand………he has blasphemed G-d by so doing, and that soul shall be uprooted from the midst of its people.” (Num. 15:30)
Immediately afterwards the Torah tells us:  “While the Israelites were in the wilderness they discovered a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day”(Num. 15:32).
All the Israelites who heard G-d speak at Sinai, who said “naaseh  v’nishma” (We will do and we will listen) knew that their covenantal responsibility for observing the Sabbath precluded the actions they witnessed (The Talmud discusses specifically what the violation was – harvesting the wood, bundling it, carrying, etc.).
Denying the Shabbat was an act of avodah zara, denying the authority of G-d, a transgression punishable by death!  “And G-d said to Moshe, The man shall be executed; let the entire community stone him with stones outside the camp.” (Num. 15:35). Ouch!
Yet we do not rely on a literal reading of the verses of the Torah to define our observance of the revealed law.
Our tradition teaches that capital punishment was rarely meted out, and only after a series of conditions were met. (The Talmud in Sanhedrin 41a tells us that 40 years before the destruction of the second temple the Sanhedrin lost the authority to decide capital cases, so in practice Jewish law does not enforce the death penalty….).

In order to have committed a capital offense the violator needed to know the significance of his actions. His actions must take place in public, with two witnesses. He needed to be warned by the two witnesses, and commit the offense in front of the witnesses immediately after being warned. The Torah tells us that the execution would take place “outside of the camp”, so as to provide more time for new facts to be discovered that would prevent the execution from taking place at all.
The Torah is not teaching us to be a band of roaming zealots, looking for violators to “rub out”. To the contrary, Judaism despises capital punishment.
But this case in our Parasha is still baffling. Why did he have to die?
The case of the mekoshesh seems to be a classic case of “Suicide by Cop”. This is the conclusion reached by the midrash quoted by Tosefot in  the Talmud( tractate Bava Batra 119a). Lest the generation condemned to wander in the desert think that Shabbat observance was irrelevant, the mekoshesh deliberately committed a capital offense, demanding his execution to prove the sanctity of Shabbat in the presence of the Shechina. According to this midrash he died “L’shem Shamayim“, for the sake of heaven.

Today we live in exile, and the presence of G-d is blurred and unfocused. The  consequence of a life without the sanctity of Shabbat is an even greater chasm between the profane and the sacred.
“More than the Jews have kept the Shabbat, the Shabbat has kept the Jews.” – Ahad Ha’am
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Greg