By Marco Del Monte
Seeing the Goal to Complete the Journey: The Secret of the 42 Stages
Based on the Shiur by Rav Yona Metzger
At the beginning of our Parashah, the Torah uses an expression that has always attracted the attention of commentators due to a strange stylistic inversion: “And Moses wrote their departures for their journeys... and these are their journeys for their departures”.
Why is there first talk of "departures for journeys" and immediately afterwards the order is reversed? To understand this duality, the great sage Rabbi Shlomo Kluger reveals an extraordinary tradition linked to the teaching of Rabbi Yonatan ben Uziel. On the night of the first Passover sacrifice, even before definitively leaving Egypt, the people of Israel experienced a hidden miracle: the clouds of divine glory transported the entire people "on eagles' wings" to the place of the future Temple in Jerusalem. There they performed the sacrifice, only to be brought back to Egypt, consume the Passover meal and, only the following day, begin the long journey on foot in the desert.
One might ask: what is the point of this paradox? If the Eternal had already miraculously brought them to their destination, why make them turn back and force them to walk for forty years through 42 grueling stages in the desert?
The answer touches upon a fundamental educational principle that the Eternal uses with human beings, a dynamic that overturns our linear perception of time. In human life, we accumulate wisdom only with the passing of years, often regretting not having had the awareness of sixty or more when we had the strength of twenty. In the spiritual world, however, G-d reverses the factors: He first grants us a glimpse of the future, an illumination of the destination, and then sends us back into the present to walk the road with a totally new awareness. We find this same dynamic in a well-known passage of the Gemara (Niddah 30b): in the maternal womb, the angel teaches the foetus the entire Torah, only to make them forget it at the moment of birth. The Gaon of Vilna explains that this is not a useless exercise: that preventative teaching serves to impregnate the soul. When we study the Torah in our lives, we will not be learning something foreign, but we will be "remembering" a goal that is already a part of us, perhaps which is why the Torah so many times asks us to Remember, for example Shabbat, and not to study ex novo.
The same concept is also found in the Sefer HaTanya, when interpreting the Talmudic passage that teaches that the soul is made to take an oath to be a tzaddik and not a rasha; that Mashbiim, the oath taken, can also be read as Masbiim, meaning it is satiated, that is, the neshama is filled with potential to face the journey of life. We also find this structure in the path towards the Giving of the Torah. When the Eternal speaks to Moses He says: «When you have brought the people out..., you shall serve G-d (Ta'avduN) upon this mountain». The masters note that the word "you shall serve" features an apparently superfluous final Nun (נ), whose numerical value is 50. G-d was showing the people, still slaves in Egypt at the lowest level of impurity, the final finish line: the fiftieth day, the Giving of the Torah. It is exactly the secret of Sefirat HaOmer: At Pesach we receive an illumination from Above, we are catapulted to the summit "on eagles' wings" and we catch a glimpse of the Nun of our spiritual future. Immediately afterwards, that light is hidden. We return to our daily reality and begin to count 49 days, rectifying our spiritual channels step by step. But that counting is not blind toil: every day we walk looking forward, towards that fiftieth day that we have already "tasted". Without the initial vision, the path would be devoid of direction; without the subsequent journey, the vision would remain a sterile dream that does not transform the soul.
The desert that Israel had to cross was not just sand, but a territory dominated by hostile spiritual forces, summarized by the acronym Ashan-smoke: Akrab - scorpion, Seraf - burning serpent, Nachash - snake. To give the people the psychological and spiritual strength to face and defeat this impurity along the 42 stages, the Eternal wanted our fathers to experience first, even if only for a moment, the absolute sanctity of Jerusalem. Just as Yaakov fills himself with Torah before undertaking his journey in life. Here is the secret of the verse of our Parashah revealed: the first part indicates the spiritual and immediate journey towards the destination while the second indicates the concrete, tiring but conscious journey, accomplished step by step in the desert to re-appropriate what has already been seen. In the challenges of our personal, family and community life, the desert of everyday life and its stages can appear insurmountable. The secret that the Torah delivers to us this week is never to lose sight of the Nun, the glimpse of the future that the Eternal has imprinted in our hearts even before coming into this world. We are not walking towards the unknown: we are only travelling to conquer what, in our soul, already belongs to us.
Shabbat Shalom
Translated from the Italian with Google Gemini. The Italian text is the original.