Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a righteous person goes on top of their roof to escape the waters of a flood, all the time praying to God for assistance. When a small boat comes by, he brushes it away saying God will save him. When a larger boat comes, he does the same. Now as the water threatens to consume him, a helicopter arrives. Still convinced God will save him, he stays on the roof until the waters fully consume him. In Heaven, he asks God why he hadn’t been saved, to which God replies, “I sent a boat and then another boat and then a helicopter.. “
This week we conclude the book of Numbers, a book where week after week everything that can go wrong does go wrong. We are attacked by enemies near and far, we are our worst enemy, Aaron and Miriam die, and worse still, we end up stuck in the wilderness for forty years. And, yet, here in the last two portions, Matot and Masei, life goes on. Nothing symbolizes this determination to persevere than the presence of Eleazar, Aaron’s oldest surviving son who must carry the mantle of the High Priest in the absence of his father. With little fanfare or recognition, he stands by his uncle Moses to fulfill the sacred duties of the Jewish people. Eleazar’s name means “God helps,” a name I particularly like because it is the backbone of my family name Lazarus. To anglify it, my great grandparents added “us” to the end when they arrived in the country, thus creating the meaning, “God helps us.” But unlike the poor fellow in the joke, I don’t believe our ancestors believed God would help us, without us pitching in as well. We need people like Eleazar to step in when everything has gone wrong and to move on we need to rely on one another. That is when our people are at our strongest, when we understand that the blessing of God only arrives when open our hearts to let it in.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex