We The Tribes

My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show Notes. This week, we start the fourth book of the Torah, Parashat Bamidbar. We will suggest that this is the book where the rubber hits the road and a radical new political model is launched. So join us for We The Tribes. So before we started, I asked you if you had ever heard of this Daniel Elazar. I had not. And I’ve kind of skimmed through, done a fast read through two of his books. He, we will see, is a world renowned scholar in federalism and obviously also a very knowledgeable Jew. Fascinating take this week, I think, on Bamidbar Are you strapped in and ready?

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:02:24]:
This is amazing. Yeah, he’s a Jewish political theorist, which I think, you know, there aren’t that many of which is really fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:31]:
Okay, so here we go. We are in Numbers 1, 1-4. On the first day of the second month in the second year after the exodus from the land of Egypt, God spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai in the tent of meeting, saying, take up the head count, take a census of the entire community. And it uses the word community or assembly or edah, which means like the ruling council or the children of Israel by their clans, by their father’s houses, according to the number of names every male per capita, which really means “kup”. It means a head count. And you and Aaron shall record them by their groups from the age of 20 years up. All those in Israel who are able to bear arms associated with you shall be a representative from every tribe, each one the head of his ancestral house. So, Rabbi, the first thing that struck me is because I’m still a little bit in Portugal, I looked at Abarbanel, and his first question was, he goes, you know, I don’t quite get this, as if this is at Sinai. Why are they at the tent of meeting? I didn’t get to the part where he gives the answer, but I think what we’re going to see is this is almost the setting for a new constitution. And it’s not so important where, when, and how. They are setting up something directly connected to the Sinai revolution. And it is normative. So there’s a tent of meeting. And then the other thing that struck me was all of the different words used for describing who we’re talking about. It says, So edat, as I said from Everett Fox, talks in terms of edah can mean a ruling council or the entire people. Then it says for their families, for the heads of each group. And then it talks about ish, ish, lemate, ish, rosh, levet, avotav, hu, a representative from every tribe, each one the head of his ancestral house. Maybe I’ve been reading too much about gerrymandering and who represents who and where the lines have divided. But it seemed to me, Rabbi, looking at it fresh through fresh eyes, this year, we’re really talking and deciding who has a voice, the different superstructure going down from individual all the way up to the head of the representative, so to speak, of each tribe. It just struck me the way it parsed it.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:05:32]:
I think that’s right. Let me go back to your first question. So it says in the second year after the exodus from the land of Egypt, God spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai in the Tent of Meeting. So what’s the significance of the Tent of meeting? So the Book of Numbers is the book of the journey of the Jews. You know, it’s an interesting thing. The book of Exodus talks about the journey. They leave Egypt, they go to Sinai, and they start traveling. The book of Leviticus takes off. It’s like a big bracket. Cause it tells you all about the tabernacle and the sacrifices. But there’s no narrative, there’s no story, there’s no journey. And the journey continues here in the Book of Numbers, chapter one, I think, in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting. That’s how that, you know, that was showed, they were journeying. They weren’t at Mount Sinai anymore. They weren’t actually in the tabernacle. It was the tent of meeting, which seemed to kind of travel with them. So I think that an important point. And for sure, there’s a big emphasis here on levels of authority, on how the people are divided. You know, that’s an important thing today when we take a census. The census takers, I don’t know who they are exactly, but they’re not the governors, they’re not the mayors. Right. You just have people who are working for the department of the census or whatever. You have it. But there. But here in the Torah, they want to tell you that the people in charge of the census are the governors and the mayors. It elevates the importance of the census. So it’s interesting to compare their census to our census. It’s also will be important to, you know, that we’ll get to it in his work what the purpose of a census is. Right. Like you said, you know, in the United States now we have all these court cases about, you know, how you divide the districts, which is related to the census. Right. You know, every state has a number of representatives depending on their population and how they divide the state. So obviously that’s not what the Torah does. And that’s also interesting to compare one with the other.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:37]:
I love it all. I love it all. What follows after what we just read is then it goes tribe by tribe, nasi, the leader by leader, and it counts everything. And it’s at this point that this Daniel Elazar kind of also tries to put the Book of Numbers into context. He says, going back to the book of Genesis, a principal purpose of the Jacob and Joseph stories is to explain the foundation of the twelve tribes of Israel. While those twelve sons of Jacob may have been the ancestors, real or eponymous, of the original 12 tribes of Israel, in fact, history indicates that while the number remained the same, the identities of the 12 tribes shifted. The beginnings of the shift are described in Bereshit. In the process, we have the final dimension of covenants developed in Bereshit, namely the establishment of the basis for a covenantal polity, a tribal federation. So again, you can go look at B’reishi, you can look at the whole story of Exodus, and you can say it’s doing many different things. There are times where I’ve looked at it and it talks about sibling rivalry, and you can go chapter by chapter by chapter, seeing how that all develops. You can go through Bereshit and say it all has to do with who’s the chosen. Is it the first son or the second son, what this guy is doing? And we’ll see when we get to his bio that he is a federalist, meaning to say that just as with the states, the 13 states, there are separate, smaller entities and then there’s an overall government. He’s looking at everything that lies before this book of Numbers as preparation for what happens the second. We read the verses we started with today. And so he looks back at all those narrative stories about the patriarchs and the matriarchs, and he’s saying they’re all there to establish this confederacy of tribes. It’s going to change the way we look at everything before and possibly everything after. And I just love that because they’re all right of course, there are just different lenses that we can look through.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:09:54]:
Amazing. Okay, let’s go for it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:09:57]:
So he says, in keeping with the organic character of the 12 tribe kinship group, before Sinai, the tribes were governed by customary law. Through the Sinai covenant, God changes the moral basis of the Israelites obligations and rights as much as he changes their content. So what he’s arguing, and he doesn’t say it as a commentary on our verses, but the fact that it mentions Sinai is at Sinai, when God already makes a covenant with this disparate group of people. Six, we always thought there were 600,000 Jews. We’re going to see in a second that there were 12 tribes camped around with flags. But he was establishing a new basis for the social contract. And that I think becomes fascinating when you think back to the verses that we started reading. So for instance, in Numbers 2 2, the next chapter of our parsha, it says, the Israelites shall canmp each household with its standard under the banners of their ancestral house. They shall camp around the tent of meeting at a distance, camped at the front or east side. The standard of the division of Judah, troop by troop, chieftain of the Judahites, Nachshon ben aminadav. So I had to drop a celebrity name. But the point is that what he’s doing is he’s changing our vision of what happened at Sinai. And all of a sudden, now we don’t see 600,000 individuals. We see 12 tribes camped around sticking their flag, so to speak, in the ground. And if it reminds us of Washington, trying to bring together these 13 states because there were things that had to be done, I don’t think it’s that far fetched.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:11:42]:
I think that’s great. Now, of course, you have to remember that in this week’s Torah portion, it tells us that the census of the Jews, which is really the census of the men who are over 20 years old, was 603,550, which means that there were between 2 and 3 million people. So part of it, Geoffrey, has to do with communication. That is, how did they communicate? Moses spoke. You know, you get the impression when you read the Torah that Moses spoke and everybody heard. Right. There was a microphone and everybody heard. Obviously, that’s ridiculous. There had to be some kind of system. And would you describe the way they camped? Is part of the system of protection? Correct, but it’s also of communication. That’s the way they got the word out.

Geoffrey Stern [00:12:27]:
I love that. And absolutely. And it’s all because we’re visualizing it slightly differently. If we go to Rashi Legilgalotam. by their polls, he says by means of shekels, and then he refers back to Exodus 38. So this isn’t the first time that we’ve come across this. But again, we have two variations on the story. One is where they count by their head count, and the other is where they do it by shekels. Rashi is trying to combine the two. Ibn Ezra, he says, as I have already explained, the meaning of gilgalatam, their poles, the word gulgulatam their poles literally means their skulls. Galgal, it’s round and so called because it is round. He sees this as different. But what I’m trying to say, and I think even Eleazar kind of referenced it, we have these traditions of 12. Sometimes the names will change. We have these traditions of polling. Sometimes it’s referred to by skulls, sometimes it’s by shekels. The details are not important. These are combining of different traditions. But the resulting vision, that is what is ultimately important and what we are going to look at. The Emek Devar says as follows, the tribal leaders were already agreed upon by each tribe as worthy to be the head. Here in our Parsha, God agreed with their selection and appointed them with his word. And this is what the verse means. Each man shall be the head of his father’s house. The man who is already the head will be appointed to take charge of the counting by God’s command. So, Rabbi, there’s already been a primary. There have already been county elections. As you were saying before, there is already. The polling stations have been set up. There are so many levels, what you call communication. It’s necessary for communication. But I love the way the Emek Davar says, we’ve already assumed all of this political superstructure. And we’ve gotten to the point where the 12 Nassiim, the 12 princes of each tribe, are presented before Moses, before God, and approved.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:14:46]:
Fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:47]:
Okay, so I wanted to talk a little bit about how the number 12 is achieved. So there are numerous times where the 12 is achieved. In our particular Parasha, it does something interesting. It says, from the sons of Joseph, in verse 1: 10, there was Ephraim the Elishama, son of Ammihud, and Manasseh Gamaliel son of Pedisur. So how do you get to 12? If Joseph is divided into two, you leave out Levi. So in our particular rendering of the 12 tribes, we don’t have Levi. And of course, if you say, why not? You could make the argument because since we’re looking at military age and Levi did not serve in the military, that’s why they were left out.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:15:40]:
And they didn’t have land. They didn’t have. They didn’t have a portion in the land because they lived in houses. They lived in special cities because they had a rotation to work in Jerusalem. Slow.

Geoffrey Stern [00:15:53]:
Absolutely. But the point is that while we all agree that there are 12 tribes, if we look at the different lists in the Torah, depending on the needs and the context, those numbers change. So in our parsha, it says, like we just said, the Levites, however, were not recorded among them because, as Moses had spoken, do not on any account enroll the tribe of Levi or take a census of them with the Israelites. And so therefore, we use Joseph, we split him, and we take his sons, Jacob’s grandsons. If we go to Exodus, it talks about, these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob there to get the number 12. We obviously include Joseph and Levi, and that’s how we get to 12. There are renderings in the book of Judges where they leave out different tribes. Judas, Shimon, and Labor, Levi are left out. The point that these modern scholars are making is that it’s not always important who made up these tribes. What was important was that there was a confederacy of 12 tribes. We’re creating a structure. And I would even argue that, you know, there are those who say, who was the tribe of Levi? Why can they not bear arms? Is it because of what happened in Genesis when Shimon and Levi went and they did a massacre? Did they have a… violent tendency? The point is, are these tribes necessarily all the children of the same patriarch? It wasn’t important at this point. This was a revolutionary confederacy of 12 disparate tribes. And they were all confederated, based on a covenant and a belief system. And that’s why this scholar who strutted between the biblical world, he was a religious Jew and a scholar of Judaica and a political scientist. He sees this as being absolutely unique in the history of politics.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:18:07]:
I’ll just say we’re not so different. You talk about the United States, it’s 50 states. If I asked you to talk about the states, there’s no way you would mention all 50 states. You’d mention some states. We have 50 states like New York, California, Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, whatever. You would say the detail is not important. It’s the fact that you have a United States of America.. The detail wasn’t so important. The point was you had a federation of 12 tribes in Israel.

Geoffrey Stern [00:18:38]:
Absolutely.

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Geoffrey Stern [00:19:48]:
So I I’ve hinted that I found the guy’s bio so interesting. I am going to run through it as if he was a guest. He unfortunately passed away in 1999. So this Daniel Elazar was a political scientist known his seminal studies of political culture of the US States. He was professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan University in Israel and Director of the center for the Study of Federalism and professor of Political Science at Temple University. He was the founder and President of the Jerusalem center for public affairs. In 1986, President Reagan appointed him a citizen member of the U.S. advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, the major intergovernmental agency dealing with federalism. He was a appointed for a second term in 88 and a third in 91. He was the author and editor of more than 60 books. His books in the area of federalism Included the American Partnership, American Federalism, the American Mosaic. And this is I found fascinating. He was also the author of multi generational study of the development of civil community in Midwestern cities. This guy was not just a tangential professor of political science who had a slight interest federalism. He was absolutely absorbed by this federalism. And lucky for us, he also wrote books on the Torah. So he writes. And now he’s talking about our book, the fourth book of the Torah. Numbers in Hebrew Bamidbar continues the constitutional corpus and is understood in the Jewish tradition to be an indivisible part of the original constitution. Numbers is an elaboration of aspects of the regime. It concentrates on the operational dimensions of the government of the tribal confederation. He gives a list. So now we’re starting.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:21:44]:
Wow, look at that list.

Geoffrey Stern [00:21:45]:
He is going to give us a list of what happens in the rest of this book through his lens. We already looked backwards, now we’re looking forward. So the national consensus by tribes and the federal means by which the census is taken. Two, the manner of forming the tribes around the tent of assembly. Three, the divisions of the tribe of Levi. Four, operational rules for managing the camp. Removing lepers, corpses. We focus on the lepers and corpses. He’s focused on operational rules for managing the camp, the order of tribal sacrifices. Okay, that you could say that’s not surprising. Technical details for praying the Levites for service. Trumpet calls for public assembly. That gets into your aspect of communication, Rabbi. Implementation of the death penalty commandment that all Israelites put on a garments with fringes. So that he’s looking at.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:22:40]:
Interesting that that’s part of it.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:42]:
Because he’s looking at it like. What’s the word I’m thinking of? It’s not a costume, it’s a uniform. He’s seeing it as a uniform.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:22:50]:
That’s fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:51]:
Then he goes. Provision for the division of land of canaan in chapters 26. Provision for succession of Moses. Adjudication of vows, division of spoils of war. Provision for the settlement of the two and a half tribes on the other side of the Jordan. Rules for conquering the west bank, the borders of the land of 12 tribes. Allocation of the Levites, cities of refuge, rules regarding the tribal lands. If you look at the Book of Numbers from his lens, this is creating the boundaries and the mechanics of this federalist revolution. It’s just amazing how you can look at it all differently when you look at it through a lens such as this.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:23:37]:
That’s fantastic. And that’s great that he lays out the entire Book of Numbers based on.

Geoffrey Stern [00:23:43]:
On that, he says this is a book filled with the day to day stuff of government and politics, worth a political commentary in its own right. In that sense, it is an excursus on the Book of the Covenant and the other constitutional laws of Exodus and Leviticus. If the decalogue is the covenant and the Book of Covenant is the basic constitution, Numbers provide several organic laws designed to implement the covenant and the Constitution in the real world occupied by the Israelites, both in the desert and what was to become the historic land of the 12 tribes on both banks of the Jordan. He just makes us look at our Parsha and this Book of Bamidbar differently. And now I want to go a little bit into what federalism is through his lens, because that’s the key argument here, that it is novel and that it appeared once, maybe twice, because he includes Switzerland, but once before the Constitutional Congress and the federal government. So he says federalism has to do with the need of people and polities to unite for common purposes, yet remain separate to preserve their respective integrities. It is rather like wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too. So again, he sees this as radical. The federal idea itself rests on the principle that political and social institutions and relationship are best established through covenants, compacts and other contractual arrangements, rather than or in addition to simply growing organically. In other words, that humans are able to make constitutional choices. We’re going to get into this “organical” in a second. The term federal is derived from the Latin for foedus, which like the Hebrew term Brit means covenant. There have been three critical federal experiments in the history of humanity to date. The Israelite tribal federation described in the Bible, what was the first. More than 3,000 years ago, it formulated the founding principle of federalism by transforming the vassal treaty among unequals into a covenant among equal partners, equal at least for the purpose of covenant. That led to the establishment of a polity of tribes maintaining their liberties within the framework of a common constitution and law. Although external pressures ultimately brought about the demiss of the tribal federation as a regime, the Jewish people lived on as the first federal people. And they have continued to use federal principles in their internal organization to the present day. So that is the most profound statement he makes. Because, Rabbi, if there’s anything that we do at Madlik is we marvel at the Jewish people’s ability to welcome different opinions, but respect different opinions. And ultimately what he’s saying is that’s what federalism is, that we are united as a people. And not only can can we disagree, but we have to disagree. We have to retain our identity. That is fascinating. So he says that other countries are started and maintained through the glue of conquest. So conquest tends to produce hierarchically organized regimes ruled in an authoritative manner. Think power pyramids with the conqueror on top. You guessed it, that is ancient Egypt. Then there is another model. The organic model has proved most attractive political philosophers, precisely because at its best, it seems to reflect the natural order of things. So if you recall a second ago, he said, before Sinai, the Jews had tradition, they had common practices. They were a people, they were naturally formed. That was the moment where they were just like the Greeks. What happened, according to this scholar at Sinai, was all of a sudden the organic model changed into a covenantal model. Covenantal foundings emphasize the deliberate coming together of humans as equals to establish bodies politic in such a way that all reaffirm their fundamental equality and retain their basic rights. It really is fascinating.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:28:05]:
It’s fantastic. That’s a fantastic couple of paragraphs.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:07]:
So he makes us look at all of this stuff so differently. He goes on to say that the biblical design is federal in three ways. First, it’s based upon a network of covenants, beginning with those between God and man, which weave the web of human, especially political relationships in a federal way, that is through a pact, association and consent. And again, you won’t be able to read what follows after reading this and not think in terms of groups coming together. Even Zelophchad’s daughter, We normally read that through a feminist lens. And once you look at this, what happened was they came up with pushback. How can we have tribal and distinct, different tribes if women who marry out of the tribe and don’t have the father or brother to do it? This was kind of like something that has to go to court. It has nothing to do with feminism. It has to do with how do we retain the Confederacy. 2. The classical biblical commonwealth was a fully articulated federation of tribes instituted and reaffirmed by covenant to function under a common constitution and common laws. Any and all constitutional changes in the Israel polity were introduced through covenanting. And even after the introduction of the monarchy, the federal element was maintained until most of the tribal structure structures were destroyed in external voices. The third thing that he says is fascinating. He says even in the end of Days, where it’s all la dee da, universal lambs lying down with sheep. If you look at Ezekiel, he talks about the End of Days and he talks about the tribes, and he talks about the 12 tribes being reinstated. Rabbi. In the same words as he talks about, the nations of the world will come. And if you read through this len, what happens is the lens that normally we call universalism, where we all become homogenous and lose our distinctions. If you take this to the end, even the biblical eschatology looks where we retain our distinct characteristics, whether we’re inside of Israel or around the world. And I just thought that this was fascinating. He even has a term that he talks about a federalist state of mind, that you think about things differently. I just am so thankful that I discovered him. And it makes you really think about how revolutionary this material is, but also to think about it differently. And I have to say what I have to do is control myself, because the gut reaction is we’re projecting back in time.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:03]:
Right. Well, I was going to say that it’s so modern. The question is, is it really modern? Or what is it saying is this is built into the human fabric of the way states are designed, developed.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:13]:
And if you have those 12 tribes around the thing, and then you talk about laws that help to support the 12 tribes, and you look at the cities and you say, how are they distributed amongst the 12 tribes? And the Levi’s, it makes you say, this is real. This is not some theology they were putting together the real thing, confederacy of tribes.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:36]:
Amazing. This is really good. Okay, enjoy the beginning of the Book of Numbers, everybody. We got a good couple of weeks coming up. You see from the professor, we have a great couple of weeks coming up. Great. Shabbat Shalom, everybody.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:49]:
And I think we have Shavuot coming, so we.

Rabbi Adam Mintz [00:31:52]:
Yeah, and Chag Sameach, who will pick it up in Parashat Naso in two weeks from now.

Geoffrey Stern [00:31:57]:
So get around Sinai next week, plant your flag, keep your independence, but also listen to the words that everybody else will be listening to. Accept the Torah in your own way. Sabbat Shalom, and we will see you all next week.