Our parsha speaks about the silver trumpets Moshe was commanded to make: "The Lord spoke to Moshe, saying, “Make two trumpets of silver; make them of hammered work. They shall serve you to summon the congregation [eidah] and cause the camps [machanot] to journey.” (Bamidbar 10:1–2)
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik explored the difference between the two terms used here to describe the people in his famous essay Kol Dodi Dofek. There are, says Rabbi Soloveitchik, two ways in which people become a group – a community, society, or nation.
The first is when they face a common enemy. They band together for mutual protection, knowing that only by doing so can they survive. Humans are not the only creatures to do this. Animals, too, come together in herds or flocks to defend themselves against predators. Such a group is a machaneh – a camp, a defensive formation.
An eidah, a congregation, is altogether different. Here, people can come together because they share a vision, a goal, a set of ideals. Eidah is related to the word eid, witness. Eidot (as opposed to chukim and mishpatim) are the commands that testify to Jewish belief, as Shabbat testifies to Creation, Pesach to the Divine involvement in history, and so on. An eidah is not a defensive formation but a creative one. People join to do together what none of them could achieve alone. A society built around a shared project, a vision of the common good, is not a machaneh but an eidah; not a camp but a congregation.
These are two different ways of existing and relating to the world. A camp is brought into being by what happens to it from the outside. A congregation comes into existence by internal decision. The first is reactive, the second proactive. The first is a response to what has happened to the group in the past. The second represents what the group seeks to achieve in the future. Whereas camps exist even in the animal kingdom, congregations are uniquely human. They flow from the human ability to think, speak, communicate, envision a society different from any that has existed in the past, and collaborate to bring it about.
So, a camp and a congregation. Judaism is both. This duality was given its first expression this week in Beha’alotecha, with the command: “Make two trumpets of silver; make them of hammered work. They shall serve you to summon the congregation [eidah], and cause the camps [machanot] to journey.” Sometimes, the clarion call speaks to our sense of faith. We are G-d’s people, His emissaries and ambassadors, charged with making His presence real in the world by healing deeds and holy lives. At other times, the trumpet that sounds and summons us is the call of fate: Jewish lives endangered in Israel or the Diaspora by the unremitting hostility of those who call themselves children of Abraham yet claim that they, not we, are his true heirs.
Whichever sound the silver instruments make, they call on that duality that makes Jews and Judaism inseparable. However deep the divisions between us, we remain one family in fate and faith. When the trumpet sounds, it sounds for us.
RABBI YAKOV YOSEF SCHECHTER
RABBI JONATHAN SACKS
