Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidtwas the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Russia from 1993 until 2022. From 2011, Goldschmidt has served as president of the Conference of European Rabbis.
“We Are One” is a phrase popularly used to describe the Jewish people – but there’s an asterisk at the end of that slogan. While all Jews are united by virtue of their peoplehood, we are actually made up of a great many “tribes” – observant and non-observant, denominational (Orthodox, Reform etc.) ideological (Zionist, non-Zionist), communal (Ashkenazim, Sephardim, etc.) – cultural (Russian versus Middle Eastern) the list goes on and on. Unifying these disparate groups into a nation where tribal needs take a back seat to the national ones is one of the great challenges of modern Jewish life.
But this isn’t a new issue. We meet first the tribes as children growing up in the house of their father Jacob, and we witness the family being torn apart by rivalry and hate, ending with the transfer of the Jewish original family from Canaan to Egypt.
In this week’s Torah portion, Bamidbar, we’re introduced to the idea of God commanding Moses to take a census as a prelude to entry into the Land of Israel. While this isn’t the first census of the Jewish people, this count in Bamidbar is the most extensive and meticulous so far in the Torah, emphasizing the tribal aspect of the count. Thus we see that the tribe of Reuven numbered 46,500 battle-ready soldiers between the ages of 20 and 60, Simeon, 59,300, Gad, 45,650, and so on. In addition, the tribes are broken down by “camps,” with the numbers of four separate groupings of the 12 tribes listed cumulatively.
But no matter how the numbers are broken down, the Torah stresses that all – regardless of tribal or camp affiliation – are part of the total, with Jews eligible to fight for their promised homeland numbering 603,550.
The generation of Israelites who took part in the great Exodus out of Egypt had its share of malcontents and disputes. To name a few, Korach the Levite and relative of Moses, demanding more power sharing, and the twelve spies rejecting the promised land. However, with all these unhappy campers, it is self evident from the text that this first generation had a strong Jewish identity which surpassed their tribal one.
However, the next generation of Israelites, who grew up in the desert, oblivious to the outside world, had a much stronger tribal than national identity. For example, as preparations were being made to enter the Land after the Israelites’ 40-year sojourn in the desert, the tribes of Gad and Reuven ask Moses to remain and inherit their lands on the eastern side of the Jordan River which the Jews had already conquered, since that area was fertile and appropriate, to support their large holdings of sheep (Numbers 32:1-32). They were only able to get permission to use this land by making a deal to send their best soldiers to the western side of the Jordan to help with the conquest of the Promised Land, after a harsh talking-to by Moses, who all but accused them of abandoning the rest of the nation in order to satisfy their tribal needs.
Another incident of competing tribal interests involves the daughters of Zelophehad (Numbers 27:2–7), who were concerned that their family’s land would transfer to another tribe, as they were unable to inherit their deceased father’s holdings.
And the Torah recognized this need for communal and tribal identity, recognizing that it is impossible to get Jews to agree on almost anything. After all, it was Moses, via the word of God, who assigned each tribe its own separate lands (Numbers 34:13). And yet it is also Moses who harshly criticizes the tribes of Gad and Reuven over the suspicion that they might be shirking their national duty. Indeed, the message is clear - we may be separated by tribal affiliation, religious practice, communal ancestry, or a dozen other factors – but in the end, we are all one.
No matter how you break it down, we are all part of that 603,550.
That’s a lesson we would do well to heed today. In perhaps his most famous speech, former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin described the problem – and the solution. There are tribes with disparate – sometimes conflicting – interests, there is no denying that, he said. But with that, “We must always ensure that in the natural tension between statehood and tribalism it is the interests of the state, the republic, which prevails over cultural autonomy and communal tribalism. The question is what each one of us is willing and able to do to ensure it,” Rivlin told the Knesset.
Up until October 6th of last year Israeli citizens were engaged in an ever more acrimonious tribal conflict, the tribe of Jerusalem against the tribe of greater Tel Aviv, endangering the future of the state of Israel. The 7th of October reminded everyone that we do not have the luxury to engage in this kind of conflict and that outside there are forces, which like the Babylonians and the Romans in their time, are just waiting to annihilate us.
Today, our tribes continue to argue and bicker over a wide variety of issues - whether or not to draft haredi men to the military; how to fight the war in Gaza; whether and how to make deals with Hamas terrorists for release of the hostages; judicial reform, and much more.
Israel has faced many existential moments in the past, and the current crisis is perhaps its most existential ever. With war in the south, the north, and even abroad, as Iran and antisemitism threatens Israelis and Jews around the world, the nation needs all hands on deck – from the protesters in Tel Aviv to the high-tech workers to the hareidim in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak to the residents of Judea and Samaria to the café aficionados of Tel Aviv – regardless of their ideas, ideologies, attitudes, and feelings for each other.
There will be plenty of time for tribalism later on. But if we don’t get through the current crisis, there may not be a “later on,” God forbid. The Third Commonwealth, as the State of Israel is often called, is sometimes compared to the Second Temple period – another time when tribalism ruled. Then, it was tribalism that led to the “baseless hatred” that actually tore the nation apart, with Pharisees squaring off against Saducees, those seeking accommodation with the Romans against rebel groups, and Jews who eschewed others who were not as ritually pure as themselves all standing firm – and inflexible – in their stances, refusing to compromise. It was that tribal-based hatred that caused the exile, the Rabbis tell us. We can’t afford to let tribalism do that to us again.
I once heard a great definition of the concept of peoplehood from the eminent American Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna. The meaning of peoplehood, he said, is the understanding that I do not want to have anything to do with person X because he is different, culturally inferior, etc. But since he is my relative I have to deal with him and talk to him.
It’s a tenet that Jews throughout the ages could, or should have heeded - but heeding it has never been more important than it is now.