"What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city?” asks the philosopher Seneca in his Letters from a Stoic. “If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
Some people are perpetually antsy. They’re never satisfied with their current location and constantly move from one place to another in the mistaken belief that their problems stem from external rather than internal conditions.
This belief might explain the wording of Numbers 33:2. This verse reads: “Moshe wrote their ‘goings forth’ according to their journeys (motza’eihem l’mas’eihem) at the bidding of Hashem, and these were their journeys according to their ‘goings forth’ (mas’eihem l’motza’eihem).”
Why does “goings forth” appear before “journeys” in the first part of the verse but after “journeys” in the second part?
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch answers that the first half reflects Hashem’s perspective; the second half, the Jews’ perspective. Each time Hashem asked the Jews to break camp, he had a specific aim in mind. “[T]he purpose was always to reach a fresh goal for which G-d’s educational ruling considered the new halting place the most suitable. Each masa was a progress, was the purpose of the motza.” Thus motza’eihem l’mas’eihem.
For the Jews, it was the opposite. They didn’t care about the journey. They just wanted to leave their current location. “Wherever they stayed they were dissatisfied. When it came to breaking up the camp, that was what they wanted, that was their purpose. At the moment it did not matter where they were going to next; they were going on only to get away from where they had been stopping.” Thus, mas’eihem l’motza’eihem.
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) - head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years - was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of “The Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch Dictionary.”