Congregation B’nai Israel – July 11, 2026
Often when someone is choosing which passage to read in Torah, there is pause. When we are in Leviticus, do we really want to enumerate the list of sacrifices? When we are in Exodus, do we really want to enumerate all the names of all the tribal heads and their number? And, this week, again we have another list. On the surface, it is not very exciting. More like the Triple A Trip Tych they used to send us. It’s a list. Forty-two verses, forty-two stops, forty-two names most of us will never say again once we close the Chumash: *Vayis’u mei-Refidim… vayis’u mei-Sinai… vayis’u mei-Kivrot Ha-Ta’avah.* They journeyed from here. They journeyed from there.
It reads like an itinerary. And for most of Jewish history, readers have been tempted to do exactly what I just did — skim it, and get to the good part.
Our Sages, though, saw that there was meaning and even holiness in what looks like only a list of train stops.
Rashi asks the obvious question: why does the Torah bother recording every single stop on a forty-year journey? He answers with a parable. Imagine a king whose child fell ill, and he took the child far away to be healed. On the journey home, the father began recounting every stop: here we slept, here you caught a chill, here you had a headache, here you finally started to feel better. Every stop mattered — not because the geography mattered, but because something happened to the child at each one.
That’s the whole sermon, really. But let me stay with it a little longer, because I think it says something true about all of us sitting here tonight.
We tend to imagine our lives as a line. Birth to today, today to whatever comes next. A clean, forward-moving arrow. Physicists call it the arrow of time. And when we tell our story — to a new friend, at a simcha, in a eulogy — we tend to tell it that way too: this led to that, which led to this, and here I am. It’s a linear, Western way of thinking and, to us, it makes perfect sense.
But that isn’t how it actually happened in the Torah. Their lives and their journeys are not linear at all. Not for the Israelites, and not for us.
Look closely at the map in this parasha and you’ll notice something strange: it isn’t a straight line at all. The people go to Kadesh, and then, later, they come back to Kadesh — the same place, twice, decades apart, as two different generations of the same people. They double back. They circle. The map of forty-two stops, if you actually drew it, would look less like an arrow and more like something a child scribbled — loops, returns, false starts, long stretches in places with names we don’t even recognize.
And that, I think, is the more honest map of a human life and the Torah knew it. This portion isn’t about the bus stops of the Jews. Its an entire metaphor of a journey toward holiness and fulfillment written as a roadmap.
Most of what shapes us doesn’t happen at Sinai. It doesn’t happen at the mountain, in the thunder and the fire, in the moment everyone remembers. Revelation is rare. Most of our journey happens at Refidim, at Ritmah, at Chashmonah — places whose names barely survive, places where, as far as we can tell from the text, *nothing happened.* And yet the Torah insists on naming them. It insists that we stopped there. It insists that something about who we became was decided in that unremarkable place, in that quiet stretch between the headlines of our lives.
Think about your own forty-two stops. The teacher who said one sentence to you in passing and you’ve carried it for thirty years. The job that fell through, that felt like a disaster at the time, that turned out to be the very thing that redirected you toward the life you actually have. The illness. The friendship that ended. The year that, if you had to summarize it, you’d say “nothing happened” — and yet you were not the same person at the end of it as you were at the beginning.
We don’t usually get to know, in the moment, which stop is the one that will matter. The Israelites didn’t know, camped at some way station in the wilderness, that this was one of the forty-two the Torah would insist on remembering forever. Neither do we. That’s what makes it hidden. That’s what makes it mysterious. We are almost never standing at a formative moment and thinking, “ah, this is one of the ones that will make me who I am.” We usually only find out looking backward — the way the king only understood, on the road home, which stop had been the turning point for his child.
And this is true for us not only as individuals, but as a congregation. This community has its own forty-two stops. Some of them are the ones we mark with plaques and anniversaries. But most of them are quieter — a conversation in the parking lot after services, a meal brought to someone’s door during a hard week, a class that only three people showed up to. We rarely know, while we’re living them, which of these unremarkable moments the Torah of our own communal life will insist on naming when the story is finally told.
So here is what I want to leave you with. Stop expecting your life, or this community’s life, to move in a straight line. It won’t. There will be a Kadesh you visit twice. There will be long stretches where it feels like nothing is happening, where you cannot see any forward motion at all — and those may turn out to be exactly the stops the Torah would insist on naming, the ones that quietly made you who you are.
We don’t get to choose which moments those will be. But we can choose to notice them — to ask, even now, even about this ordinary week: what happened to me here? What am I becoming, in this unremarkable place, that I won’t understand until I look back and see the whole map?
May we have the patience to trust our own winding journeys, the humility to honor even the stops we’ve forgotten the names of, and the wisdom, someday, to look back and see how every single one of them brought us home.
Shabbat shalom.
