Parashat Matot-Maasei
July 10, 2026 CBI – Boca Raton
No matter how many times I have read a portion, studied some text or learned something new from the biblical luminaries of the Jewish people, it is so breathtakingly obvious how human everyone is. We may stand in awe of the likes of King David or King Solomon, or the astonishing wisdom of Moses or intelligence and insight of Rebecca, but they always do things that remind us just how human they are. They aren’t really different from us: they just found themselves in situations where the gifts they had had to develop. Our awe at them comes from how they were willing to meet the challenges, despite the many faults and mistakes they made along the way. This week’s portion is a perfect example of that humanity and we find it both in the tribes of Reuben and Gad and in Moses, himself.
Picture it, the people are camped in the plains of Moab, on the eastern bank of the Jordan. The Promised Land is visible, tantalizingly close. After forty years of wandering and camping post-Exodus, after plagues and rebellions and heartbreak, the finish line is right there.
And then two tribes — Reuben and Gad — walk up to Moses and say, essentially: We’d rather stay here.
They have looked at the land east of the Jordan — the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead — and they have seen that it is good for cattle. And, since they are people of flocks and herds, the terrain suits them. And so they ask Moses to let them settle east of the river, outside the borders of the land God had promised.
You can almost feel the silence that follows.
You can taste Moses’ anger. And his fury is not simply the frustration of a tired leader. It is something deeper — something almost like grief. Remember, Moses has lived through this moment before. He was there when the twelve scouts returned from Canaan, and ten of them frightened the people into despair. He watched as an entire generation condemned itself to wander and die in the wilderness, never crossing over. And now, standing before the Jordan with a new generation and with the goal for the Jewish people literally a few steps away, he hears echoes of that same failure.
He says to them plainly: “If you turn away from God, who then abandons the people once more in the wilderness, you will bring calamity upon all this people.” He is not being melodramatic. He is a man who has seen exactly how one act of communal cowardice can unravel everything. He knows that the people move together or not at all. He knows that when some step back, others lose heart. He knows that the community is only as strong as its weakest commitment to one another.
And underneath the anger, there is something else: this must have felt like a personal wound. Moses himself will not cross the Jordan. We all know that and it was uppermost in Moses’ mind. He carried that knowledge and its burden of disappointment, yet still led his people. So imagine how he feels now that two of his tribes don’t want to enter after the journey he led them through! I hope we can all see and feel Moses’ humanity.
But the story now turns into something else. It transforms from anger and sadness to hope. Because what happens next is not a confrontation. It is not an exile. It is not a punishment. It is a conversation.
Reuben and Gad hear Moses’s fear and they respond to it directly. They say: We will build pens for our livestock here, and cities for our children — but we ourselves, your servants, will arm ourselves and go as the vanguard before the Israelites until we have brought them to their place. We will not return to our homes until every one of the Israelites has received their portion. They are not abandoning the community. They are asking to serve it differently — to fight on its behalf even without a stake in the territory being conquered.
This is the compromise that changes everything. And we should sit with it for a moment, because it is a genuinely sophisticated moral act.
The tribes of Reuben and Gad are not wrong for having different needs. Their attachment to the land of Gilead is not a moral failing — it is a recognition that the community they belong to contains multitudes, that not everyone’s flourishing looks identical. What would have been a moral failing is if they had simply withdrawn. If they had said: our children are settled, our flocks are fed, the Jordan will be our border and that will be that. Because a community cannot survive when its members treat their private security as the ceiling of their obligation.
The compromise demands something harder: You may have what you need, but first you must give what is needed. Your individuality does not exempt you from solidarity. Your difference does not dissolve your responsibility. Moses made that happen and the tribes respected that they were respected. A great leader takes people from confrontation to compromise. Moses was a great leader.
There is a teaching here that speaks directly to every community — including ours. We are not all the same. We have different needs, different temperaments, different visions of what a good Jewish life looks like. Some of us are deeply rooted in traditional practice; others find their connection through social justice, through culture, through family. Some feel the pull toward Israel deeply and personally; others feel more at home, as it were, east of the river — building Jewish life in the diaspora, investing in the communities where we actually live.
These differences are not threats to the community. They become threats only when they become excuses — when “I am different” becomes “therefore I owe nothing.”
What Reuben and Gad model, imperfectly and only after Moses presses them, is the recognition that belonging to a people means showing up for that people — even when your personal interests are already secured. Even when your children are safe and your flocks are fed. Even when crossing the Jordan doesn’t benefit you directly.
Moses never stops being disappointed that they chose to stay east of the river. But he is wise enough to accept the compromise. And perhaps, in his final days, looking out from Mount Nebo over that whole sweeping landscape — east and west, the land of Gilead and the Land of Israel — I am sure he understood something and that is that a people diverse enough to need different kinds of land, and wise enough to find terms they can live with, is a people sturdy enough to survive.
At B’nai Israel, we are those people, as well. Let us hold our differences without letting them divide us. And in our minds, let us imagine the future we will build together so that we can look over our camp and say, “Ma Tov ohalecha Yaakov, mishkenotecha Yisrael!” – how wonderful are your tents oh Jacob, your dwelling places oh Congregation B’nai Israel!”
Shabbat Shalom.
