My paternal grandparents (a.k.a. Nana and Papa) were expert gardeners; they certainly had a green thumb that I sadly did not inherit. Papa always planted a beautiful flower garden in the backyard of their house every year and would invite me to help. Then Nana would plant the vegetable garden, and I’d tend the plants with her. We’d put up a fence to keep the deer and bunnies away from the bounty. While at the time I may have gone out of my way to avoid eating anything resembling a vegetable, I do remember planting and then watching them grow. The inside of their house was filled with plants too. They kept most of them on a beautiful window seat behind their dining room table, one of which was a potted cactus. One Rosh Hashanah lunch after services, my younger sister tried to squeeze between the edge of the seat where the cactus was and my Papa’s seat and ended up falling into the cactus. Ouch!
After calling poison control, my dad and uncle wrapped their hands in duct tape to extract the cactus needles from my sister’s arms and face. Unfortunately, the little spines were so tiny and thin that we were finding them for days. And that’s when I truly understood the meaning of “a thorn in your side.” We moved the cactus to a different spot, but our family never forgot the trauma of the incident, a lesson which is described symbolically in our Torah portion this week.
In our parshah this week we read the final sections of text from the fourth book of the Torah, Bamidbar. Parshiyot Matot and Masei begin with a discussion of the different vows Israelites might make, and then they detail the requests of the various tribes as they get ready to enter the Promised Land. The chapters end with the final placements of all the tribes as they prepare to divide their land inheritance. Along with this information are warnings about what it might be like to live within an area with a variety of customs and cultures. Not since leaving Egypt have the Israelites lived in a place long enough for God to worry about them acculturating and assimilating.
In chapter 33, verse 55 we read: “Those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides.” This warning is meant to illuminate for the Israelites that sometimes their adversaries will be in plain sight (a sting in your eye,) and sometimes they will walk beside you, with a false sense of camaraderie until they dig in their barbs (a thorn in your side).
Like avoiding the cactus with her unseeable needles, the Torah reminds us to use precaution as we journey through life. It’s easy to get caught up in the literal interpretation that we need to rid the land of certain people who might be against us, but the real lesson is to recognize and rid ourselves of the more insidious metaphorical needles of intolerance and ignorance. Those are the needles that do the most damage.
