Golden Lands Are a Myth. We American Jews Need a New Story

Beha’alotecha and Why We Must Resist the Lure of Perfect Journeys

Parasha Point: This week's Torah portion describing the beginning of the murmurings in the wilderness is a warning: stop idealizing the journey. Life, community, history—they're not meant to unfold perfectly. Beha'alotecha tells us: expect the mess, and keep walking.

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Golden Lands Are a Myth. We American Jews Need a New Story

If I could step into the Torah and shake someone by the shoulders, it would be in this week's portion, Beha'alotecha.

The portion opens with a pristine vision: the Levites are perfectly arrayed, every tribe in its place. Those who missed the Passover offering approach with humility and a desire to repair. Moses and his father-in-law part warmly. The silver trumpets sound, and the people follow God’s command to the letter—when God says move, they move; when God says stop, they stop.

When I was younger, I read this with mounting dread, knowing what was coming: complaints, rebellion, unraveling. I wanted to shake my ancestors and yell: “Please, don't mess this up!” Now I think the Torah wanted me to feel exactly that frustration—because the opening is too perfect. Every Levite in place, trumpets gleaming, synchronized movement. And then—collapse.

The collapse comes quickly. The people don't just complain—they distort. They demand meat, and then they say something that still shocks me:

"We remember the fish that we used to eat for free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic" (Numbers 11:5).

Egypt—a place of slavery and attempted genocide—is remembered for abundance and freedom. Oppression is rewritten into paradise.

But the Torah isn't just recording a failure—it's highlighting a pattern. One of the portion's most iconic verses—Vayehi binso'a ha'aron (Numbers 10:35), the line about the ark setting out—is marked in the scroll by two inverted Hebrew letters.

The rabbis note that this verse is out of chronological order, placed here deliberately. It's a signal that the Torah is deliberately constructing this contrast between order and collapse.

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Here's what the Torah is showing us: when you begin the journey expecting perfection, you will collapse the moment things go a different way. And when that collapse comes, you will reach backward—not to the real past, but to a version you've reimagined.

When the wilderness gets hard—when the manna tastes bland, the path unclear, the community fractures—the mind creates illusions instead of preparing for the hard work of navigating instability. It transforms captivity into comfort. It turns oppression into stability. The Israelites don't just miss Egypt; they reinvent it as the opposite of what it was.

Maybe this is how nostalgia always works. We don't remember the past; we reshape it to suit the present. We edit out the pain and amplify the sweetness. We turn "the way things were" into "the way things should be." But this rewriting doesn't just distort memory—it’s dangerous nostalgia that paralyzes the future. You can't build tomorrow out of a yesterday that never was. You can't walk forward if your energy is spent looking back at mirages.

The Torah is warning us: idealizing the journey leads to disillusionment—romanticizing the past keeps us from moving at all.

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Lately, I've been thinking about this in the context of American Jewish life. There's an ongoing debate about whether we were living in a golden age. Some argue that the pre–October 7^th era was exactly that—unprecedented acceptance, success, and security—and that we've now crossed into a darker chapter. Others insist that the golden age is now: a time of reawakening, pride, and recommitment.

I've grown wary of the whole framework. We've built mental categories: an idealized Jewish life versus a catastrophic one. These binaries leave us unprepared for reality—messy, in the wilderness, with a little bit of everything.

American Jews have always been expert mythologizers. We mythologize the shtetl—forgetting poverty and persecution. We mythologize the immigrant generation—forgetting trauma and loss. We mythologize the postwar suburban boom—forgetting anxiety of assimilation. Now we're mythologizing the recent past—either as golden age perfection or as catastrophic illusion.

Beha'alotecha speaks directly to this. The Israelites begin with a fantasy of order—and when reality disappoints, they reach for another fantasy: that Egypt was good to them. They remember leeks and garlic, not slavery. Fish, not fear. They can't live in the present, so they rewrite the past. And the Torah shows us how dangerous that is—not only because it's false, but because it paralyzes the future.

The real spiritual challenge of Beha'alotecha is this: can we be Jews who know they live in the wilderness—and keep walking anyway?

Not Jews who cling to illusions. Not Jews who need clarity to act. But Jews who remain committed through uncertainty. Who can hold complexity without grasping for false simplicity. Who refuse to let imperfection become a reason to give up.

This means accepting that American Jewish life will always be both/and: thriving and threatened, rooted and rootless, successful and struggling. The wilderness isn't a detour—it's where we live.

As Michael Walzer writes in his masterful Exodus and Revolution, "The way to the land is through the wilderness. There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching."

The only way to reach the promised land is together—through the mess, through the questions, through the wilderness. We're in it. And it's up to us to keep walking.

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🎙️ Wondering Jews Pod 🎙️: Noam and I were honored to be in conversation with Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Dr. Yechiel (Michael) Leiter.

It was a wide-ranging discussion. Ambassador Leiter shared memories of his son, Maj. (res.) Moshe Leiter z’l, who fell defending our people in Gaza; reflected on the relationship between Jews in Israel and America; spoke about the limits of critique and the importance of diverse opinions—and even shared thoughts on the value of meditation.

Give it a listen here—and as always, I’d love to engage with you in the comments!