Commentary on Parashat Masei, Numbers 33:1 - 36:13
My friend Dan is rising to say the Mourner’s Kaddish for his father and I, sitting a few pews away, add my voice to the chorus of “Amen.” If I am in his sight line, I’ll nod in Dan’s direction as he sits down — an I-see-you nod, an I’ve-been-there nod, just as he had nodded toward me not that long ago when I was saying Kaddish for my mother and Dan was among those in their seats holding the mourners up.
We cycle like this: One season we find ourselves among the mourners, the next we are among the comforters who witness the grieving from a slim, but ever-so-significant distance. Inevitably, we will switch positions, we just don’t know when, the timing of our losses as unpredictable as weather. As much as we wish to avoid ever being designated “the mourner” (or in funeral parlor parlance, “the bereaved”), as much as we prefer being positioned to comfort the brokenhearted, these are wishes over which we have no control.
A scene in this week’s Torah portion, Parashet Masei, captures this juxtaposition vividly. The Israelites are journeying through the wilderness from Egypt to the promised land and the text recounts their various marches. For the most part, the itinerary from one site of encampment to another is sparsely related. In contrast, the beginning of the story of the Israelite departure from Egypt is narrated in vivid detail: The Israelites “set out from Rameses in the first month, on the fifteenth day of the first month. It was on the morrow of the Passover offering that the Israelites started out with a high hand before all the Egyptians. And the Egyptians were burying all the firstborn whom God had struck down.” (Numbers 33: 3.) The Egyptians are experiencing the very same fate that Pharaoh had earlier decreed upon the firstborn of the Israelites.
The details allow us to easily imagine this scene. There are the Israelites the day after they sacrificed a lamb and used its blood to mark the lintel of their houses so the Angel of Death, executing the tenth plague, could distinguish between the spared firstborn sons of the Israelites and those of the condemned Egyptians. As they escape, as they commence a journey to a place of promise and freedom, the Egyptians are absorbed in the emotional and physical work of burying their dead.
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When I contemplate this verse in light of my own lived experience of shifting between the roles of mourner and comforter, I imagine the Israelites and the Egyptians presented simultaneously on a split screen. On one side are people starting off on a journey, energetically engaged in making progress toward their future. On the other side are the broken-hearted ones whose lives are, at that moment, stilled with loss.
Parashat Masei offers us an opportunity to meditate upon the split screens of comforter and mourner. In so doing, I am reminded of a supplementary reading in Siddur Lev Shalem which is positioned alongside the Kaddish at the end of the Sabbath morning Musaf service. Taken from Nessa Rapoport’s entry in the volume Kaddish: Women’s Voices (edited by Michal Smart), it reads, “Loss steals language. You have nothing to say. A loving community buttresses you, feeding you, telling you when to stand and sit, thrusting into your slack hand the prayer book containing the chanted words that, until now, only other people knew by heart.”
In our loss, we are not alone.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Reading Torah Through Grief newsletter on July 26, 2025. To sign up to receive this newsletter each week in your inbox, click here.
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