Digital Maggid
As you well know (ooh, I’m sounding like one of them), this parsha is filled with sentences stating each place the Israelites (Children of Israel, -aka Jacob, aka the 12 Tribes) journeyed from and pitched (their tents) at. (ooh, bad grammar.)
What you may not know or realize that each of the place names has a meaning in Hebrew. If you’re reading the Chumash (um, “Old Testament”) in English, all you get is a transliteration of the name, like “Elim” or “Marah” but “Elim” actually means violent or aggressive and “Marah” means bile or gall (and is related to the word bitter).
The masters, accordingly, liked to riff on these place names, teaching that with each station along the 40 year journey, the people moved from one state of consciousness to another, as we saw in the teachings on Bittersweet Wells, and really all of the teachings this week. Here are a couple more insights on the places (literal and figurative) our people found themselves in.
Numbers 33:25 — They journeyed from Ḥaradah and pitched at Mak’heilot
