One Small Step For Man......

Did you ever stop and realize that there are a number of similarities between what happened to the Israelites in the desert and the Apollo 11 story. You see, the Torah, like the Apollo space program, is also about getting man to reach a particular destination. The Torah actually gives us two in fact. The first is a physical destination; reaching the land of Israel. The second is a spiritual destination. Having us become closer to God and better people by observing God's commandments.

And just like man could not have reached the moon without all the effort and manpower of so many who worked on that project, so too, the Israelites could not have reached the Promised Land without the efforts not only of Moses and Aaron, but like the Apollo program, through the efforts, manpower, trial and error, and even death, of many people, all of which had to have occurred in order for the Israelites to reach their destination, the Promised Land.

And that is perhaps one of the reasons why the Torah goes out of its way to tell us the names of the daughters of Zelophehad; Machlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah and Noah. The Torah wants to remind us that we must never forget the people, large and small, who enabled us to reach our destination; the people who helped shape our laws and society. And so these five women are specifically mentioned in order to impress upon us the important lesson that every person who is involved in making our society better, or more just, is deserving of recognition.

We weren't around thirty five hundred or so years ago to witness the events that were described in the Torah. But we were alive, and can recall, the miraculous events of forty years ago, when man achieved the impossible and walked on the moon.

But what we can take away from both historical events is that there are many small steps that need to be taken by man in order to make that one giant leap for mankind. We learned that we can't just snap our fingers and like magic walk on the moon or conquer Canaan. It took a long time to get to both places with many steps and missteps along the way.

We still have many more goals to achieve, many more moons to conquer, many societal ills still left to eradicate, more tikkun olam yet to accomplish. But we have learned, both from Apollo 11 and from our Torah, that if we are patient, if we allow ourselves to take those small steps, and if we recognize the efforts and sacrifices of all those who helped us get there, then we too will be able to make what hopefully will be many more giant leaps for mankind.