Matot and Masei: Is Torah Advocating for or Warning against Tribal Revenge and Genocide?

This week’s Torah readings, Matot and Masei, are the last two in the Book of Numbers/Book of Wilderness. Matot means tribes and also the walking sticks the tribal chiefs carried with them on the Masei, meaning Journeys. Throughout Torah matot become instruments imbued with magic powers to bring forth water, stop plagues and other divine interventions in the human journey.

Putting these two names together brings me back to powerful moments in the Jewish Israeli – Palestinian Nonviolent Communication movement at EcoME in the desert at the crossroads of Jerusalem and Jericho, برية الخليل, Bariyat El-Khalil/Wilderness of Hebron/ יְשִׁימוֹן Yeshimon, Wilderness of Judaea.

At the end of nine days sleeping in large tents in the desert, we walked together in circle singing this song from the anti apartheid movement in South Africa:

Courage
My friend
You do not walk alone
I will walk with you
And sing your spirit home.

For nine days, we were becoming a new tribe, a tribe that sat in circles around the fire, speaking in Arabic, Hebrew, English, creating connection, understanding and agreements. We were becoming a new tribe that had no geographical borders because our focus was expanding the borders of the heart. Our strength came from understanding through dialogue.

Matot and Masei:
Advocacy or Warnings About Tribal Genocide?

This week’s Torah portions, graphically and vividly, illustrate a model of tribalism bred in violence and vengeance. The Israelites are instructed to carry out ethnic cleansing and genocide: “[For the sake of revenge] They took the field against Midian, as GOD had commanded Moses, and slew every male.” Moses becomes angry and orders: “Now, therefore, slay every male child, and slay also every woman who has known a man carnally.”

It’s not even clear why this is the only path. The only way I can approach this with any integrity is to hold this question:

Are the themes in this week’s Torah portions advocating for ethnic tribalism that depends on revenge and genocide to meet it’s needs for safety or cautionary tales about what causes and results when tribes resort to revenge and genocide? Is Torah offering any wisdom, spiritual or ethical guidance on these subjects, as Hannah Arendt chose to do when she wrote about the “banality of evil” in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem to explain how ordinary people commit monstrous atrocities?

The Inability to Forgive, Strangled in Fear, Clouded Seeing, Vengeance and Patriarchy: The Roots of Genocide

I’m writing this as I struggle to find my own answer to these questions. It appears from the text that Torah is suggesting that Moses’ genocidal instructions come directly out of anger. Earlier in this book Moses’ anger causes his not being allowed to enter the promised land. And here his anger spills over into directing genocide. The God figure’s instructions for revenge and genocide come out of fear and anger at its own annihilation in the sense that this God’s existence and influence on earth depends on the Israelites’ centering the God presence by centering its Mishkan and laws throughout its desert wandering. The Israelites’ deviation from this, particularly in these chapters, threaten the likelihood of future generations, knowing this God at all.

Mistaken Identity; Clouded Vision

Torah also clearly suggests that deluded seeing, dissociation from actually seeing who you are calling your enemy, seeing everyone as a threat and actually mistaking friends for enemies, is also a cause of genocide. In the Nonviolent Communication movement we call this the tragedy of not seeing the humanity of who we think of as “the other.” This is evident in that the genocide and this week's Torah stories is directed against the Midianites, when clearly all of the “wrongs” listed in the story have nothing to do with the Midianites. The Midianites were the free desert people who have been the allies and teachers of the Israelites, not to mention Moses’ Midianite wife Tzippora and beloved father-in-law/mentor Yitro. The Midianite chiefs accompanied the Moabites through the desert to the prophet Balaam, but there’s no indication that they participated in any of the wrongs. The Midianites were peacemakers who always modeled how to live freely and safely without having enemies. Here the Israelites make their natural allies their enemies. They are not seeing anything clearly. This is markedly depicted by the singling out of the prophet Balaam, not from any of the desert tribes, as a cause for the genocide. Torah herself beautifully forgave Balaam and hails him because he was able to see clearly that the Israelites were to be blessed rather than cursed, as Balak, Moabite chief, had hired and ordered him to do. The vengeance, genocide and killing spree arises out of the Israelites’ inability to see and trust Balaam’s growth and forgive him.

Again, in the Nonviolent Communication movement, we would say that the Israelites’ blindness toward Balaam is because they are stuck in a past vision of him and holding an “enemy image” of him, rather than seeing him as he is right now. And this Torah story illustrates clearly how, when we hold an enemy image of another, tragically here a divine prophet from another tribe who has become our ally, it leads to unspeakable destruction of human life.

Patriarchy and Genocide

This blindness toward Balaam and specific anger when the subjugation of women is threatened leads to a direct order to slaughter the Midianite women and children. (And again it was not even Midianite women involved in the story.) Is Torah reinforcing patriarchy or warning us that as long as we live in systems that hold women as properties of men, and indeed, those binaries at all, we will not be able to unmake war and prevent genocide? We will turn on ourselves and our own. It is our own souls and future that we destroy.

The story in the desert ends, and the people have not entered the Promised Land. Next week begins the last of the five books of the Torah, the retelling of the same story through the lips of Moses.

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Matot and Masei, the Journey to End Suffering

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July 25, 2025

This week we complete the reading of the Book of Numbers/Book of Wilderness with two Torah portions, Matot and Masei. The Hebrew word matot carries multiple meanings: tribes and the powerful walking sticks or staffs the tribal chieftains carried as they journey through the desert wilderness.

Think of someone who has let you down or did something that you feel scared, angry, disappointed or irritated about.

When you think of this person:

What sensations are present in your physical being? What thoughts and feelings do you have? Is there an “enemy image” of them?

In pairs-talk about “enemy images” you have of people –what are they, where do they come from, how do they affect you? Then apply this to the person you thought of.

Now imagine if instead of an “enemy image” you stayed present with that person and focused on your present feelings and needs?

How do you respond to them and what is your request to them?

Using the Feeling or Judging Words on this Listt:

Can you respond to that person without using the hidden blame in the words on this list of ‘nonfeeling” words?

These are words we use when we have judgments of people. Think of a time you used those words, or they were used toward you- what are the feelings and needs behind the messages?

Practice

As you go through the week, pay attention to when you become automatically agitated. Can you identify the thoughts, ideas and concepts you already had about that person or ”people like them”?

Caution! Do not judge yourself! This is a learning exercise.

Roberta Wall steps2peace.com