Shabbat Sermon: College Hunks, Biblical Style with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

Do you remember those times in your life when you had to move? You moved from one house to another. Or from one city to another. Or you helped your parents move from the home they had lived in for 50 years as they downsized? Young couples deal with moving when they move into their first home together. College kids, and their hapless parents, deal with moving as they move from their home to their dorm room and from their dorm room back home, filling living spaces, basements and attics with college stuff. What a tzimmus.

The good news is that we can purchase a solution to all this headache. I have found a moving company with the best name in the history of moving companies. College Hunks Hauling Junk.

Let me tell you who really needed College Hunks—biblical Israel. Last week we started Bamidbar, which tells of our ancestors’ wanderings in the wilderness. The Israelites lived in 42 different locations. They had to pack and unpack 42 times. That is a lot of moving. And here is a problem: At the heart of the community was the wilderness tabernacle, the Mishkan, which was big and unwieldy and heavy and made of boards and planks and posts and had an altar and a ramp leading up to the altar and dolphin skins and yarns and curtains and priestly garments and all the ritual items like the bread plate and the washing station and the ark of the covenant that contained the ten commandments. All this stuff had to be assembled, disassembled, reassembled, 42 times.

If God had really loved the Jewish people, God would have provided biblical Israel with college HUNKS. Let the Israelites sit back and relax—the College HUNKS have the Israelites covered.

And the answer is, God really did love the Jewish people, because God provided a biblical College HUNKS, a group of Israelites whose job it was to be the sacred schleppers. The Biblical version of College HUNKS were three families of Levites called Gershonites, Merarites, and Kohathites. And God provided moving equipment in the form of six carts designed to carry heavy things, and twelve oxen. The carts containing the boards, planks, posts and other Tabernacle equipment were so very heavy it took two oxen to carry each cart. Therefore six carts, 12 oxen, to carry all this stuff, 42 different times.

How do we carry what is heavy, hard and holy?