The Banner of Love and the Woe That Came With It

The Vinegar Cellar and the One Good Barrel

Rabbi Abahu, working in Caesarea in the third century, needed an image for what it meant to be chosen, and he found one that was not flattering. God, he said, is the wealthy man whose entire wine cellar has turned to vinegar. He walks down the stairs. He lifts lid after lid. Rot, rot, rot. The smell of failed fermentation filling the darkness. Then he reaches one barrel that still smells the way wine is supposed to smell, the way the vintner intended when he pressed the grapes. That barrel is Israel.

Abahu built this picture out of Song of Songs 2:4: He brought me to the banquet house, and his banner of love is upon me. The numerical value of the Hebrew word for wine, yayin, is seventy. There are seventy nations in the world. Sixty-nine casks of vinegar. One cask of what wine was supposed to be.

Bamidbar Rabbah, working through the Book of Numbers in twelfth-century Europe out of much older Palestinian material, did not soften this image. The banner over Israel is not a parade flag. It is the cloth a merchant drapes over the one thing in a damaged shipment worth saving. The love is real. The damage is also real. And the banner is both a sign of favor and a measure of how far everything else has fallen.

The Tabernacle Stands and God Groans

The Tabernacle was finished on the first of Nisan. The poles were set in their sockets, the curtains were hung, the Ark was carried into the Holy of Holies, and fire came down from heaven to consume the first offering. A people who had been slaves in Egypt three months earlier now had a house built exactly to divine specification. Trumpets sounded. The cloud of presence settled over the tent.

And then Bamidbar Rabbah recorded a sound underneath the celebration that the Torah itself does not mention. God said: Oy li. Woe to me.

The midrash asked what could possibly cause grief on this day. The answer was Zimri. Not Zimri-as-he-was-then, the prince of the tribe of Simeon standing among the joyful people. Zimri-as-he-would-be, the Zimri of Numbers 25, the man who would take a Midianite woman into his tent in front of Moses and the entire weeping congregation, who would provoke a plague, whose act of contempt would cost twenty-four thousand lives. God looked at the Tabernacle just finished and saw the man inside the rejoicing crowd who would make it necessary to groan.

The dedication day held both simultaneously: the banner of love and the woe that came with it. The single good barrel of wine, and the knowledge of what was waiting to spoil it.

The Tent of Zimri and the Frozen Lawgiver

When Zimri walked into his tent with Cozbi the Midianite woman and the plague began to move through the camp, Moses stood at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting and wept. He did not act. The law that would have permitted Phinehas to act required a very specific set of circumstances, and Moses was frozen between what he knew and what the law required him to wait for. The greatest prophet, the man who had carried the tablets down the mountain, stood at the threshold of the tent he had built to divine specification and could not move while the count of the dead climbed.

The Spear of Phinehas and the Angels Who Cried Out

Phinehas was not frozen. He saw the circumstances clearly, took a spear, and went in after Zimri and Cozbi. The angels watching from the upper worlds, Bamidbar Rabbah says, cried out with him when the spear found its mark. Not from satisfaction at the deaths, but because the plague had stopped. The woe that God had spoken on dedication day had reached its limit. The angels understood what it had cost to stop it.

The banner of love requires exactly this calculation. You cannot love one thing in a world where everything else has gone to vinegar without knowing, from the beginning, what the vinegar can do to what you love. God walked down the cellar stairs knowing. The woe was spoken before the banner was raised. Both were true simultaneously, from the first moment the poles went into their sockets and the cloud settled and the fire fell.