The Signs Are in French Now

On Monday morning a flight from Paris landed at Ben Gurion, and 128 people walked off it as new citizens of Israel. France sent a little over a thousand Jews home in 2023. The next year the number doubled. The year after that it passed three thousand. More than six thousand French Jews have made the move since the morning of October 7, and this summer’s flights have only started.

The parsha this Shabbat, Matot-Masei, closes the Book of Numbers with the whole people camped on the plains of Moav, across the river from everything they have been walking toward for forty years. Moses spends these last chapters handing them instructions for the land they are about to enter. Some of it is borders. Some of it is inheritance. And then, before the book ends, he gives them a map with six points on it.

you shall provide yourselves with places to serve you as cities of refuge to which a manslayer who has slain a person unintentionally may flee.

— Bamidbar 35:11

Arei miklat. Cities of refuge. The Torah is describing one specific person: someone who killed by accident. The axe-head that flew off the handle. The load that shifted and crushed the man working below. Under the old order a relative of the dead man could hunt the killer down, so the Torah carved out six cities across the country where he could flee and stay alive until a court heard his case.

The first civic institution the people are told to build in their new home is sanctuary. Before a palace, before a courthouse, six cities whose whole job is to take in the person running for his life and keep him alive long enough to be judged fairly.

The instinct those cities answer is ancient — blood answered with blood.

Israel’s first law for the land drops a wall between that instinct and the frightened man on the road, and it stations a court on the far side of the wall to do what the avenger never could, which is ask what actually happened.

The rabbis noticed the care buried in the details.

The Talmud, in tractate Makkot, describes the roads to these cities kept wide and kept in repair, with a sign posted at every crossroads. One word on each sign, pointing the way. Miklat. Refuge. A person running in panic, not thinking straight, should never have to stop and wonder which road went where. The society was obligated to offer the refuge and to keep the road to it marked.

And the refuge was never only for the ones born inside it.

These six cities shall serve the Israelites and the resident aliens among them for refuge, so that anyone who kills a person unintentionally may flee there.

— Bamidbar 35:15

The ger and the toshav — the stranger and the settler living among them — are written into the same six cities, the same protection.

The families who came off that plane on Monday were not running from an axe-head. They were running from something slower and far more sinister.

French Jews have been leaving in rising numbers because the ordinary business of being visibly Jewish in France has grown increasingly more precarious every week since October 7.

The guard outside the school. The second thought about the necklace. Worrying about a kippah or a ball cap. The sense that the room has changed. What matters for this week is the direction they ran. They ran toward a place, and that place, by its own founding law, was built to take them in.

The numbers read like something with a pulse. A thousand, then two, then three. The road stays marked. The Jewish Agency runs the flights, the absorption ministry does the paperwork, and this year the government added a five-year tax exemption for anyone who comes.

Say what you want about the machinery of an Israeli ministry. (I certainly have some thoughts.) Its work this summer is keeping the road home wide and clear and signposted. Which is truly a very old job for Israel.

We read Matot-Masei inside the Three Weeks, the stretch of the calendar that mourns the walls of Jerusalem breached and the Temple burned, the season set aside to sit with the land lost and the people scattered to every corner of the earth.

And in the middle of that same season, on an otherwise ordinary Monday, a plane lands and a hundred and twenty-eight of the scattered come home.

The Torah could have opened the life of the land with a conquest or a coronation. It opened with refuge. Six cities, the roads kept clear, a single word posted at the crossroads so no one arriving in fear would lose the way. Three thousand years on, the signs are in French now.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham