Generations

i
The text says: Now these are the generations of Moses and Aaron.

One would expect that what follows would be the story of Moses’ and Aaron’s children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; the children of the pious.

But instead we hear how Aaron’s oldest sons died, in Aaron’s own lifetime, punished for bringing a strange fire up to God.

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There are generations that are rooted in parentage and offspring. And there are generations that are the unfolding of the long saga of man’s coming close to God, and too close to God.

ii
The tribes of Israel, the text says, are arranged in the Desert according to the lineage of their fathers: according to literal ancestry.

But Moses and Aaron and their families (their generations) dwell at the center of the camp, at the heart of the camp, tending to the Tent of God.

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We are a people of ancestry.

But it is the saga of our closeness to God that is the heart of that ancestry.