When I was a young child, my parents announced that we were moving and that we would be taking a road trip from Texas to New Jersey. Not to worry, my mother assured us, we’ll be making stops along the way. I didn’t understand. I knew that cars come to a stop, but I was just old enough to get worried about how long a drive that was, even if we were going to stop at every red light along the route!
Regardless, I was excited to move closer to my grandparents and cousins who lived on the East Coast. We would be leaving the place of amazing barbecue and breakfast burritos for better bagels. I still miss the Mexican Market and the Riverwalk in San Antonio all these years later. We could have flown and sent all our belongings with the movers, but the chance to see every state between San Antonio and Mt. Olive, New Jersey, and to meet new people along the way, excited my family—at least, my father of blessed memory. A dusty chartreuse Ford LTD station wagon sailed us onto the river of highways. And even without seatbelts, by the grace of God, we drove thousands of miles and had wonderful station stops that have left a lasting impression on me to this day. I still can’t get over the beauty of Kentucky—the Bluegrass State was a wow.
The Hebrew word for grace is
, chen. Listen for those two letters at the heart of the words for “a stop along the way”: 
, tachanah, a station. 
, machaneh, an encampment—a spot to rest or pitch a tent (or find a hotel!). Each of those words might be poetically translated as a temporary home, or used for a home among homes in which someone has lived during a lifetime of moves.
A philological question: Why should grace sit at the center of these words for a station stop, an encampment, or a stop along the way? And why a hey, 
, at the end of the words, which is the letter our tradition hears as a whisper of God’s name? Instead of seeing grace as the gifts God bestows without our asking, I’ve shifted my understanding to see grace as the power planted within us to stop and sense the wow. Compare our ability to pause to the ever-in-motion tides of the oceans or our expanding universe. Compare our camping out to the harried, rushed lives we lead in which we forget to lean on a tree, hear the birdsong, or make a human connection.
There were many 
, tachanot, station-stops along that route we traveled from Texas to New Jersey. When we stopped in Oklahoma or Arkansas, Washington, D.C. or Pennsylvania, we met the kindest local folks, who pointed us to the best parks, good chow, and the cleanest motels. It was a season of sensing the wow only because we made stops and embraced the beauty. Had we flown over or driven straight through we might have made it to our promised destination, but I would not have grown my desire to visit all 50 states of the USA. (I’ve been to 37!)
In some way, those childhood experiences made me a better reader of this week’s Torah portion, which lists the many stops along the Israelites’ journey. Parashat Masei, the final portion of the Book of Numbers, opens as a travelogue (Numbers 33:1-2):
These were the marches of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron.
Moses recorded the starting points of their various marches as directed by GOD. Their marches, by starting points, were as follows:
Forty-two stations follow, name after name. Rashi, the famous French bible commentator, explains what’s behind mentioning all the place names:
And Rabbi Tanchuma expounded it differently: a parable of a king whose son was ill, and he brought him to a faraway place to heal him. When they were returning, his father began counting all the journeys. He said to him: Here we slept; here we caught cold; here your head ached. (Numbers 33:1)
What a father remembers is not the mileage, but the experiences of his children. The healing that the Israelites needed was the erasure of their enslaved mentality and their longing for the material abundance of Egypt. The wilderness, the unknown, and the nearly barren became a place of becoming and healing.
The Torah’s descriptions of these stops hold lessons for us about grace. Of the second stop after the Red Sea, the itinerary pauses to count (Numbers 33:9):
They set out from Marah and came to Elim. There were twelve springs in Elim and seventy palm trees, so they encamped there.
Earlier in his commentary on the Torah, from the Book of Exodus (15:27), Rashi taught that when the Torah writes about twelve springs of water, they correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel. And if there are twelve springs for twelve tribes, the Torah is hinting at something spectacular. Instead of there being a lack of beauty and resources in the desert, it might have been that the Israelites complained they had no water so often because they did not look and see abundance. They didn’t sense or pursue the wow factor.
Three stops after Sinai, the Torah explains that they camped at Kivrot HaTa’avah, “The Graves of Craving” (Numbers 33:16). The name of the place is its own commentary, given that earlier in the book of Numbers, the Torah tells us:
“For there they buried the people who craved” (Numbers 11:34). This is because it was there that, fresh from Sinai, with manna falling daily, the people could see only what they lacked, complaining that they didn’t have the will to see the blessing of their daily bread. A station of miracles became a cemetery of desire and insufficiency when the people couldn’t find the beauty in desert and desired to live back among the banks of the Nile River. Two stops later, a place called Ritmah carries a lesson as well: Rashi teaches that it was so called for the slanderous speech of the spies and the lack of faith of the people. They did not see goodness in the land itself or the promise of the Promised Land.
The truth is that beauty is all around us. Abundant springs of resources exist in our world; God has planted so much more potential in us and among us. Will we walk or travel in search of what will quench our thirst and desires?
Norton Juster explored the truth of our situation in a children’s story. In The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo comes upon what appears to be empty air and is told he is standing in the city of Reality. Once it was a beautiful place, full of things worth seeing — and so people slowed down to see them. But life got busier. People began to hurry, then to rush, eyes fixed on their shoes, taking the shortest line between here and there. Because no one looked at the buildings and gardens anymore, or at each other, the city slowly faded, until one day it disappeared altogether. Its residents still live there, Milo learns, hurrying through streets they can no longer see, unaware that anything is missing. Nearby shimmers Illusions, a gorgeous city that does not exist at all — easier to see, Juster suggests, than the real thing. It is a warning in a children’s book: a world unnoticed is a world that vanishes.
Noticing is a choice. Abraham Joshua Heschel gave this discipline a name: radical amazement. “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement,” he wrote in God in Search of Man — to get up each morning and look at the world with eyes that take nothing for granted, treating everything as incredible, because awe, for Heschel, is where wisdom begins. Amazement, in Heschel’s teaching, is not a mood that happens to us; it is a practice we choose. Read this way, the forty-two stations on the Israelites’ journey are Moses’s curriculum in radical amazement. I am grateful that my parents set out a course for me back when we made the move north in 1979. If only the Israelites had a few station wagons when they left Egypt!