Making Sure Not to Miss the Point

At the end of our parsha, after the two and a half tribes settled on the east side of the Jordan River, the verses relate how some of the cities were renamed. The final verse reads:

וְנֹבַח הָלַךְ וַיִּלְכֹּד אֶת קְנָת וְאֶת בְּנֹתֶיהָ וַיִּקְרָא לָה נֹבַח בִּשְׁמוֹ

And Novach went and conquered Knas and its surrounding areas, and he called it “Novach” like his name.[1]

Rashi notes a curious grammatical anomaly: The letter heh of the word “לה” should actually have a dot inside it, called a mapik. As we know, a mapik heh is pronounced in a kind of abrupt manner, and denotes the preposition for a feminine noun. Why is it missing here? Rashi comments:

ראיתי ביסודו של רבי משה הדרשן לפי שלא נתקיים לה שם זה לפיכך הוא רפה, שמשמע מדרשו כמו לא.

I have seen in the writings of R’ Moshe Hadarshan that the reason is because the name did not last; therefore the letter has a weak sound, so that it can be expounded to be read as “no” (לא).[2]

According to this explanation, the message is: on the one hand he called it Novach, but on the other hand it did not remain with that name. What is the significance of this? Why did the name not endure and what does it have to do with us?

R’ Shimon Schwab[3] explains the matter by contrasting Novach’s renaming with that of his brother Yair, mentioned in the preceding verse:

וְיָאִיר בֶּן מְנַשֶּׁה הָלַךְ וַיִּלְכֹּד אֶת חַוֹּתֵיהֶם וַיִּקְרָא אֶתְהֶן חַוֹּת יָאִיר

Yair, son of Menashe, went and captured their villages (chavos), and called them Chavos-Yair (The Villages of Yair).

The point of these two verses is to contrast the approach of Novach to that of Yair. Yair came into possession of certain villages, and, accordingly, attached his name to them — the villages of Yair. Thus, he preserved his identity as Yair the person, with these villages as his acquisitions. Novach, on the other hand called the cities that he captured after his own name, Novach. In so doing he demonstrated that he was over-investing in his material acquisitions, and to a certain degree defining himself by what he owned. To this the Torah responds by removing the dot from the letter hei, which as Rashi told us, allows the word to be read as לא, no. The Torah is stating that these places are in fact not Novach — you are Novach, and these are your suburbs, but they are not you! Thus, Yair’s name endured, but Novach’s did not.

The message of these final verses is that physical possessions are only ever things that you own, they are not what you are. This is the crucial lesson learned from the Torah deleting the dot from Novach’s suburbs, and it is a point that we cannot afford to miss.

[1] Bamidbar 32:42.

[2] See also Haamek Davar to our verse.

[3] Maayan Beis Hasho’eivah.