Mapping Justice: Land, Sanctuary, and Embodied Belonging

by Stephanie Gray

In the double parsha Mattot-Masei, the Israelite people find themselves at a threshold moment. After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, they are preparing to cross into the Promised Land. The Torah offers us a portrait of a people in transition, moving from mobility to settlement, from marginality to power, from impermanence to permanence. It is a moment of becoming, and Torah meets them there with memory and structure: a list of their encampments, instructions for warfare, laws governing vows, and a plan for dividing the land.

Masei begins with a seemingly mundane passage, a list of forty-two places where the Israelites camped during their journey from Egypt to the border of Canaan. Rashi, citing the midrash in Bamidbar Rabbah 23:3, explains that this list is like a parent gently reminding their child of each step they took together. Every location marks either a hardship or a miracle. The Ramban adds a striking interpretation: this list is ecological. It is a testament to divine sustenance in places without natural resources. The land itself becomes a record of care, survival, and presence.

This is Torah as sacred cartography. It maps not just movement, but meaning. In Indigenous and decolonial traditions, we know the land is never neutral. It holds stories, trauma, and memory. Torah, too, insists on this truth. The places we pass through matter. The land remembers. Nothing is forgotten.

And yet, these same chapters can also provoke deep discomfort. Mattot-Masei contains not only visions of care and refuge, but also troubling calls for conquest and exclusion. In Numbers 33:50–53, G-d commands:

“You shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land... and destroy all their figured objects... You shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess.”

This passage echoes the language and logic of settler colonialism and extraction. It has been invoked, both explicitly and implicitly, to justify violence and erasure. From Zionist claims to historic Palestine to the Christian Doctrine of Discovery used to colonize Indigenous lands in the Americas, this theology of conquest has left a long and devastating legacy.

After returning from a recent trip to Palestine, these verses took on a different weight for me. I met families who had been displaced multiple times. I walked through villages where the rubble of ancestral homes remains untouched but deeply felt. I saw olive trees older than nations, cut down to make way for settlements. These verses are not ancient abstractions. They mirror contemporary systems of occupation and removal that continue to inflict harm.

And yet, in the same parsha, we encounter another kind of instruction. Numbers 35:15 describes the establishment of cities of refuge—arei miklat—where those who have killed unintentionally can flee for safety. These cities must be accessible not only to Israelites, but also to gerim—resident aliens and sojourners. People without tribal land. People who might otherwise be left out.

The Mishnah in Makkot 2:5 teaches that the roads to these cities were widened, made smooth, and clearly marked with signs that read miklat, miklat—refuge, refuge. The Rambam, in Hilchot Rotzeach 8:5, insists that these roads must be maintained regularly and that the community is responsible for supporting those who seek shelter. This is not theoretical. It is a blueprint. Torah imagines a society in which care is built into the infrastructure, in which safety is proactively and publicly designed.

What would it mean today to build wide, visible roads to refuge? What would it mean to treat access, not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental part of justice? In disability communities, we talk about access intimacy: the practice of anticipating and meeting needs in ways that build trust and mutual respect. The Torah’s instruction to widen the road and post clear signs is, in its own way, a model of access intimacy. It insists that the right to refuge should never depend on someone’s ability to navigate difficult terrain alone.

In this way, Mattot-Masei offers a quiet but radical framework: sanctuary must be designed with all bodies and experiences in mind. Not only the idealized or normative ones. Roads must be wide enough for everyone. Refuge must be visible to those in crisis. Those who have caused harm and have been harmed.

So what does Mattot-Masei ask of us?

It asks us to map differently. Not to build a future on conquest or dispossession, but on memory, refuge, and interdependence.

It asks us to widen the road. To design care into our systems, to meet people where they are, and to refuse to let anyone be left behind.

It asks us to hold the fullness of our journey. The grief, the harm, the resilience, the miracle, and to bring that into the world we are trying to build.

It asks us to remember where we have been, who has been excluded, and how we can make that memory part of the blueprint.

Let us not enter the Promised Land empty-handed. Let us bring with us maps that remember.

Stephanie Gray (they/them) is a scholar, grassroots organizer, and ritualist based on Quapaw, Osage, and Caddo land in Central Arkansas. They are the spiritual leader of Taste of Olam Haba, a pluralistic Jewish congregation in Little Rock.