Parashat Re’eh / פרשת ראה
Deuteronomy 11:26 – 16:17

Sandwiched between an extensive listing of blessings and curses, on hand, and a reminder about Israel’s sacred festivals, on the other, is an expression of the Torah’s and Judaism’s core value of caring for the poor, needy and vulnerable in our society. As I studied Parashat Re’eh this week, an article by Rabbi Shai Held, Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, touched me deeply. To gain insight on the centrality of caring for the less fortunate, please read and discuss Rabbi Held’s article — Opening Our Hearts and Our Hands: Deuteronomy and the Poor — with friends and family.

Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraph:

None of the Five Books of Moses is more passionately concerned with the plight of the vulnerable than Deuteronomy, and no chapter in Deuteronomy more powerfully expresses that concern than chapter 15, which focuses on remission of debts and manumission of slaves…. As always, Deuteronomy makes a claim on our hearts as well as our deeds. When confronted with the sufferings of the needy, Deuteronomy wants us to act decently and also, crucially, to care deeply.

May we heed the directives of this week’s reading and work to create a society in which all people feel God’s love.

Shabbat Shalom.

Parashat Matot / פרשת מטות

Numbers 30:2 – 32:42

This week’s Torah portion deals with the complicated matter of vows and oaths. As this portion follows on the heels of a command regarding votive or voluntary offerings, most commentators say that vows refer to the promises people make to God in the form of offerings or sacrifices, e.g. “If I make it through this ordeal, God, I will give $18 to tzedakah.” Oaths are any promises made in God’s name, i.e. “I swear by God I’ll never eat shellfish again.”

On Yom Kippur we pay homage to commandments regarding vows when we recite Kol Nidre. The legalistic formulation of Kol Nidre emerged in the Middle Ages when many Jews took vows of allegiance to the Catholic church in order to save themselves from the horrors of the inquisition. Kol Nidre imagines each of us standing before a heavenly tribunal being released from any vows we may have made in the past year (or, depending on the version in your prayerbook, that we may make in the coming year) either willingly or under duress. In this way, even apostasy for the sake of saving one’s life is forgiven. To this day, many descendents of “conversos” from the Middle Ages rely on this forgiveness as they prepare to rejoin the Jewish people proudly and openly.

What we learn from this week’s Torah portion above all is to take our words seriously. While the Torah may be speaking narrowly about vows and oaths, we should extrapolate from this discussion the broader lesson that words and intentions really do matter. We ought not to make promises to God or to others that we don’t mean or that we know we are unable to keep.

On the other hand, if we find ourselves in a position where we must make such a vow or oath to preserve a life or we find that circumstances prohibit us from fulfilling a vow or oath, we must contritely acknowledge where we are. To “profane God’s name” in these situations is to not care, to take our promises lightly. On the other hand, we sanctify God’s name when we use these moments to ask for forgiveness or to contribute tzedakah as is appropriate. We sanctify God first by refraining from making vows and oaths in God’s name entirely. But, after the fact, after the vow or oath has been made, we infuse our promises with sanctity when we realize that sometimes our words express sacred commitments that we may not be able to avoid or that we legitimately may not be able to fulfill.

 

Parashat Pinchas / פרשת פינחס

Torah Portion: Numbers 25:10 – 30:1

 

This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Pinchas, is disturbing on many levels as it touches on nerves frayed by recent events in Israel. Last week, we read that Pinchas, son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron, the high priest, ruthlessly kills Zimri, an Israelite of the tribe of Simeon, and Cozbi, a Midianite woman, when he sees them pass before Moses and enter a tent ostensibly to engage in sexual relations. A casual read of this incident reveals Pinchas acting on his own on behalf of God. If this is the case, how do we reconcile our love for Torah with our contemporary abhorrence for murder in the name of a higher cause, especially in light of the recent tragic murders of three innocent Israeli teens and one Palestinian teen in Israel? Is our tradition condoning vigilante justice?

First, some context: Just prior to that aforementioned event, Israelite men had en masse been “profaning themselves by whoring with the Moabite women, who invited the people to the sacrifices for their god. The people partook of them and worshiped that god” (Numbers 25:1-2). Incensed that Israel was straying after a foreign god, God instructed Moses to “Take all the ringleaders and have them publicly impaled before the Lord, so that the Lord’s wrath may turn away from Israel” (25:4). It was just after Moses issued God’s command to Israel’s officials from the opening of the Tent of Meeting that Zimri, in the sight of all, brings Cozbi over to his companions en route to a marital tent.[1]

At the moment that Pinchas rushes after Zimri and Cozbi and runs them through with a spear that a plague, which had taken the lives of twenty-four thousand people, ceased. God instantly rewards Pinchas (25:10-13):

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Pinchas, son of Eleazar son of Aaron the priest, has turned back My wrath from the Israelites by displaying among them his passion for Me, so that I did not wipe out the Israelite people in My passion. Say, therefore, ‘I grant him My pact of friendship. It shall be for him and his descendants after him a pact of priesthood for all time, because he took impassioned action for his God, thus making expiation for the Israelites.'”

In other words, God establishes a unique pact with Pinchas and his descendents, a brit shalom, a covenant of peace or friendship, and guarantees the priesthood of Pinchas and his line for all time.

What? Pinchas murders two people in cold blood without having been instructed to do so by Moses and now he’s a hero? How could God possibly have made a brit shalom with someone who acted so violently? Why would God have also ensured the perpetuity of the priestly line from Pinchas? To my eyes, what Pinchas did was just plain wrong. What if others followed suit and resorted to vigilante justice because they felt it was the right thing to do? Could there be peace then? It seems to me that a harsh rebuke, at the very least, is in order.

While it is the case that most commentators have seen in Pinchas a model of fidelity to God and willingness to act when others wouldn’t and, thus, worthy of God’s praise[2], others have been more critical of Pinchas and have offered interpretations of the Torah that suggest that God’s intentions are more complicated than simply rewarding Pinchas for a job well done. For example, in the 3^rd century C.E. Rav Abba, aka “Rav” in the Talmud, condemns Pinchas for failing to follow Moses’ instruction (Fields, p. 76):

He holds that Pinchas sees what Zimri and Cozbi are doing and says to Moses, “Did you not teach our people when you came down from Mount Sinai that any Israelite who has sex with a non-Israelite may be put to death by zealots?” Moses, says Rav, listens to Pinchas and responds, “Let God who gave the advice execute the advice.”

According to Rav, Pinchas may have acted within the law, but that he should have heeded Moses’ instruction and trusted that God would, indeed, execute judgment in God’s own way.[3]

That the tradition has not always viewed Pinchas favorably is further supported by the insights of Rabbi Jack Reimer, who shows that the brit shalom was more a necessity for Pinchas’ own protection than a divine reward for exemplary behavior. In his essay My Covenant of Peace, Rabbi Reimer writes[4]:

…Abravanel says that God had to promise Pinchas peace in the sense of protection because the relatives of the one whom he had killed would be out to get him. The inference of Abravanel’s comment is that violence only leads to counter‑violence, that when a man takes the law into his own hands he only starts a chain reaction of revenge that goes on without end.

The Talmud offers a different explanation of what “My covenant of peace” means. It says that Pinchas needed protection, not so much from the relatives of the person he had killed, but from Moses, and Aaron, and the Sanhedrin. They were the ones who wanted to punish him and disqualify him from the priesthood for he had taken the law into his own hands. If God had not intervened to protect him they would have punished him for murder, or at the least, taken away his priesthood for taking the law into his own hands. This is a bold midrash for it changes the whole character of the biblical story. For the midrash Pinchas is not a hero but a criminal for if every man were to take the law into his own hands society could not stand.

The third explanation of what “My covenant of peace” means comes from the Netsiv, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin. According to his commentary, God had to bless Pinchas with the covenant of peace so that he would be protected, not only from the relatives of the one he killed, and not only from the courts, but from himself. For when a man has killed, whatever the reason the act of killing inevitably has an effect upon his soul. There is the danger that he may used to it and become casual about it, and there is the danger that his conscience may drive him mad with guilt. This is why God had to promise him “My Covenant of peace.” God had to promise to help him recover from the damage to his own soul that the murder had done. What the Netsiv is suggesting is that violence not only harms the victim and society but also the soul of the one who does. It makes him less stable, less sensitive and less human.

Against this argument by Rabbi Reimer, my friend Rabbi Gideon Estes shares a traditional view that Pinchas was not a vigilante, but rather a person of authority among the Israelites who was carrying out God’s earlier command conveyed by Moses to impale all the Israelites who had gone astray. Furthermore, Rabbi Estes explains that the “tent” into which Zimri and Cozbi entered was the Tent of Meeting, not a private abode, making their sin all the more heinous and deserving of Pinchas’ extreme response.[5] Rabbi Estes, thus, suggests that Pinchas’ action was understandable and even justifiable.

I believe as contemporary Jews we must hold both interpretations of this story to be True. On one hand, we have a story told in hyperbole about the responsibilities of Jews to perform mitzvot and to intercede when we see sins being committed. On the other hand, though, we have a story of zealotry gone tragically awry, a story in which one man’s action is roundly criticized. Pinchas’ act, like all acts of violence, merely begets further violence. It instills anger and pain in the families of the ones he kills and in the wider community and also compromises his own soul. Both stories are True.

It is my hope that as we read Parashat Pinchas this week we are able to see both sides of the story. Pinchas’ extremism in the defense of God’s word may be no vice from one perspective, but we mustn’t overlook the horror of his action, either. The lesson, I believe, is that as devotees to any ideal we must check ourselves and ensure that our actions truly serve the cause of peace. May this lesson sink into the hearts of all those caught up in conflict around the world.

 

[1] Jacob Milgron, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 215.

[2] See Harvey Fields, A Torah Commentary for Our Time: Volume 3, Numbers and Deuteronomy (New York: UAHC Press, 1993), 77-78. Fields points to Samuel, head of the academy in Nahardea, Moses Maimonides, and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch as staunch defendants of Pinchas and God’s response.

[3] Ibid., p. 77.

[4] http://www.americanrabbi.com/my-covenant-of-peace-by-jack-reimer/ Accessed by subscription, 7/10/2014.

[5] Conversation held on 7/9/2014.

Parashat Balak / פרשת בלק

Click HERE to read Torah Portion: Numbers 22:2 – 25:9

For an insightful commentary on this week’s intriguing and humorous Torah portion, check out The Lampooned Prophet: On Learning From (and With) Balaam by Rabbi Shai Held.

I’ll return with my own commentary on the Torah reading next week. Have a safe and happy Independence Day weekend!

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Dan

PARASHAT Beha’alotcha — Numbers 8:1 – 12:16

When in a position of leadership, how would you say you deal with chaos? Do you get angry and lash out at people? Do you retreat and ignore the chaos? If there’s a lot of complaining, do you give in to demands and give people what they want even if doing so might be impractical, costly or unwise? In truth, exhibiting leadership in hard times is always a challenge.

This week’s parashah comes along to offer us guidance. In Beha’alotcha, we encounter Moses at his wit’s end, dealing with a restless, hungry, grumbling populace. All they’ve had to eat in the wilderness for two years has been manna, a dew-like substance. They are tired of manna and long for meat. They wax nostalgic for all the foods they ate while slaves in Egypt. In his appeal to God for relief, Moses cries out: I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me. If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness!” (Numbers 11:14-15).

God’s response to Moses is twofold. One response is to attempt to put an end to the people’s whining about meat once and for all. God instructs Moses to say to the people: The Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you (11:18:20). After God makes good on this promise/threat, God then inflicts the people with a severe plague.

It is clear from God’s outburst that God is every bit as fed up as Moses! Tempers are flaring all around.

God’s other response is more measured and provides a lesson about leadership. To Moses’ credit, he admitted to God that “I cannot carry all his people by myself.” Thus, God instructs Moses to enlist others to help share the burden of leadership: Gather for Me seventy of Israel’s elders of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people, and bring them to the Tent of Meeting and let them take their place there with you. I will come down and speak with you there, and I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and put it upon them; they shall share the burden of the people with you, and you shall not bear it alone (11:16-17).

Though expressed in desperate terms, Moses’ appeal for help is in and of itself exemplary. He noticed his limitations and knew that alone he would not be able to continue to lead in any responsible way. The job of leading Israel was wearing on Moses and he was feeling inadequate to the point of wishing for death. Yet, he had the clarity of mind to believe he could continue if only God would lend a hand.

God did, indeed, lend a hand, but rather than simply intervene by providing quail to the Israelites, God also gave Moses a good piece of advice: share the task of leadership with others. Moses had done this earlier at the suggestion of his father-in-law Jethro (Exodus 14:16-18), but for whatever reasons God perceived that it was time for a new or, perhaps, an additional, leadership team.

What made this leadership team distinctive was that all the elders received the gift of prophecy, i.e. they could hear God directly and speak on God’s behalf. This gift had previously been reserved for Moses. With the elders joining Moses in speaking on behalf of God, Moses was no longer perceived as an autocrat by the people, God’s word attained a new level of Truth because it wasn’t coming from the mouth of one man, and the people now had others they could talk to about their problems, knowing that these were already well-respected leaders within each tribe. With this leadership team in place, Moses was more easily able to manage the chaos and discontentment among the masses.

Meanwhile, two other elders by the names of Eldad and Medad, who were not in the Tent of Meeting with the other seventy, also received the gift of prophecy and began to prophesize in the camp (Numbers 11:24-26).  Rather than restrain Eldad and Medad, as Joshua urged him (11:28), Moses embraced the idea of having additional leaders prophesying among the people. Moses had already demonstrated his willingness to share authority with the seventy elders in the Tent of Meeting. Now he was showing an even greater generosity of spirit. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord put His spirit upon them!” he said (11:29).

From Moses’ example, we learn the importance of sharing responsibility with others. It often takes a team of leaders to tackle big challenges. Moreover, allowing people outside the immediate leadership circle to assume the mantel of leadership serves to empower the people to take responsibility for themselves and not rely only on others to solve their problems for them. Like a candle’s flame that is not diminished when it ignites another candle, Moses was not less of a leader or prophet because he dared to share authority with others. On the contrary, Moses’ status as a great leader is significantly bolstered by the generosity, humility, confidence and wisdom he exhibited not only in accepting God’s direction regarding the elders but also in his decision to allow others beyond an elite group to assume authority as well.

The next time we are faced with a challenging situation that requires level-headed leadership, may we recall this moment of brilliance in which Moses reached out for help and lovingly embraced the leadership of all those whom God endowed with the will and ability to lead.

 

Parashat Bemidbar: Numbers 1:1 – 4:20

With this week’s Torah portion, Bemidbar, we begin a new book of the Torah, also named Bemidbar. Bemidbar depicts Israel’s trials during the 40 years of wandering “in the wilderness” (bemidbar, in Hebrew) following their exodus from Egypt. The book also contains multiple censuses of the Israelites. Reflecting this latter focus on counting people, the English title for Bemidbar is Numbers. The relationship between these two themes — the wilderness and the censuses — is full of meaning.

The reading begins:

1 On the first day of the second month, in the second year following the exodus from the land of Egypt, the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, saying…

The French medieval commentator Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam, 1085-1174) asks why the Torah here specifies where God spoke to Moses. He posits that the location of God’s speech adds clarity. After all, God had spoken to Moses and Israel elsewhere just a year earlier: “All of the divine utterances that were spoken during the first year, before the Tabernacle was set up, are labeled as having been spoken ‘on Mount Sinai.’ But once the Tabernacle was set up, on the 1st of Nisan of the second year, we find not ‘on Mount Sinai’ but ‘in the wilderness of Sinai in the Tent of Meeting.’”^[1] In other words, now that Israel has the Tabernacle, God can speak to them as they wander through the wilderness. Beforehand God could only be present at Mount Sinai. God is now portable.

But why the emphasis on the midbar, wilderness, itself? Of the many explanations for this, I am drawn to two in particular. One sees the wilderness, both a challenging place for human survival and a spectacular show of nature, as the perfect crucible for Israel’s maturation. The Israeli historian Nachman Ran imagines that after Israel’s centuries-long period of enslavement in Egypt, they needed to gel as a nation and to grow spiritually. “To a people whose entire living generation had seen only the level lands of Egypt, the Israelite march into this region of mountain magnificence, with its sharp and splintered peaks and profound valleys, must have been a perpetual source of astonishment and awe. No nobler school could have been conceived for training a nation of slaves into a nation of freemen or weaning a people from the grossness of idolatry to a sense of grandeur and power of the God alike of Nature and Mind.” Indeed, “in the midbar they become free human beings responsible to God and to themselves for every choice they make.”^[2]

Another interpretation likens the landscape of the midbar to “the psychological and spiritual realms of human existence.” The 20th century Israeli scholar and poet Pinhas Peli believes there is a “‘wilderness’ within each person, a ‘desert’ where selfish desires rule, where one looks out only for one’s needs. No person is ever satisfied in the desert. There is constant complaining about lack of food and water, the scorching hot days and bitter cold nights. Anger, frustration, disagreements, and hunger prevail… The Torah is given in the desert… ‘to conquer and curb the demonic wilderness within human beings.’… The lesson here is that, ‘if human beings do not conquer the desert, it may eventually conquer them. There is no peaceful coexistence between the two.’”^[3]

These understandings of the midbar first as Israel’s training ground to serve as God’s “chosen people” and next as a symbol of the treacherous landscape within each of us, leads me to the next verses in our reading:

2 Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head. 3 You and Aaron shall record them by their groups, from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms.

What emerges from the census, we learn later, is the creation of an army, on one hand, and a workforce to tend to the Tabernacle, on the other hand. God, thus, provides Israel with a mechanism literally to put its camp in order so that it can survive the tough trek ahead. With no such order, the nation and its connection to God would be doomed.

On a symbolic level, the census represents the moral, spiritual and physical preparation necessary to be able to make something of God’s revelation. Without some kind of ordered society, without a higher purpose, and without personal accountability, Israel would not have been able to actualize the lessons of Torah. They would have been too divided, distracted, and self-interested to build the kind of caring world that God envisioned. What kind of “light unto the nations” would Israel have been if it was at war with itself, unable to know right from wrong?

What we learn from this week’s Torah portion is that in order to bring calm to a world in chaos, we must first take care of business at home and within. Judaism places a premium on shalom bayit, family harmony, partly because it recognizes that the family is fertile ground for sowing the values of Torah and Jewish peoplehood. But family isn’t the only fertile ground. Individual souls and communities, too, are places where values must be allowed to flourish. Without tilling the soil, without bringing order to it, nothing except weeds and wildflowers will grow. Under such circumstances, beauty is left to chance. We can’t leave the creation of a just, compassionate world to chance, however. Instead, let us strive to bring order to the wilderness.

©Rabbi Daniel Aronson, 2014

 

^[1] Michael Carasik, The Commentator’s Bible: Numbers, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2011), p. 3.

^[2] From Harvey J. Fields, A Torah Commentary for Our Times: Volume 3 Numbers and Deuteronomy, (New York: UAHC Press, 1993), pp. 9-10.

^[3] Ibid., pp. 11-12.