Category: D’var Torah

Shabbat Shalom! – Pinchas

Parashat Pinchas has a little bit of everything. It has the conclusion of the troubling story of Pinchas, who committed a double murder in defense of Torah in last week’s Torah portion. It has a census of the tribes, which can be interesting to compare with other censuses in Torah. It has commandments regarding many Jewish holidays, including Rosh Chodesh, Passover, Shavuot, Sukkotand the High Holy Days. And at its heart it has the story of the Daughters of Zelophehad.

So let’s see what the darshanot (yes, darshanot this week – all women!) make of this cornucopia of possibilities!

Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild: #Girlpower; Or: The real stars of the sidra are the five women siblings who transform society and create justice.

Rabbi Ruth Adar: Oh Daughters, My Mothers!

Rabbi Dr. Margaret Jacobi: D’var Torah Parashat Pinchas

Rabbi Amy Scheinerman: “I’m gonna live forever!”

Rabbi Eleanor Steinman: Pinchas with Rabbi Ellie (VIDEO)

 

Balak: Not Only A Jewish Story

Image: A donkey (pixabay)

In 1967, at Deir Alla, Jordan, about 8 km east of the Jordan River, archaeologists found an inscription with a story relating visions of the “seer of the gods Balaam, son of Be’or.” It was a startling find, since “Balaam, son of Be’or” is the central figure of Parashat Balak in our Torah. However, instead of being a prophet of the Hebrew God, in the Deir Alla inscription he is associated with a number of deities, including “the Shaddai gods” and the goddess Shagar.

In the inscription, the gods tell Balaam that the world will be destroyed. The disaster is explained to him via animals: birds shrieking, animals of the field and herd disrupted.  He is able to avert the disaster, although the details are lost to damage to the inscription.

While there are many important differences between the Balaam of Parashat Balak and the Balaam of the inscription, one striking similarity is the communication with animals. In Torah, the seer has a donkey who speaks to him. In the inscription, birds communicate the news. In both cases the subject matter is deadly serious: in Torah, a curse to be put upon the Israelites, and in the inscription, news of the end of the world.

In the present time, we also receive messages from the natural world: warnings in the migration of polar bears, warnings in the shifting of fish in the sea. Like the ancient Balaam, whoever he was, we ignore those messages at our peril.

This d’var Torah appeared in a recent issue of the CCAR Newsletter.

Shabbat Shalom! – Chukat

Image: A red heifer (pixabay)

This week’s Torah portion, Chukat (khoo-KAHT) contains several difficult passages of Torah: the ritual of the “red heifer,” a special purification rite, the deaths of Aaron and Miriam, and a terrible mistake by Moses. These are also stories about the difficult relations between the Israelites and the desert peoples.

As one of the rabbis below points out, the shadow of death hangs over Parashat Chukat. Two important figures die; another learns something about his own death. The news has been very difficult this week: deaths by violence, terrorism, horrors. Torah does not avoid difficult topics, rather it can help us center ourselves to cope with difficult times.

Read these divrei Torah to learn more:

The Gift of Grief by Rabbi Lisa Edwards

Obituary for Miriam the Prophetess by Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild

The Smith Speaks by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

Chukat by Rabbi Aubrey Glazer

On Being Effective by Rabbi Peter J. Rubenstein

Shabbat Shalom! – Korach

Image: An ominous cloud, an approaching storm (pixabay)

This week’s Torah portion is a challenge. It contains the story of Korach, the Levite who felt slighted by God and by Moses. The portion is difficult to read on many levels – it is a complex text with many problems for understanding and the end of it is emotionally charged for many of us. It is one of the most famous stories in Torah.

The story of Korach became a yardstick for judging human behavior:

“Any dispute which is for the sake of Heaven will ultimately endure, and one which is not for the sake of Heaven will not ultimately endure. What is a dispute for the sake of Heaven? This is a debate between Hillel and Shammai. What is a dispute not for the sake of Heaven? This is the dispute of Korach and his assembly.” – Pirkei Avot 5:17

Have I intrigued you?  Parashat Korach is Numbers 16:1- 18:32. For some ideas about interpretation, here are seven divrei Torah:

The Women Behind the Men Emerge: Take a bow, Ms. On ben Pelet by Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild

“He Stood Between the Dead and the Living” by Rabbi Lisa Edwards

A Lesson in Conflict Resolution by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

An Anti-Semite’s Delight by Rabbi Stephen Fuchs

Korach and the Un-Holiness of Racism by Dr. Shaiya Rothburg

Korach, Privilege, and Striving for More by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

Claims and Flames by Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

 

 

Shabbat Shalom! – Shelach Lecha

Image: Sculpture of two people eavesdropping at a brick wall. (couleur/pixabay.)

Shelach Lecha – “Send for yourself” or “Send to yourself” – is the fourth Torah portion of the Book of Numbers. It offers us two challenging narratives, the story of the Spies and the story of the Sabbath violator, along with three commandments:

  • Take Challah – Set aside a portion of dough for the priests.
  • Wear tzitzit [fringes] on four-cornered garments.
  • Do not go astray after your whims or what you see with your eyes.

Here are seven different divrei Torah on the portion:

The Faith of Women is Overlooked and the Result is Catastrophic by Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild

Larger than Life by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

What’s Your Confidence Quotient? by Rabbi David Ackerman

Moses Stays God’s Wrath… Again! by Rabbi Stephen Fuchs

Hope in the Darkness of Fear by Rabbi Vered L. Harris

What Does Changing Your Mind Say About You? by Hannah Perlberger

A Jewish Birthday by Rabbi Ruth Adar

 

A Jewish Birthday

Image: Large bunches of purple grapes hanging from a vine (Jill111/pixabay)

This week’s Torah portion is Shelach-Lecha (“Send For Yourself”)

Shelach-Lecha was the Torah portion 21 years ago when I became a Jew. The portion always reminds me of my year of study towards conversion.

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Send men to scout for yourself the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people.” –Numbers 13:1-2

Like Joshua and Caleb, I was a spy in the Land of Israel, learning about it, seeing the beauty of Judaism. Like the 10 other spies, some of what I learned confused and frightened me.

When Moses sent them to scout the land of Canaan, he said to them, “Go up there into the Negeb and on into the hill country, and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? And take pains to bring back some of the fruit of the land.” – Number 13: 17-20

I took a class, met with my rabbi, studied and wondered. Since my rabbi required me to attend Shabbat services every week, I got to know the regulars in the congregation. I met many encouraging people, people for whom I developed a great fondness.

They reached the wadi Eshcol, and there they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes—it had to be borne on a carrying frame by two of them—and some pomegranates and figs. – Numbers 13: 23

I also met a few who quietly informed me that no convert could never be truly Jewish. Whenever anyone said that, I felt like a grasshopper in a land of giants.

Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size; we saw the Nephilim there—the Anakites are part of the Nephilim—and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” – Numbers 13:32-33

Torah is beautiful. I loved her, and I loved her people. I felt the weight of that love on my shoulders, heavy as the harvest of fruit that the spies carried back to camp.  I felt that for Torah, for Israel and her People, I could learn to deal with the scary giants. My shoulders were ready for the Ohl Hashamayim, the Yoke of Heaven.

The spies did not know what it would be like to be residents of the Land.  They had only their imaginings: their hopes and their fears. In their case, fear won out. For me and for many other gerim [converts,] hope won out. That’s why every Shabbat Shelach-Lecha I say with enthusiasm, “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haolam, sheasani Yisrael!” [Blessed are you, Eternal our God, Ruler of Time-and-Space, who has made me a Jew!]

Shabbat Shalom! – Beha’alotecha

Beha’alotecha (pronounced beh-hah-ah-LOH-t’khah) is a mouthful. It means “When you go up” and as with all names of Torah portions, it comes from the first distinctive word of the portion. which is the third portion in the book of Numbers. We’re deep into the Wilderness now, reading difficult stories and learning challenging mitzvot.

According to Maimonides, there are five mitzvot in this parashah. Four have to do with Passover, but the fifth has to do with sounding the alarm in time of war:

When you are at war in your land against an aggressor who attacks you, you shall sound short blasts on the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the LORD your God and be delivered from your enemies. – Numbers 10:9

This is followed immediately by the commandment to sound the trumpets at other times. I’ve never understood why the Rambam doesn’t count this as a mitzvah as well:

And on your joyous occasions—your fixed festivals and new moon days—you shall sound the trumpets over your burnt offerings and your sacrifices of well-being. They shall be a reminder of you before your God: I, the LORD, am your God. – Numbers 10:10

Perhaps one of my readers can enlighten us about this: why doesn’t this count as a mitzvah? Or maybe the point is doing it, not counting it!

Note also that the word for “trumpets” here is khatzotz’rot, not shofarot. These are silver trumpets, not rams’ horns. However, in Joshua 6, the priests are told to blow rams’ horns (shofarot.) Apparently knocking walls down requires shofarot!

Here are some of the divrei Torah available online for study this week:

The Silencing of Miriam and the Cushite Woman by Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild

The Real Beneficiaries of Our Rituals by Rabbi Marc Katz

May It Be His Will by Rabbi Rafi Mollot

Power and Prophecy by Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

Light by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

Out, Out, Damn Tamei! by Rabbi Ruth Adar

If You Missed It the First Time by Rabbi Vered Harris

 

 

Out, Out, Damn Tamei!

Image: A red calf. Photo by bluesnap/pixabay.

Moses said to them, “Stand by, and let me hear what instructions the Eternal gives about you.” – Numbers 9:8, Parashat Beha’alotecha

In Numbers 9, the Israelites celebrated Passover in the wilderness, following the instructions of Moses. One had to be ritually clean (tahor) to participate in the sacrifice. Some of the men approached Moses with a problem: they were ritually unclean (tamei) “because of a corpse.”

The modern reader may wonder  why they don’t just take a bath? But in fact it’s a serious problem and not easily repaired. We won’t learn details of the problem until Numbers 19, which is another issue* but for now let’s just look at the rule regarding ritual purity and corpses:

He who touches the corpse of any human being shall be unclean for seven days. – Numbers 19:11

There is a ritual for purification, however. First we have to prepare the materials for purification:

This is the ritual law that the LORD has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid. You shall give it to Eleazar the priest. It shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence. Eleazar the priest shall take some of its blood with his finger and sprinkle it seven times toward the front of the Tent of Meeting. The cow shall be burned in his sight—its hide, flesh, and blood shall be burned, its dung included— and the priest shall take cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson stuff, and throw them into the fire consuming the cow. The priest shall wash his garments and bathe his body in water; after that the priest may reenter the camp, but he shall be unclean until evening. He who performed the burning shall also wash his garments in water, bathe his body in water, and be unclean until evening. A man who is clean shall gather up the ashes of the cow and deposit them outside the camp in a clean place, to be kept for water of lustration for the Israelite community. It is for cleansing. – Numbers 19: 2-9.

This is what is known as the “Ritual of the Red Heifer.” Notice that it requires a very special cow, a priest, and the proper setting for a sacrifice. The only such place is the Tabernacle, and then after the Temple is built, the Temple in Jerusalem.

Once you have the ashes, then the unclean person can take action:

He shall cleanse himself with it on the third day and on the seventh day, and then be clean; if he fails to cleanse himself on the third and seventh days, he shall not be clean. – Numbers 19:17

“With it” in this verse refers to the ashes mixed with water, according to Rashi. So we are to take the ashes of the cow, and mix them with water for cleansing. This, too, is a ritual:

Some of the ashes from the fire of cleansing shall be taken for the unclean person, and fresh water shall be added to them in a vessel. A person who is clean shall take hyssop, dip it in the water, and sprinkle on the tent and on all the vessels and people who were there, or on him who touched the bones or the person who was killed or died naturally or the grave. The clean person shall sprinkle it upon the unclean person on the third day and on the seventh day, thus cleansing him by the seventh day. He shall then wash his clothes and bathe in water, and at nightfall he shall be clean. If anyone who has become unclean fails to cleanse himself, that person shall be cut off from the congregation, for he has defiled the LORD’s sanctuary. The water of lustration was not dashed on him: he is unclean. That shall be for them a law for all time. Further, he who sprinkled the water of lustration shall wash his clothes; and whoever touches the water of lustration shall be unclean until evening. Whatever that unclean person touches shall be unclean; and the person who touches him shall be unclean until evening. – Numbers 19: 17-22

So the person who touched the dead body (to perform a mitzvah) can’t purify himself. He faces a week-long process in which someone else has to mix the cow ashes with water and then sprinkle the first man with the mixture.

To return to Beha’alotecha, this week’s portion, the men who were handling the dead body can’t celebrate the Passover sacrifices on the appropriate day, because it will take a week for them to become tahor [ritually clean.] What are they to do? Moses doesn’t know, so he tells them to wait while he consults with God.

Finally, they get an answer: for people like themselves, or who cannot celebrate Passover because they are away, they can observe Passover a month later! This is the origin of Pesach Sheni, “Second Passover,” which you may have seen on a Jewish calendar.

In the midst of what seems an utterly arcane, impossible set of rituals, we still have this important principle: Torah is not meant to be impossible.

When all seems impossible (How shall these men observe Passover?)  and at other points, Moses returns to the Tent of Meeting to ask God for clarification about rules that don’t quite work. Later on in our history, it would become the task of rabbis to figure out how to make Torah do-able for real live Jews. Or, as teacher and writer Blu Greenberg writes “Where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halakhic way.”

As for the issue of tamei/tahor, ritual purity, that became effectively moot with the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, since the whole Ritual of the Red Heifer requires the Temple. The act of immersion in a mikveh [ritual bath] substitutes for the purification ritual of Biblical times. As my Talmud professor Rabbi Dr. Dvora Weisberg used to point out, it is merely a substitute and in fact, since 70 CE, the state of ritual purity is impossible.

What are we to take from this? Ultimately observance is up to each Jew. For some, observance according to traditional rules seems the best way. For others of us – myself included – some rules belong to history. I am more concerned about whether my words and actions are pure than whether my person is in a state of ritual purity. And you, dear reader? Your choices are up to you.

*The Red Heifer and the purification ritual are from Parashat Chukat, three weeks after this portion. One of the curiosities of Torah is that it doesn’t always present things in an order that seems logical to modern, post-Enlightenment minds.

 

 

Wilderness, Again

Image: Joshua Tree National Monument, an American wilderness. (nightowl/pixabay)

The book of Numbers is known in Hebrew as Bamidbar.

The word bamidbar means “in the wilderness.” It is in the first verse of the first chapter of Numbers:

And the Eternal spoke unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying: – Numbers 1:1

Midbar is a key word in the Jewish view of the world. We spent 40 years in the wilderness of Sinai.

Notice that the verse specifies a particular wilderness, the wilderness of Sinai. It implies to us that there are other midbarim, other wildernesses, as well.

Midbar is a place with no security and few signposts. Midbar is a place where our imaginations can get the best of us. Midbar is a place where many wild animals live, but few human beings. Midbar both draws us and repels us.

The midbar in the photo above is not midbar Sinai, but the Joshua Tree National Park – you could call it midbar Joshua, I suppose. As you can see, it is a brutal landscape, full of rocks and spiny plants. And yet it is also a place of great fascination and a deep beauty. When I felt overwhelmed by my studies in rabbinical school, I would drive out to Joshua Tree and spend Shabbat sitting on a rock, soaking up the midbar.  If I sat quietly, I would see many of its denizens: birds, snakes, lizards, and bugs.

I remember joking to someone that it wasn’t all that different from Los Angeles: full of strange creatures, hot in the summer and dry nearly all the time, except when it rained, which was always a disaster.

As Jews know, sometimes the world is a midbar, a place of no guarantees. We may think that we’ve put our bit of it in order, but then a storm comes and – midbar! We may think our family safe and secure, then there’s an accident or illness and – midbar! We may assure ourselves of an outcome and then something else happens – midbar! We may reassure ourselves that racism, or anti-Semitism, or lawlessness is something somewhere else, and then – midbar!

We are living in midbar times right now, times when things we once took for granted seem no longer assured.  Perhaps it is time to recognize that those things are never assured, that we can never take them for granted.

What tools do we have? We have what we have always had: Torah and mitzvot.

Even when it seems that everything has changed, nothing really changes. We are still traversing the midbar, bearing the tablets in our arms.

Shabbat Shalom! – Behar-Bechukotai

Image: One of the mountains traditionally thought to be Mt. Sinai, this one in present-day Egypt. Photo by tamerlan/wikimedia.

What a mouthful! This week’s double portion has a long tongue-twisting name. Behar means “on the mountain” and it refers to Mount Sinai, where God spoke these words to Moses.

Bechukotai means “by my decrees” – chook is the Hebrew word for a commandment that does not have a logical explanation, it’s simply a commandment. For instance, while people have tried to come up with justifications for the laws of kashrut, in actual fact the only reason the Bible gives for keeping kosher is that God commanded it. The laws of kashrut are chookim (plural of chook.)

These two portions contain around 36 commandments, both mishpatim (laws with logical explanations) and chookim (laws without explanations.) They also close out the book of Leviticus. Thus we leave the Book of regulations for the Levites and next week we’ll be back in Numbers, or Bemidbar – in the wilderness!

Here are some divrei Torah from teachers around the internet this week:

Natural Miracles by Rabbi Amy Scheinerman

Patriarchy and Priesthood Join Forces to Undervalue Women’s Work by Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild

Reduced to Poverty by Rabbi Nina J Mizrahi

Giving Charity is Not Easy Business by Rabbi Marc Katz

God, Too, is Lonely by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

Shabbat shalom!