Category: Torah

Parshat Hukat is the story of transitions. The narrative begins in Chapter 20, with the death of Miriam and Aaron, after the Children of Israel have completed 40 years in the desert. But the parsha itself begins in chapter 19, with the statute (hok) of the Parah Adumah, the Red Heifer. The law describes the process a person undergoes to transition from being tameh(impure) to tahor (pure), after coming in contact with a dead body. The process itself makes little sense. The kohanim (priests) prepare the Red Heifer’s ashes outside of the camp or Temple (Middot 2:4). During its preparation, those kohanim who burn the cow or gather its ashes become impure,  and must wash their clothes and ritually immerse themselves in a mikveh. The kohen who sprinkles the ash water remains pure. The paradox of this ritual is best seen in Chapter 19 verse 19:

A pure person sprinkles the impure person with the ash water of the Red Heifer and somehow the impure person becomes pure. But what exactly does this water do? What does this ash water do for the Tameh person?

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Long road trips don’t bring out the best in people, and the extended journey of the Children of Israel from Egypt to the Land of Israel is no exception. The Book of Numbers sometimes reads like a series of variations on “Are we there yet? How much longer?” — only with higher stakes and graver consequences.

In Parshat Shelach, we read of how the spies’ report leaves the nation begging to cut their trip short and turn back to Egypt. God punishes the people by making the journey substantially longer than planned, and a defiant attempt to infiltrate the Land early ends with crushing military defeat.

In this week’s parasha, Korach, the complaints in the wilderness reach a crescendo, as Korach foments outright rebellion. Korach’s particular concern, however, isn’t about the journey. Instead, he challenges the Torah itself.

According to the Talmud Yerushalmi (Sanhedrin 10:1), a series of three sincere questions leads Korach to become both rebel and heretic.

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In Parshat Shelach, Moses sends 12 scouts to survey the land of Israel in preparation for their entry. It seems as if God commanded them to go, so why should they be punished for reporting what they saw?

The problem was that their perception was skewed based on their slave mentality. They imagined the natives were stronger than them and “the land was out to eat them”! Although they admitted that “the land is flowing with milk and honey,” it was irrelevant to them. As Robertson Davies says, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” This appears to be the root cause of the sin of the spies, for when it came to describing what they saw, they said,

There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, descended from the giants. In our eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.

They felt unworthy and incapable and projected their insecurities and fears onto the natives and the land. The biggest sin of it all was that they caused their own suffering due to their lack of faith in their G-d-given abilities to successfully conquer, inhabit, and enjoy a blessed land. The huge luscious fruit which should have been seen as a blessing turned into a self-made curse.

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At the end of Parshat Beha’alotcha, we find a mysterious and puzzling narrative, the first three verses of which do not seem to follow from each other at all:

1. And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Kushite woman whom he had married; for he had married a Kushite woman. 2. And they said, Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? has he not spoken also through us? And the Lord heard it. 3. And the man Moses was very humble, more than any other men which were upon the face of the earth.

I am intrigued by verses 1 and 2 and the disconnect between them. What precisely is the complaint here? Is it that Moses has married a Kushite woman, as verse 1 implies (and if so, why is that a problem?); or is it to do with God speaking through people, as in verse 2 ? These appear to be two entirely different issues.

In attempting to explain the problem with marrying the Kushite woman, plus the connection between the two seemingly unrelated complaints, the Midrash, Rashi, and others suggest a non-literal interpretation: the complaint was that Moses had separated from his wife Tzipporah, and his siblings felt that that this was unnecessary and inappropriate, for they too were prophets and yet had not separated themselves thus from their own spouses.

Read the full article on The Times of Israel