Sh'lach L'cha

Numbers 13:1−15:41

“Because Freedom Can’t Protect Itself”

D'VAR TORAH BY: LISA EDWARDS

This year marks Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's twentieth anniversary on the United States Supreme Court. Justice Ginsburg likes to tell her version of a story that has many versions:

"What is the difference," she asks, "between a bookkeeper in New York's garment district and a U.S. Supreme Court Justice?" The answer: "One generation."

So much can change in a generation as we learn from this week's Torah portion, Sh'lach L'cha, in which God, fed up with the lack of faith shown by the Israelites, condemns a whole generation to die in the wilderness.

What was their crime? Moses, at God's behest, had sent twelve scouts into the Promised Land to see "what kind of country it is" (Numbers 13:18). Forty days later, ten of the twelve scouts came back with reports not only of the Land's plentiful milk, honey, and fruit, but also of fortified cities and powerful inhabitants so big that "we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them" (13:27-28, 33).

Their report brings the whole community to tears. And by the next day their fear elicits an odd request, as they shout at Moses and Aaron: "If only we might die in this wilderness! Why is the Eternal taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off" (14:2-3).

God is incensed. After all God has done for them, have they so little faith? Perhaps their own low self-esteem ("we looked like grasshoppers"), carried over to their trust in God as well. The midrash wonders if they were losing faith in themselves or in God. When the faint-hearted spies say, "We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we" (13:31), the Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 35a) and, later, Rashi, note a grammatical ambiguity-the last word of that verse, mimenu, can be read either as "than we" or as "than He." Are the ten scouts suggesting that the people in that country are stronger than He-than God? No wonder then that God devises a punishment to fit the crime: "I will do to you just as you have urged Me. In this very wilderness shall your carcasses drop. . . . [But] Your children . . . shall know the land that you have rejected. . . . You shall bear your punishment for forty years, corresponding to the number of days-forty days-that you scouted the land: a year for each day" (14:28-34). God holds the adults accountable, but the children, too young to have known slavery, will live to enter the Land.

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B'haalot'cha

Numbers 8:1−12:16

By Lisa Edwards

Oy! There's a lot of whining in this week's Torah portion, B'haalot'cha. It has such a promising beginning-the training and blessing of the Levites for their special role among the people Israel, including the lighting of the golden seven-branched menorah; the poetic and comforting description of the cloud by day and fire by night that will signal when to make camp, and when to break camp and journey on; and the silver trumpets sounding to gather the people and God together in bad times and in good-"an institution for all time throughout the ages" (Numbers 10:8).

What happened? Why all the complaining? (Not that complaining is new to the Israelites.)

Some of the complaining proves legitimate. God appreciates it when some of the men, unable to celebrate the Passover sacrifice at its proper time, ask for another opportunity to do so. If the reason for delay is legitimate, says God, then offer it a month later on the same day of the month (9:6-13)-and the idea of Pesach Sheini is born, a second Pesach, this one, importantly, not imposed by God, but desired and requested by the people.

In this parashah the Israelites, at God's instruction, take their leave of Mount Sinai: "They marched from the mountain of God a distance of three days" (10:33). The commentator Rashbam (twelfth century, the grandson of the more-famous commentator Rashi) theorizes that the cause of the Israelites' complaining was the unexpected difficulty of the three-day journey.1 Given all the organizing beforehand, and the presence of the cloud and Moses to guide them, they were expecting an easier time of it.

It's such a wary time for God, for Moses, and for the Israelites. They want their bonds to deepen; they want all that comes next to go well. Yet they barely seem to understand one another. Some commentators suggest the Israelites ran from the mountain, eager to get away lest God give them still more laws to follow, "like a child running from school," says Ramban (Nachmanides, thirteenth century) leading him to wonder if the words, "they marched from the mountain of God," suggest a spiritual distancing in addition to a physical one (10:33).

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Naso

Numbers 4:21−7:89

We’ve Got to Stop It

D'var Torah By: Lisa Edwards

The sign read, "We've got to stop it," and under it a woman sat alone at a table in the grocery store parking lot. The sign also contained the words "domestic violence," so I walked over. She greeted me warmly, "I'm trying to put a face to it. To say it could happen to anyone. Because," she explained, "before it happened to me I wasn't very sympathetic. I would hear about battered women and think to myself, 'just put one foot in front of the other and walk away.' I had no idea how difficult that could be, how entrapped people can become in this cycle of violence. Are you a survivor?" she asked me.

"No," I said, "but I worked at a battered women's shelter for six years, so I well know what you're saying."

"Jealousy, for no reason, can start it all," she said. "But it can be anything-just that desire to control something-someone-in a world that feels so out of control."

One of the strangest passages of Torah occurs in this week's Parashat Naso-the ritual of the jealous husband and what comes to be known in Mishnah as the sotah wife (sotah from the word used in our parashah, tisteh, meaning "gone astray" or "turn aside"). "If any wife has gone astray and broken faith with her husband . . . [and] a fit of jealousy (ruach kinah) comes over him and he is wrought up about the wife who has defiled herself; or if a fit of jealousy comes over one and he is wrought up about his wife although she has not defiled herself, the husband shall bring his wife to the priest . . . . " (Numbers 5:12-15). The priest is instructed to subject the wife to a bizarre ordeal, including drinking "bitter waters" made of sacred water mixed with dirt from the floor of the Tabernacle and ink from the writing of the punishment she will face if guilty. If the drink causes her womb to swell, she is judged guilty; if not, she is innocent. If guilty, it is left to God to punish her-presumably by the miscarriage or infertility that will result from her swollen belly.

We're not the only ones troubled by this passage. The Talmud includes a whole tractate about it, Sotah, and examines this ordeal in great detail, including added restrictions that greatly reduce the likelihood of using it. But even if we stay just with the Torah's cryptic version, chances are the woman will not suffer physical harm either from the "potion" or at the hand of her husband.

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B'midbar

Numbers 1:1−4:20

A Kinder, Gentler Nation

D'var Torah By: Lisa Edwards

This week brings us Yom Y'rushalayim (May 8 / 28 Iyar), one of several Jewish holidays commemorating events of war in the modern State of Israel. This one recalls Israel's "recovery" of the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Despite these modern holidays, or the always popular Israeli postcards of handsome young men and women in uniform, it seems safe to say that we Jews generally don't think of ourselves as a military people.

Yet the coming together of Yom Y'rushalayim with our annual reading of the opening portion of the Book of Numbers, beginning with a census of all Israelite men "from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms" (Numbers 1:3), might give us pause to question our assumption. In fact, from Abraham onward in Torah we find ourselves often embattled, and the fighting continues beyond Deuteronomy and into other books of Tanach as well.

Take the Israelite nation, for example, in this week's Torah portion, B'midbar. Here's the same crowd we witnessed a year and a month before, running hurriedly from Egypt, looking over their shoulders as they cross the parted sea, terrified by what lay behind and ahead. But in the beginning of B'midbar, "In the Wilderness," they've become much more organized, some might say "civilized," and the "proof" is that all the tribes are lining up in perfect order exactly according to instruction, surrounding their newly constructed sacred Tabernacle, preparing now to march through the wilderness toward the Promised Land.

The Book of Numbers shares its Hebrew name with that of the first portion, B'midbar. Why is the book called "Numbers" in English? Presumably because it begins with God's instruction to Moses (and Aaron and a man from each tribe) to count the people, s'u et-rosh kol-adat B'nai Yisrael, "take a census of the whole Israelite company" (Numbers 1:2). God immediately clarifies the command saying, kol-zachar, "all the men . . ." (1:2). (Note: Just a few months into the United States military leaders' decision to allow women to serve in combat, it's useful to remember that gender inequality is neither new nor ever easily overcome. But I'll write more on that in discussing later portions of B'midbar.)

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