You can find the rest of the parsha text on Chabad.org at Naso.
As an alternative, you can also read the text (Numbers 4:21 – 7:89) on Sefaria .
30 thoughts on “Naso”
Wendy Berk
From JTS
NASO
BY : BENJAMIN D. SOMMER
The final verse of Parashat Naso is easy to miss. It comes after a long passage that describes the gifts the leader of each tribe presented at the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting (both names are used for the structure) in the wilderness. Twelve times we read six verses listing the exact same set of items donated from each tribe. The substantial amount of repetition may lead readers to lose some focus as they move through the passage. But Numbers 7:89, the verse that comes right after those twelve sets of six verses, is highly significant. It provides crucial information about the nature of revelation as understood by the kohanim (Priests) who wrote this section of the Torah.
Numbers 7:89 describes what transpires between God and Moses at the Tent of Meeting. In doing so, it uses an unusual verb that I’ll leave untranslated for now:
When Moses came to the Tent of Meeting to speak with Him, he heard the voice middabbeir-ing to him from above the covering that was on top of Ark of the Covenant, from between the two kerubim, and He spoke to him.
To understand what the Torah tells us about God’s way of talking to Moses, we need to realize that the word our verse uses for God’s speaking, middabbeir, is quite rare. It is related to another verb that means “speak,” m’dabbeir, which appears over a thousand times in the Bible. But the verb middabbeir shows up only three or four times in the Bible.[1] The grammatical construction of the verb as it appears in our verse is known as the hitpa’el (whereas the much more frequent construction, m’dabbeir, is known as a pi’el verb).[2] The hitpa’el construction carries several types of meaning. It describes a reciprocal action—that is, action that goes back and forth between two parties. (In modern Hebrew, the verb mitkatteiv, “correspond, exchange mail,” is an example of this use of the hitpa’el verb.) If middabbeir conveys that sort of meaning in our verse, then, it refers to communication that moves back and forth between God and Moses. In this case, the Priestly author of our verse is telling us that the revelation of the law was not just a top-down affair; it involved some degree of dialogue between God and Moses. This conception of revelation fits well with five other Priestly passages in the Torah, where Moses and the Israelites request clarification from God on specific points of law and God responds by producing new legislation that answers the questions they ask. This Priestly picture of lawgiving as being at least in part dialogical, as involving some sort of human input and not just divine decree, may be indicated in our verse through the hitpa’el verb it uses.
Additional possibilities exist as well. Sometimes the hitpa’el construction conveys ongoing action, which suggests that we can translate our verb, “he would hear the voice continually speaking to him,” “he would hear the voice as it went on speaking to him.” (This understanding is suggested by the modern biblical commentators Baruch Levine and Everett Fox.) Further, the construction often conveys a reflexive meaning—that is, it describes an action that people do to themselves. This possibility leads Rashi to suggest that this voice “would speak to itself, and Moses would hear on his own”—that is, at the Tent, Moses somehow attained access to God’s internal ruminations. These various meanings, it should be clear, are not mutually exclusive; it’s possible that all of them or several of them are implied at once in Numbers 7:89.
By choosing this rare hitpa’el verb to explain what took place when God communicated with Moses, our text suggests that this communication was not a simple matter of speaking in the way that humans speak. A voice that entails both giving and taking information, or one that allows for continuous rather than punctual communication, or for overhearing internal dialogue, is not a voice speaking in any normal sense of the word. The phrasing of our verse indicates that its description applies to all the times God communicated laws to Moses. It informs us that whatever communication transpired when Moses went to the Tent differs from what happens when one human talks to another human. In its own subtle and allusive way, then, Numbers 7:89 is making a significant theological claim similar to one that Maimonides would much later expound in The Guide of the Perplexed: God doesn’t literally speak, and whenever the Torah refers to God as “speaking,” we need to understand that something much more complex and mysterious was occurring.
This sense is especially strong in one other possible meaning of our verb. The hitpa’el construction can denote simulation—that is, it can be used when the subject of the verb acts as if he were doing something. For example, in 2 Samuel 13:5 the verb mitḥalleh means “pretend to be sick”; in Genesis 42:7 and 1 Kings 14:5–6, the verb mitnakkeir means “act like a stranger.” If our verse employs this sense of the hitpa’el construction, then our narrative is indicating that “speaking” is not something that the deity really does, and whenever the narrator attaches the verb “speak” to the subject “God,” it intends something different from that verb’s usual meaning. God’s “speaking” is something that only a prophet has experienced, and therefore something for which no word exists among us non-prophets who make up the narrative’s audience. My use of quotes in the previous sentence, in fact, may be exactly what the Priestly authors of our passage intend when they use the strange hitpa’el form of this verb: it reminds us that God’s “speaking” is not really speaking at all.
In that case, mattan Torah or lawgiving did not involve God literally pronouncing or writing the words we find in the Torah. God’s commands to the nation Israel were not conveyed in language, and one of the most important roles played by Moses, by the prophets who came after him, and by the sages who succeeded them, has been to translate God’s communications into human terms. The process of parshanut or interpretation, then, did not begin after the revelation of the Torah. Instead, interpretation was part of the ongoing, dialogical process of revelation itself. Interpretation is not only an activity that is performed on the Torah; interpretation helped to create the Torah. We read each day in the paragraph that precedes the Shema in the Morning Service that all Jews have the responsibility of studying and teaching the law, fulfilling it and guarding it. When we do so, we continue Moses’ work: by studying and interpreting the law, we contribute to the ongoing process of creating the law anew. Since we celebrated the holiday of Shavuot, the season of the giving of the law, earlier this week, now is a good time to think about this lesson from the little-noticed but highly important verse that concludes our parashah.
The Wholeness of Fragments
A Teaching from Gershon
In the Hebrew Scriptural Book of Bamidbar (Numbers), members of the Israelite tribe of Leyvee are recorded as having been assigned to carry the sacred implements of the Mishkan (portable finite venue of the Infinite), as well as the Tent of Meeting and the Ark of the Covenant.
However, when we pulled up camp to continue our journey, we were warned not to witness the disassembling of the Mishkan, the taking-apart of the sacred implements and the structure in which they were kept, or we could die (Numbers 4:20).
Only the Kohanim (priests) alone were designated to disassemble the Mishkan, but anyone else was warned not to come anywhere near this event, let alone observe it. Rather, all of the parts were covered with blue-dyed dolphin skins before being handed over to the Levites, so that the only thing the carriers of the Mishkan got to see was pretty sky-blue decorated tapestry (Numbers 4:11). Blue — the color of the infinitely wide expanses of the heavens as well as their reflection in the sea below — the window, so to speak, to the One Creator of the Many.
There is a lot of practical wisdom in all of this, a wisdom which sets the stage for the instructions that follow, cascading from the warning not to watch the disassembling of the Mishkan, to the quarantining of contagiously-diseased individuals, to rituals of restitution, to dealing with paranoid husbands who suspect their wives of having affairs, to people bent on taking vows of abstinence – and then concluding with the priestly blessings and a brief note on how Moses would hear the Voice of Creator from the empty space between the Cherubic sculptures that sat atop the Ark of the Covenant.
But isn’t it so?
That if you have witnessed wholeness, completeness, an intact system of things, whether it is the efficiently-erected edifice of the Mishkan, or the well-oiled structure of our society, our economy, our values, and then suddenly we watch it all come apart — that what we’d imagined as immutable and unbreakable suddenly becomes disassembled into parts, shattering our vision of the Whole, then – yes – we can “die” in that our faith can ebb away, as can our hopes, our sense of security, our trust in one another, our worldview. We can easily slip-slide into disconnect which can in turn implode into getting sick, or wreaking havoc, or becoming suspicious of those we once trusted, or even distancing ourselves from this world altogether by detaching ourselves from it!
But the Torah here reminds us not to get caught-up in the chaos of the disassembly, in watching what we once knew as Whole come apart. Rather, we are to focus on the sky-blue of the expanse that overlays it all, and be thereby reminded that the wholeness of life is infinitely far more vast than its parts, and not to become overly focused on the parts to the neglect of the whole. Like Abraham Joshua Heschel once said: “Disregard of the fullness of what transpires leads to the danger of regarding the part as the whole” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 162).
And so, the Torah continues with the Kohanic blessings (Numbers 6:22-26), as in “We interrupt this scripture to bring you the following messages: (1) Yevare’che’cha — focus on the blessings you have right now, on what is NOT wrong, what is NOT hurting, what has NOT come apart; (2) Ya’er — keep the light burning, the light of joy, the light of hope, the light of possibility. And finally: (3) Yee’sa — lift your head up high, high above that which seeks to bring you down from your vision of a better tomorrow.
And if the images are too vivid, and the visuals too disturbing for you, remember that although Moses would face toward the images of the Cherubim when he sought the comfort and counsel of Creator, the Voice always responded to him not from the images themselves but from the empty space between them. He understood that the Presence resides in the Absence, and that, in the words of the 2nd-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yo’hai: “There is no light as brilliant as that which emerges from out of the Dark.”
And so, just like the Levites of 3,400 years ago, we are today challenged to carry the fragments scattered around us with our eyes focused on the blue, on the deep knowing and faith that the parts will one day become reassembled again; and that until they do, to remember always that wholeness itself is made up entirely of fragments.
Birkat Kohanim — Blessing of the Priests or of the Community?
How the Priestly Blessing is manifested within the community’s needs.
BY RACHEL FARBIARZ
Parashat Nasso provides the script for one of the more penetrating segments of the Hebrew liturgy — the birkat kohanim, or priestly blessing. Over the millennia, this benediction has remained a seminal means of invoking the Divine in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. In this Torah portion, God dictates the blessing to Moses, who is to teach it to Aaron and his sons, the kohanim, or priests:
May God bless you and guard you.
May God make God’s face shine upon you and grant grace to you.
May God lift up God’s face to you and give you peace (Numbers 6:22-26).
At the Sephardic synagogue in which I was raised, Shabbat mornings were punctuated by the eerie call-and-response of the benediction and the congregation’s hopeful rejoinder: “May it be God’s will.” Integral to the priests’ recitation were the rituals accompanying the blessing that seemed to suspend kohanim and congregation together in a humbled thrall.
Recitation of the Priestly Blessing
At a specified time in the service, the community’s kohanim discreetly excused themselves to perform their preparatory ablutions. The faint sound of the priests’ shuffling was followed by a call-to-attention — Koh-Haahh-Neeeeeem! –summoning them to their posts before the ark. The men of the congregation gathered their children and their children’s children under the prayer shawls they had drawn over their heads.
The kohanim faced them, cloaked too in their billowing shawls. Their arms outstretched, their fingers extended and conjoined in the cultic v-shape, the priests swayed and chanted the blessing–distending its syllables, trilling its notes. Only after the kohanim had finished the blessing did the face-off of masquerading ghosts end: Modestly, the priests turned their backs to the congregation and took down their shawls, unveiling themselves before the ark.
I actually was not supposed to have witnessed any of this. All of us, kohanim and congregation alike, were to have had our eyes closed or averted downward, to shield ourselves–it is traditionally said–from the awesome power that emanated from between the kohanim’s fingers. I have always suspected though that we protected ourselves not only from the Divine, but also from something very human: the tendency to turn an act of blessing into an act that invests one group with power at the expense of the other.
The Blessing Resides in the Community
The tented shawls, the downcast gazes, shield the community from the inevitable psychological contortions that easily transform a blessing into an act that underscores the hierarchy between blesser and blessed.
The benediction is therefore given and received blindly. The kohanim cannot see those upon whom they confer God’s blessing and the congregation cannot identify the priests who have done so. Rather than simply given or received, the blessing is instead resident within a community of both givers and receivers. The heavy presence of this shared blessing, I would proffer, helps explain the palpable mystery that is experienced as kohanim and congregation emerge together from beneath their shawls.
The aspiration to draw forth the shared blessing resident within a community is a defining feature of the posture taken by organizations, such as AJWS, in their pursuit of global development and justice through grassroots work. Grassroots work means facilitating change that is realized from within the community that seeks it. The goal is not to achieve blessing via the roles of priest and congregant, blesser and blessed. Rather, it is to discover together the blessing that already lives there–forged by a community’s own needs, developed according to its own vision, and pursued via the methods it itself identifies.
The Illusion of Blindness
Of course, the cultivated blindness of the birkat kohanim is in many ways an illusion. We are shielded from the priests’ faces, but we know their identities from other liturgical encounters–such as the calling of the kohanim to the Torah–that are plainly public.
Through these encounters there is thus an already-intact hierarchy of ritual status, in which kohanim are separated and elevated from the congregation of Israel. In the moment of blessing, however, we invoke the illusion of blindness –choosing to shed, or at least mask, the hierarchical relationship that is elsewhere respected.
We strive to cultivate similar illusions in pursuing global justice through grassroots work. Inevitably, there are power imbalances between those who give and those who receive aid and assistance. But through grassroots engagement we gesture toward blindness. We pull our shawls over our heads and turn our eyes downward in an effort to undo the hierarchy between giver and receiver, to render ourselves both recipients and givers of blessing.
May it be God’s will that when we emerge from beneath our shawls, we — givers and recipients alike — find our global community rife with blessing: guarded from harm, infused with grace, and joyful in its peace.
Provided by American Jewish World Service, pursuing global justice through grassroots change.
Princely Gifts
The princes’ gifts to the Tabernacle illustrate important principles of leadership and methods of balancing personal and communal needs.
BY RABBI SHIMON FELIX
This week’s Torah portion continues to discuss the arrangements for the trek the Jewish nation is about to make through the desert to the Land of Israel. The Levites, who are responsible for transporting the Tabernacle, are counted, and their work-load is apportioned among them. This is followed by a number of laws concerning ritual purity, aimed at keeping the encampment pure, and a number of other laws whose placement here seems odd and which I will not talk about.
Then, towards the end of the portion, after everything seems to have been arranged, and the nation should be ready to start to make its way to the promised land, with the Tabernacle in place at the center of the camp and all the tribes arranged appropriately around it as they travel through the desert, the nesi’im, the leaders of the twelve tribes, suddenly approach Moses.
They bring him a gift — “six covered wagons and twelve cattle, a wagon for every two leaders and an ox for each one, and they brought them near to the Tabernacle.” Moses is unsure what to do with this voluntary gift, until God tells him: “Take these from them, that they may be for the work of the Tent of Meeting, and give them to the Levites, each man according to his work-load.” Moses then apportioned the wagons and oxen among the Levites, according to the amount of material from the Tabernacle that they had to transport.
A Voluntary Gift
This voluntary, spontaneous gift to the Levites on the part of the heads of the tribes contains many interesting messages. First of all, we have the theme of the Torah’s ‘leaving space.’ After dozens, no, hundreds, of verses relating to the way the Tabernacle should be designed, constructed and transported, there was still room left for improvement–still room for a new, innovative technological (!) way to make the work of transporting the parts of the Tabernacle easier and more efficient.
This is not the only occasion on which the Torah seems to leave space in this way for suggestions, improvements, challenges, or changes to the orders handed down by God to the people through Moses. In an interesting parallel, Rashi points out that the heads of the 12 tribes, as leaders, also ‘left space’ for the Jewish people, the people they were leading, in which to act. Rashi explains that all through the process of donating materials for the Tabernacle — the silver, gold, fabrics, and other materials needed — the nesi’im are not mentioned. This is because they did not, as nesi’im, bring any specific donations. Instead, Rashi tells us, they held back, leaving room for the people to act first and bring what they could, thinking that they, the leaders, would fill in later whatever was missing.
They were surprised that the people brought as much as they did; at the end of the process there was very little left for them to donate. This, according to Rashi, is the reason why they hurried to bring the gifts of the wagons and oxen; to fill a gap that they perceived, before one of the people did. The nesi’im wanted this opportunity, which, until now, because of their leadership style, they had not had, to bring something of their own for the Tabernacle.
This model of leadership, wherein those in charge leave room for their ‘followers’ to act, and see themselves as being there only to do whatever is left undone, is a fascinating one. I have often thought about parenting in this way–the challenge is to leave space for your kids to do the right thing on their own. The Jewish people, at this early sage of their nationhood, were getting some very good parenting.
A former teacher of mine, Rabbi Jay Miller, once compared the Ari’s (16th century Safed) Kabbalistic model of the creation of the world to parenting. God has to do an act of tzimtzum–shrinking, contracting–in order to make room for something other than himself to exist–that something being the created universe. Parents, too, must do an act of tzimtzum in order to leave space for their children to function and grow. The difficulty that the nesi’im had with this, when they saw that their ‘children’, the people of Israel, had gone ahead and done just about everything for themselves, leaving them to scramble to try and find some area where thy could make a contribution, is interesting and beautiful.
There is also the theme of egalitarianism, and brotherhood. The Levites are assisted in their role in the Tabernacle by the rest of the people; the nesi’im, representing their tribes, act sensitively, and in harmony, to make the Levites’ work easier. In this way, the entire nation has an ongoing stake in the day-to-day functioning of God’s Temple. The S’forno (15th-16th century Italy) also points out that having every two nesi’im give one ox is another sign of cooperation and brotherhood.
After this section, the nesi’im again approach Moses, with yet another voluntary gift. Each one of the 12 nesi’im brings a series of animal and vegetable sacrifices to be offered on the altar, along with vessels that they donate to the Tabernacle. Once again, Moses is nonplussed, until God gives him the go-ahead, and orders each one of the nesi’im to bring his sacrifice separately, one day at a time. What is the purpose of this second round of unbidden gifts? Why did the nesi’im bring them? What need do they serve, what hitherto un-thought role do they play?
Rashi’s Explanation
Rashi has a beautiful explanation: “After they offered the wagons and cattle used to transport the Tabernacle, their hearts moved them to volunteer these sacrifices to dedicate the altar.” The language Rashi uses is highly suggestive. If their first batch of giving — the wagons and the oxen — was essentially a response to a real need that the Levites had, this second round is an answer to an inner need on the part of the nesi’im to give. The nesi’im inspired themselves: they were moved by their unselfish, creative, sensitive and brotherly act of giving to give more.
Moses was at first unsure of how to respond to this. God’s response–let them bring the sacrifices, one day at a time–seems to not only accept the spontaneous gift of each nasi, but to spotlight it, individualize it. God’s decision to give each nasi a separate day in which to bring his sacrifice seems to underscore the individuality of each gift. This, in spite of the fact that they all gave the exact same thing.
The Torah, in fact, at the very end of our portion, goes through the same list, twelve times, of animals and incense and grain offerings and utensils that each one of the leaders brought. This seemingly unnecessary repetition of the same list of offerings creates, I think, a balance. A balance between the individual expression of each nasi’s desire to give of himself to the Tabernacle — underscored by each nasi getting his own day and his own separate mention–and the collective nature of their act — they all originally approached Moses together and they all give the exact same thing.
This balance between the individual and the collective, between the urge to stand out from and the urge to be a part of, is a balance that all of us must struggle to achieve in our personal and communal lives.
A story is told of Rabbi Sampson Raphael Hirsch (Germany, 1808-1888), the intellectual giant behind the founding of contemporary Orthodox Judaism: It is said that late in his life, the old rabbi surprised his students by scheduling himself a long trip to Switzerland. When they inquired about why he insisted on making such a journey, he replied:
“Soon, I will stand before the Almighty. I will be held answerable to many questions. But, what will I say when I am asked, ‘Shimson, my son, it is true you did many mitzvot, but did you also remember to see My Alps?”
The Jewish tradition indeed contains within it many rules – foods that we are told to abstain from eating, activities that are not to be done on Shabbat and holidays, and other ways in which we are supposed to limit ourselves in the name of a larger holiness. Yet, it would be wrong to characterize Judaism as an ascetic tradition. Quite the opposite – ours is a community that is taught to celebrate life and to bless the beauty and bounty of this world. With very few exceptions in our 3,000-year religious history we have had no monastic ideal; in fact, the Sages of the Talmud had harsh words for those who chose to remove themselves from the ordinary pleasures of daily life.
This attitude in particular comes to play concerning a peculiar category of religious vows described in this week’s Torah portion – the vow of the nazir. A nazirite was a person who elected to undertake a period of self-denial, avoiding wine and cutting their hair, abstaining from mourning rites, even if they were to lose a close member of their family. At the conclusion of the nazirite’s vow, they were instructed to bring a sin offering to the Temple (Number 6:10-11), before resuming ordinary life.
The Rabbis ask, why does the Torah specify that the nazirite must bring a “sin” offering? In what way were they suspected of having sinned? The answer: the act of asceticism itself is a sin, as the Talmud states: “Is it not enough what the Torah has forbidden you that you wish to forbid yourself more things?” (Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9:1). Maimonides echoes this sentiment in his comment on the verse in Ecclesiastes: “Be not over-righteous” (7:6), stating: “No one should, by vow or oath, forbid themselves that which has otherwise been permitted” (Mishneh Torah, Deot 3:1). On the basis of this overwhelming attitude of disdain for voluntary self-denial, the institution the nazir vow vanished from Jewish life nearly two millennia ago.
We often find so-called religious voices equating pleasure with sin, and denouncing things of “this world” as unholy distractions from “the next.” Yet, this is not the normative approach of the Jewish tradition. Instead, we are called upon to offer blessings while standing at the seashore and upon seeing a rainbow, to feast and dance at the myriad celebrations that punctuate our calendar, and to make sure – if we haven’t visited them yet – to get a look at God’s Alps. When our time comes, we don’t want to have visited this world without having taken the time to catch that magnificent view.
Sharp elbows at shul extend beyond the kiddush table line and back into the sanctuary. Prayer—or giving honor to God—can be a competitive business. There are lots of reasons why this is so, and some of them even have to do with loving God. But showing off how we love God can get us into trouble. Against this background, let’s consider Numbers, chapter 7, the concluding chapter of Parashat Naso.
At 89 verses, chapter 7 is a wall of words, built mostly from 12 near-identical blocks. Each block records the same gift brought by each of the 12 nesi’im—chieftains of the 12 Tribes of Israel—on 12 successive days to join in dedicating the Mishkan (Tabernacle) upon the inauguration of its service. On the first day, Nahshon ben Aminadav, nasi chieftain of the Tribe of Judah, brings a bowl, a basin, and a ladle, and a specific array of 21 animals for the Levites’ sheepfold and pens. On the second day, Netanel ben Tzu’ar, nasi of the Tribe of Issachar, brings the same, as does Eliav ben Helon of Zevulun on the third day. While my increasingly terse telling about each day’s gift is efficient and still clear, the Torah chooses to recount each gift with elaborate, repetitive precision.
The dignified procession of nesi’im, each stepping forward in turn to present their dedicatory offerings on their appointed days, seems the very model of serene, noncompetitive equality. Robert Alter (no relation) writes,
This passage is . . . a kind of epic inventory. Each of the tribes, here accorded absolutely equal status before the sanctuary without political hierarchy, brings exactly the same offering. One can readily imagine that the members of each tribe in the ancient audience of this text would be expected to relish the sumptuousness of its own tribal offering exactly equal to all the others, as it hears the passage read. (The Five Books of Moses, 716–717)
No sharp elbows here. Why else would the Torah tell of it thus, rather than in shorthand? The Torah does not quite answer this question, but it gives us clues. The Rabbis, characteristically, leap upon them.
First, while the nesi’im assemble their gifts on their own initiative (Num. 7:10), it is God who instructs Moshe to have them offered on 12 successive days. If God wants the presentation so evenly arranged, then the Torah rightly records it in discrete portions. But there are other hints. Of the 12 nesi’im involved, Nahshon, the giver on the first day, is the only one not recognized as a nasi in our passage. We know he is a nasi from last week’s Parashat Bemidbar (1:16, 2:3), yet here he is named without his title (7:12). The commentator Hezekiah ben Manoah, known as the Hizkuni, points out: “Nahshon is not called nasi here so that his being first to offer the sacred gift would not go to his head, while all the others are called nesi’im because they humbled themselves in offering their gifts after his.” Hizkuni recognizes that the nesi’im are dignified men deserving of (and possibly accustomed to) tribute, and that the opportunity to publicly honor God might play on their pride. So the Torah manages the chieftains’ prestige with careful application of their honorifics.
While Netanel ben Tzu’ar’s gift on the second day is the same as Nahshon’s on the first, the Rabbis pick up on a variation in the telling. Everett Fox’s distinct translation best conveys the redundancy in the Hebrew: “On the second day, Netanel son of Tzu’ar, leader [nasi] of Yissakhar, brought-(it)-near; he brought-near [my italics] his near-offering.” Fox is indicating that the Torah employs the verb hikriv (“offered” or “brought near”) twice with Netanel, when for all the other nesi’im, it uses it but once. Remember, this passage is all about what Alter calls “verbatim repetition.” Midrash Rabbah 13:15 asks,
Why is hikriv used in connection with Netanel? Because Reuven lodged a complaint when he saw that the tribe of Issachar was to make the second offering and not him: “It’s enough that Judah [Nahshon’s tribe] already precedes me in the marching order. But I should be able to make my offering according to birth order!”
A little explanatory context: in last week’s parashah, we learned how the tribes were encamped around the Mishkan, and that the Tribe of Judah was placed by God in the vanguard. In our midrash, we see that Reuven has no choice but to accept Judah’s priority position in that context, but he expects that his status as firstborn among Jacob’s sons/tribes will be recognized in the dedication ceremony for the Mishkan. Note that, while we might expect the nasi of Reuven to advocate for his own honor, the midrash places the complaint in the mouth of Reuven himself. This cannot mean what it says, though, as Reuven, the man, is long dead. Reuven, here, must be the personification of the tribe, probably in the person of its nasi, Elitzur ben Shedei’ur. The pride of the entire tribe is carried by its nasi.
But the appeal fails. In the midrash, Moshe rebukes “Reuven,” explaining that the order of the offerings is dictated by God, no less than the arrangement of the camp. The offerings are made by Judah, then Issachar, then Zevulun, and only then firstborn Reuven. So much for pride of place. It goes further, taking a different tack. It’s not an unassailable divine decree that puts Issachar before Reuven. Rather, Issachar demonstrates a piety that Reuven did not. He earns his place near the front of the line. How? We learn in the midrash that it is Issachar’s nasi who has the idea to organize all of the nesi’im to offer a group gift in the first place. He prompts them to give. (In the first verses of our chapter, the nesi’im give gifts collectively before they bring the offerings on behalf of their respective tribes.)
The “absolutely equal status” of the respective tribes and their nesi’im in this inauguration ceremony,then, barely contains the resentments and rivalries among them behind the scenes. Over what do the nesi’im contend? Is it their honor? God’s honor? The honor of honoring God? Yes.
Our passage calls to mind the disaster of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. No one told Cain to make an offering to God. He did so spontaneously out of love and gratitude. Abel was inspired by Cain. Did he intend to one-up his brother with a more lavish offering? Cain thought so. (Troublingly,) God favored Abel’s offering over Cain’s. For Cain, the demotion and rejection were intolerable.
Honoring God—in the Torah, often through material gifts, in our experience, often in prayer—is a high-stakes matter. Earlier in Midrash Rabbah (13:6), we learn in a gorgeous passage that God’s existential loneliness spurred God to create the world, and that, since Creation, God craved intimacy with humanity—a craving fully answered only with the establishment of the Mishkan. The procession of gifts from the nesi’im is like the procession of the bridal party at a wedding, weighted with love and longing. Those who perceive God’s yearning love, of course, want to reciprocate and proclaim their love for the world to see. That urge to proclaim can sometimes yield preening displays and, other times, motivate ugliness, even violence. Rising above the quibbling heard in the midrash, Numbers 7 portrays a community of individuals united in their love for God, generously claiming no monopoly on it, and humble in disregarding human hierarchies as they stand equally before God.
Without diminishing the vitality and beauty of spontaneous prayer, the dedication of the Mishkan points to a benefit and a challenge in the imposed uniformity inherent in communal worship. When we observe another recite the same words in prayer we’ve said countless times before, may we strive to say appreciatively, “I hope to offer something just as lovely when my turn comes.”
The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (z”l) Hassenfeld.
THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS – Parshat Naso
This post originally appears at Kevah.org.
Asceticism – the idea that physical pleasure stands in the way of spiritual enlightenment – has a long and storied history in the annals of religious thought. All the great religious traditions have some expression of it, including such practices as: fasting, celibacy, sleep-deprivation, wearing simple clothing, poverty, and even – in the most extreme cases – the active pursuit of pain.
But Judaism has always had an uncomfortable relationship with the uncomfortable life. While it is always impossible to define a single, official Jewish theology, it seems fair to say that most modern Jews have inherited a basic assumption that Jewish tradition – from the Garden of Eden on – regards the physical world as a fundamentally good place, full of things that are meant to be enjoyed by human beings.
In rabbinic literature, perhaps the most explicit celebration of physical pleasure is this statement from the Jerusalem Talmud Kiddushin 4:12:
Rabbi Hizkiah the Cohen, in the name of Rav, said, “A person will have to give a justification and accounting for any delight he saw but did not consume.”
רבי חזקיה ר’ כהן בשם רב עתיד אדם ליתן דין וחשבון על כל שראת עינו ולא אכל
But then, on the other end of the spectrum, we can find more ascetic rabbinic voices, like this one from Pirkei Avot 6:4:
This is the Way of Torah: Eat bread with salt, drink small amounts of water, and sleep on the ground; live a life of deprivation and toil in the Torah.
So which is it? What is the Jewish ideal – pain or pleasure? Well, these rabbis can debate it all they want, but what does it say in the Torah itself?
Many have claimed that the ascetic tradition in Judaism finds its roots in this week’s parsha, with the laws of the “Nazir.” We have already come across the institution of vows (nedarim – נדרים), whereby someone can verbally pledge something she owns to God. But the Nazirite vow is a particularly intense version of this practice, in that the Nazir essentially pledges herself to God for a temporary period.
There are three prominent manifestations of this commitment:
1. No wine or any other grape product.
2. No cutting of hair.
3. No contact with the dead (even one’s own parents).
The prohibition on hair-cutting may remind us of the most famous Nazir in the Bible – Samson (though he was a bit of an unusual case, because he had been pledged from birth). But it is the first rule – abstinence from wine – that most strongly suggests asceticism. Sobriety as a religious commitment is one of the classic forms of self-denial, and we find a prohibition on intoxicants in many spiritual traditions, from Islam to Buddhism.
Judaism does not ban wine, as a general rule. Quite the opposite – wine is used prominently for sacred purposes. So if this Nazirite practice is an authentic expression of Jewish asceticism, it seems to distinctly frame this kind of religious expression as the exception, rather than the rule. You can take on these extreme practices, but it is not expected, or even encouraged.
However, even this small a nod to the value of asceticism gets vehement pushback from a parade of Jewish thinkers throughout history:
First, in the Talmud (Taanit 11a), Rabbi Eliezer HaKappar, understands the Nazir not merely as an extremist, but in fact, a sinner:
His sin refers to his denying himself the enjoyment of wine. If then, the one who merely denied himself the enjoyment of wine is called a sinner, how much more so does that apply to the person who denies himself the enjoyment of the other pleasures of life!
וכי באיזה נפש חטא זה אלא שציער עצמו מן היין והלא דברים קל וחומר ומה זה שלא ציער עצמו אלא מן היין נקרא חוטא המצער עצמו מכל דבר ודבר על אחת כמה וכמה
Then, in the medieval period, Maimonides, who famously revived Aristotle’s concept of “the golden mean,” or “middle path,” wrote the following about the Nazirite vow:
If a person should say… He will not eat meat or drink wine, or get married, or live in a nice house, or wear fine clothes, but only wool and sackcloth, like the heathen priests – this is an evil path, and it is forbidden to walk down it.
Therefore the sages commanded that a person should not deny himself anything beyond what the Torah itself prohibits, and should not take on vows of abstinence on things permitted to him. (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Deot, 3:1,3)
שמא יאמר אדם… שלא יאכל בשר ולא ישתה יין ולא יישא אישה ולא יישב בדירה נאה ולא ילבוש מלבוש נאה אלא השק והצמר הקשה וכיוצא בהן, כגון כומרי אדום–גם זו דרך רעה היא, ואסור לילך בה.
לפיכך ציוו חכמים שלא ימנע אדם עצמו אלא מדברים שמנעה התורה בלבד, ולא יהיה אוסר עצמו בנדרים ובשבועות על דברים המותרים.
And finally, when we come to the modern Hassidic movement, we find that one of the key features of their theology was a strong affirmation of engagement with the physical world, not just as a form of pleasure, but as a means of unlocking spiritual potencies. So Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky, in Netivot Shalom, writes this about the Nazirite vow:
The purpose of Creation and the purpose of divine service is for the Jew to immerse in all the physical things, and then to elevate them all in the name of God, for then he joins the lower with the upper. The path of separating from the things of this world is an easier path. But the higher level is to raise all the things of this world to the Holy One, Blessed be He. And that is the desired purpose.
תכלית הבריאה ותכלית עבודת ה׳ היא שיהודי יעסוק בכל הענינים הגשמיים וירים את הכל לשם ה׳, שאז הריהו מחבר תחתונים בעליונים. אמנם הדרך לפרוש להתנער מעניני עוה׳׳ז היא דרך יותר קלה, אבל המדרגה היותר גבוהה היא להעלות את כל עניני עוה׳׳ז להשי׳׳ת שזוהי התכלית הנרצית.
Here the Nazirite path is not a problematic form of extremism. Just the opposite – it’s total a cop-out! The real work of the world is to be immersed in its physicality, and then to lift it up, merging the material with the spiritual. The Nazir takes the “easier path,” just letting go of the world entirely. Sure, he has found a more direct way to a spiritual experience. But he has also forsaken his true divine purpose.
But wait a minute. Before we allow these voices to write the Nazir out of the Torah altogether, we ought to wonder what he’s doing there in the first place. Is it really plausible that the Torah would go out of its way to create this elaborate ritual if it were totally undesirable – even sinful – to carry it out?!
And after all, the Torah itself describes the Nazir with what seems to be quite lofty language:
All the days of his being a Nazir, he is holy unto the Lord. (Numbers 6:8)
כֹּל, יְמֵי נִזְרוֹ, קָדֹשׁ הוּא, לַה
“Holy unto the Lord” sounds pretty good! Surely there is something deeply valuable in this practice.
In that spirit, one of the most celebratory approaches to the Nazir comes from the commentary of the Ibn Ezra, who – in his typical fashion – first focuses on linguistic nuances:
Some say that Nazir comes from the term nezer, meaning crown. Which is why it refers to the Nazirite hair “for God, upon his head.” And this seems likely.
And know that all people are slaves to their worldly desires, and the true king, the one with the Nazirite crown upon his head, is the one who is free from these desires.
ויש אומרים כי מלת נזיר מנזרת נזר והעד כי נזר אלהיו על ראשו ואיננו רחוק ודע כי כל בני אדם עבדי תאות העולם והמלך באמת שיש לו נזר ועטרת מלכות בראשו כל מי שהוא חפשי מן התאות
So back and forth, back and forth – the rabbis keep debating. Is it good to become a Nazir or not? Is it good to cut oneself off from the pleasures of the world, or is it contrary to the very purpose of creation?
But there is something that we have been ignoring all along, the great 19th-century German commentator, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch points out. And that is – these Nazirite practices do not really constitute such a rigorous program of asceticism.
No wine, no haircuts, and no dead bodies? That’s it?! What about fasting and sleeping on the ground? What about wearing sackcloth or going celibate?
In fact, the Nazir can still enjoy all kinds of physical pleasure. If the point of the Nazirite vow was to free the vower from all worldly desire, it really didn’t take us too far down the list of desires.
Instead, Rabbi Hirsch understands the function of the Nazirite vow quite differently:
The basic meaning of nezer is quite definitely: to keep aloof, to keep separate…. So that just as nezer means a royal diadem which marks the person whose head it surrounds as being set apart and inaccessible, so here nezer designates a regime of living and striving that raises the person who vows of his own free will to undertake it, out of and about the midst of people amongst whom he lives and sets him the task to be completely “holy to God,” to belong with the whole of his being and will exclusively to his God. He wishes to draw a circle round about himself in which only God is to be present.
The obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, according to this model, is not physical pleasure, but social pleasure. It is not temptations of the flesh that that will keep me away from God, but the bonds of friendly and familial obligation. How can I cultivate a deep relationship to the Divine, if I am balancing it with all my other relationships? I need space to myself. I need time alone with my God.
And yet, Jewish life does not offer too much alone time. The laws that make up Jewish practice presume a community of practitioners. This is not a religion for individuals; it is the religion of a people. These people need me, and I need them. We cannot escape from one another.
But then, how does one ever find God, in the midst of all these people? How does one hear the still, small voice of God calling above the buzzing noise of human society? Religion takes place in the congregation, but sometimes God can only be found alone.
Rabbi Hirsch acknowledges this tension as he finishes his comments, and offers us a strange solution:
One who does so isolate himself [with and for God] is called a Nazir. But this is no hermit-like isolation, no shutting oneself up in the wilderness. It is an isolation of one’s mind and spirit with God in the midst of the most active ordinary life.
I will not run away – the Nazir is saying – far from the madding crowd. I will find a way to be alone with God right here, amongst you all. I will live in society, and I will give to it – but I will have a place of retreat, in my mind.
How will I do this? I will not drink wine, for then I will lose myself in the joy of celebrating, and drift away into the crowd of revelers. I will not cut my hair, so that I begin to appear strange, and others keep their distance from me. And for a time, I will not go to funerals, for in sorrow I am always bonded to my people.
For now I must be alone. I am searching for something, and I have to find it by myself.
But this period of isolation will come to an end. And then I will return to you. For I belong here, in this world, with all its wonders and pleasures. And of all those earthly delights, you are chief among them.
“And from the ground the Lord God caused every tree to grow that was pleasurable to the sight and good for consumption…
… and the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for a person to be alone.”
“Lessons of the Midbar”
By Rabbi Diane Elliot, ’06
We Jews have often been called “people of the book,” but perhaps a better appellation would be “people of words.” A people forged in the wilderness, the midbar—a Hebrew word whose root, l’daber, means “to speak,”—a people defined by Aseret ha-Dibrot, The Ten Speakings of an invisible and awesome Divine mouth, our Torah unfolds as a saga of the spoken word: “va-yidaber YHVH el moshe leymor…,” “and the Infinite spoke to/through Moses, saying…,” “va-yidaber moshe el b’nai yisrael…,” “and Moses spoke to the children of Israel….”
In my rare and precious times in desert wilderness—in Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea, in the high desert of New Mexico, in the Anza-Borrego desert east of San Diego, in the Panamint Valley just outside of Death Valley—what’s been palpable and deeply healing for me has been the silence. A rich, thick silence that lies upon the land like a cloak, in which any minute sound seems to echo for miles; a silence shattered at times by the wailing of wind and storm, inchoate, like wild beasts rampaging through the valleys and dry river beds.
So how, in our tradition, does midbar, this wild place of palpable silence and nature’s unpredictable blasts, become transmuted into m’daber, a mishkan built from the sayings, speakings, pronouncements of Divine Presence, channeled through the throat of Moses? And how, over the course of the Israelites’ wilderness sojourn, does this pristine space fill to overflowing with so many words of confusion, doubt, complaint, conflict, pleading, punishment, forgiveness, and threat of further punishment?
In her recent book, Moses, A Human Life, the great contemporary darshan, Dr. Avivah Zornberg, presents the voice of Moses—that great transmitter of God’s words, whose own speech was deficient, impaired in some way—as a harking back to “tehom,” “the murmuring deep,” the rumbling, inchoate flood of sound that precedes Creation, a buzzing, vibrating ocean of sound that contains all possible human vocalizations. Inarticulate, at times requiring translation by his brother Aaron, the voice of Moses, holds the full, raw range of pre-verbal feeling. And it is precisely this voice, the voice beneath words, beyond even silence, that God needs to convey Godself to this ragtag bunch of erstwhile slaves, these descendants of Jacob the trickster, of Yisrael, the angel-wrestler.
For, in the human mouth, well-formed words are often not trustworthy. Some blockage, some distortion often intervenes between the true intent and its expression, between the raw emotion, the deep intuition, and its verbal shaping. We see this in the current travesty of our public discourse. Misunderstanding blossoms, explodes into anger and hurt, and freezes into intransigent opposition.
This week’s parshah, Naso, which unfolds fairly close to the beginning of what, yet unbeknownst to them, will become the Israelites’ forty-year sojourn bamidbar, in the wilderness, includes the extremely troubling description of a “trial by water” imposed upon a wife suspected by her husband of infidelity, the sotah. The scenario described here is clearly one of broken communication, something sensed but not spoken, for, without concrete evidence, the jealousy of the husband is aroused against his mate: “…a man could have lain with her carnally, but it was hidden from the eyes of her husband, and she became secluded and could have been defiled, but there was no witness against her, and she had not been forced, and a spirit of jealousy had passed over him…” (Numbers 5:13-14, my italics).
The unlucky woman is to be brought to the Tabernacle and made to stand, her head uncovered, before the High Priest and before God. A “meal offering of jealousies” (minkhat k’na’ot) is brought by her husband, and she is made to drink from a vessel of holy water, mixed with earth from the floor of the Tabernacle and seasoned with curses, inscribed on a scroll and then scraped into the water. If, upon drinking the cursed water, her “belly distends and thigh collapses,” she is proven guilty and cursed; if not she is exonerated.
Of course, being forced to submit to this low-tech lie detector test would’ve been extremely humiliating for any woman. And though the “bitter waters” contained only a little earth and ink, the destructive power of her husband’s mistrust, or of her own guilt, if she had, in fact, slept with another, intensified by the pressure of this very public shaming, might well have caused the woman so accused to physically collapse, to become, in Torah’s words, “a curse amid her people.”
As disturbing as this description of the sotah is, can we not in some way see foreshadowed here, in microcosm, the distortions, the hiddennesses, the half-truths, untruths, and unkept promises—the repeated failures of words—that will plague the Israelite people throughout their desert sojourn, evinced both in the evolving relationship between HaShem, the Divine husband, and Israel, his reluctant, often terrified bride, and also in the people’s relationships with Moses, their leader, and with one another?
Perhaps the truth of any relationship rests not in the multitudes of words that will inevitably be shared, but in the attentive stratum of silence underlying those words, and in the tehom—the murmuring, groaning, cooing, crying, burbling resonance of shared souls—beneath the silence. Perhaps the word “midbar” points us not to a place of everyday speech, but to all that underlies and surrounds our speaking—to the great, cosmic hum that births Creation and to the matrix of silence out of which words arise. As Avivah Zornberg so eloquently puts it, “In our deepest aloneness, we listen for the elemental in each other’s voice—which, strangely, is also the particular sound of the other. He is unknown to me, it is her unknownness that I draw on, to help me be at home in the alien elements of my own world.” (Moses, A Human Life; p. 55)
As rabbis, cantors, chaplains, spiritual directors, and spiritual friends to one another, we are charged with the challenging task of conveying wisdom, comfort, remembrance, and sometimes challenge and rebuke through the tricky medium of words. How essential then that we steep ourselves in the matrix of silence and the unformed sounds of the human heart that prefigure language—that we privilege listening and the expectant space between breaths, not jumping reflexively to speech, which can so polarize, so alienate. Truth, ever elusive in our speaking, sometimes shines through most radiantly in our silences, in the simple loving act of our listening.
I See You
God’s face shining toward you: see it over there?
You can pick up the shining a long way away.
You can appreciate it from across the room or
Across the Universe.
God’s face lifted up toward you
That’s relationship
Intimacy.
God’s face right there
I see it moving lifting up and
Toward me.
Wow.
That’s peace baby.
Also what is it about a face in Hebrew that English
Does not signify.
Panim. B’fanim. Bif-nim.
Face and within
The face in Hebrew has some transparency
Hey. Look at that face.
There’s a soul in there. I see it.
What did I learn this week.
Our beloveds are like mirrors for us
They reflect our souls.
Our beloveds say: look at me.
I am seeing you.
Here is the gift I am giving you
This is who you are
As I see you.
jsg
Numbers 6:24 ff.
A dizzying array of rituals, censuses, sacrifices and job descriptions fill this week’s Torah portion, Nasso (Numbers 4:21-7:89). And smack in the middle of the hurly burly is one whopper of a blessing:
May God bless you and protect you
May God’s face illuminate and be gracious to you,
May God’s face be lifted to you and place peace in you
-Numbers 6:24-26
These are among the most famous, oft repeated and ecumenical words in the Hebrew Bible, and rightly so. They capture exactly what most of us crave spiritually, physically, psychologically and emotionally— to be cared for, to be safe, to be seen, and to be comforted.
Aptly they occur almost randomly in the midst of a flurry of human activity—tasks needing our attention, cases to hear, numbers to crunch and wrongs to right. The preoccupation with keeping the spiritual scales balanced through the temple rites fills page after page with arcane rules regarding priestly power, the feral nature of public tribunals, and the establishment of a cosmic social order delineating who is who and what is what. And there wedged between all of that formality are words of blessing, to be bestowed from human to human, as if to remember what all the fuss is about.
Like us, our ancient forebears lived busy, difficult lives. They suffered bouts of jealous rage, they lifted and carried, and they struggled into and out of sociological pigeonholes. They erred and dared, doing whatever was necessary to ensure their survival while also discovering their purpose, their destiny, their legacy. And like us, right in the middle of their train wrecks and triumphs, they needed blessings to stay the course.
Modern culture is woefully lacking in this simple practice—perhaps this week’s Torah portion is a reminder that even amidst the blaring activity gets and unpaid bills, even when wrongs have yet to be righted, what really counts, what we remember and return to most, what sustains and inspires us, are our blessings.
As this Shabbat arrives, with its invitation to let go of the week’s clattering business long enough to enter into the rarified time of spiritual liberation, take a moment to review your blessings. Step in even deeper; wrap these words around yourself, those you love, and even those you don’t: May you be cared for and safe, may you be filled with light and grace, and may every twist and turn in the path ahead bring you closer to fullness and peace. Amen. Amen.
One night we were woken up around 1:00 AM when our two-year old daughter wandered into our bedroom and cried, “Why did I wake up lonely?”
I think she meant to ask why she woke up alone, not lonely. But, I realized, this can be a concern for many people on the Path- “If I wake up spiritually, will I be lonely?”
Put another way- “If I awaken to a new level of consciousness, will I still be able to relate to people? Will I feel all alone if I let go of all the games and dramas that I am used to playing out with people?”
It’s true, there is an aspect of waking up that requires aloneness, but not necessarily loneliness.
On the inner level, there has to be a willingness to let go of your addiction to thinking. As long as the mind is constantly generating a stream of thought, the world will appear as a projection of your thought. Let go of your stream of thinking, and you open to the Divine Presence that is your own awareness, seeing Its own glory and unity in everything.
This happens when your consciousness fully stands alone, not seduced by the compulsive narratives of the mind.
This week’s reading, Parshat Nasso, is the finale for describing the construction of the Mishkan- the sanctuary of the Divine Presence. In preparation for the Mishkan becoming activated, the Israelites are told to expel anyone who is a tzaru’a, a zav, or who is tamei lanafesh.
All three of these terms have to do with bodily things that many people would consider to be kind of gross. Metaphorically, they are related to ways that our thoughts, speech and actions can keep us unconscious and in “exile” from the Presence.
“Tzaru’a” means someone with a particular skin affliction, and is associated with the sin of lashon hara- gossip and slander. Since the skin is the boundary of a person but also the place of intimate connection with others, this mythic disease is an expression of relationships getting tarnished through destructive speech.
“Zav” means some kind of bodily emission and is associated with sexuality. Metaphorically, the outward emission represents the way thoughts of sexuality can be a kind of “reaching” or “grasping” for gratification, a loss of vital energy and presence.
These two represent the polarity of unconsciousness-
“Tzaru’a” is negativity, and “Zav” is wanting, grasping, neediness. Both of these lead to an absence of Presence in the body, which brings us to the third one: “Tamei Lanefesh” means spiritually contaminated by a corpse.
To the degree that you become seduced by the energies of “I hate” and “I want,” your body is temporarily dead to the Presence that is not separate from your own Being. In order for your body to become a sanctuary again, these forces and the thoughts they produce must be “expelled from the camp” in a sense.
You must stand alone from them- let go of your resistance, and you will come to know your inner Wholeness. Once you know your inner Wholeness, you can let go of your wanting as well. It’s enough to be with what is.
Rabbi David Novaodok would say-
“Why is it that people don’t have what they want? It’s because they don’t want what they have. If they wanted only what they have, they would have what they want!”
On this Shabbat Nasso, the Sabbath of Carrying, may we constantly carry with us the knowledge of letting go, so that we cease to carry the burdens of resistance and wanting. And in so doing, may the Presence that we are reveal Itself ever more deeply, making our bodies into temples of the Presence.
At 176 verses, Naso is the longest of the parshiyot. Yet one of its most moving passages, and the one that has had the greatest impact over the course of history, is very short indeed and is known by almost every Jew, namely the priestly blessings:
The Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘Thus shall you bless the Israelites. Say to them:
May Lord bless you and protect you;
May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you;
May the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.’
Let them set My name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” (Num. 6:23-27)
This is among the oldest of all prayer texts. It was used by the priests in the Temple. It is said today by the cohanim in the reader’s repetition of the Amidah, in Israel every day, in most of the Diaspora only on festivals. It is used by parents as they bless their children on Friday night. It is often said to the bride and groom under the chuppah. It is the simplest and most beautiful of all blessings.
It also appears in the oldest of all biblical texts that have physically survived to today. In 1979 the archeologist Gabriel Barkay was examining ancient burial caves at Ketef Hinnom, outside the walls of Jerusalem in the area now occupied by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. A thirteen-year-old boy who was assisting Barkay discovered that beneath the floor of one of the caves was a hidden chamber. There the group discovered almost one thousand ancient artefacts including two tiny silver scrolls no more than an inch long.
They were so fragile that it took three years to work out a way of unrolling them without causing them to disintegrate. Eventually the scrolls turned out to be kemayot, amulets, containing, among other texts, the priestly blessings. Scientifically dated to the sixth century BCE, the age of Jeremiah and the last days of the First Temple, they are four centuries older than the most ancient of biblical texts known hitherto, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Today the amulets can be seen in the Israel Museum, testimony to the ancient connection of Jews to the land and the continuity of Jewish faith itself.
What gives them their power is their simplicity and beauty. They have a strong rhythmic structure. The lines contain three, five, and seven words respectively. In each, the second word is “the Lord”. In all three verses the first part refers to an activity on the part of God – “bless”, “make His face shine”, and “turn His face toward”. The second part describes the effect of the blessing on us, giving us protection, grace and peace.
They also travel inward, as it were. The first verse “May Lord bless you and protect you,” refers, as the commentators note, to material blessings: sustenance, physical health and so on. The second, “May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you,” refers to moral blessing. Chen, grace, is what we show to other people and they to us. It is interpersonal. Here we are asking God to give some of His grace to us and others so that we can live together without the strife and envy that can so easily poison relationships.
The third is the most inward of all. There is a lovely story about a crowd of people who have gathered on a hill by the sea to watch a great ship pass by. A young child is waving vigorously. One of the men in the crowd asks him why. He says, “I am waving so the captain of the ship can see me and wave back.” “But,” said the man, “the ship is far away, and there is a crowd of us here. What makes you think that the captain can see you?” “Because,” said the boy, “the captain of the ship is my father. He will be looking for me among the crowd.”
That is roughly what we mean when we say, “May the Lord turn His face toward you.” There are seven billion people now living on this earth. What makes us any of us more than a face in the crowd, a wave in the ocean, a grain of sand on the sea shore? The fact that we are God’s children. He is our parent. He turns His face toward us. He cares.
The God of Abraham is not a mere force of nature or even all the forces of nature combined. A tsunami does not pause to ask who its victims will be. There is nothing personal about an earthquake or a tornado. The word Elokim means something like “the force of forces, cause of causes, the totality of all scientifically discoverable laws.” It refers to those aspects of God that are impersonal. It also refers to God in His attribute of justice, since justice is essentially impersonal.
But the name we call Hashem – the name used in the priestly blessings, and in almost all the priestly texts – is God as He relates to us as persons, individuals, each with our unique configuration of hopes and fears, gifts and possibilities. Hashem is the aspect of God that allows us to use the word “You”. He is the God who speaks to us and who listens when we speak to Him. How this happens, we do not know, but that it happens is central to Jewish faith.
That we call God Hashem is the transcendental confirmation of our significance in the scheme of things. We matter as individuals because God cares for us as a parent for a child. That, incidentally, is one reason why the priestly blessings are all in the singular, to emphasise that God blesses us not only collectively but also individually. One life, said the sages, is like a universe.
Hence the meaning of the last of the priestly blessings. The knowledge that God turns His face toward us – that we are not just an indiscernible face in a crowd, but that God relates to us in our uniqueness and singularity – is the most profound and ultimate source of peace. Competition, strife, lawlessness and violence come from the psychological need to prove that we matter. We do things to prove that I am more powerful, or richer, or more successful than you. I can make you fear. I can bend you to my will. I can turn you into my victim, my subject, my slave. All of these things testify not to faith but to a profound failure of faith.
Faith means that I believe that God cares about me. I am here because He wanted me to be. The soul He gave me is pure. Even though I am like the child on the hill watching the ship pass by, I know that God is looking for me, waving to me as I wave to Him. That is the most profound inner source of peace. We do not need to prove ourselves in order to receive a blessing from God. All we need to know is that His face is turned toward us. When we are at peace with ourselves, we can begin to make peace with the world.
So the blessings become longer and deeper: from the external blessing of material goods to the interpersonal blessing of grace between ourselves and others, to the most inward of them all, the peace of mind that comes when we feel that God sees us, hears us, holds us in His everlasting arms.
One further detail of the priestly blessings is unique, namely the blessing that the sages instituted to be said by the cohanim over the mitzvah: “Blessed are you … who has made us holy with the holiness of Aaron and has commanded us to bless His people Israel with love.”
It is the last word, be-ahavah, that is unusual. It appears in no other blessing over the performance of a command. It seems to make no sense. Ideally we should fulfill all the commands with love. But an absence of love does not invalidate any other command. In any case, the blessing over the performance of as command is a way of showing that we are acting intentionally. There was an argument between the sages as to whether mitzvoth in general require intention (kavanah) or not. But whether they do or not, making a blessing beforehand shows that we do have the intention to fulfill the command. But intention is one thing, emotion is another. Surely what matters is that the cohanim recite the blessing and God will do the rest. What difference does it make whether they do so in love or not?
The commentators wrestle with this question. Some say that the fact that the cohanim are facing the people when they bless means that they are like the cherubim in the Tabernacle, whose faces “were turned to one another” as a sign of love. Others change the word order. They say that the blessing really means, “who has made us holy with the holiness of Aaron and with love has commanded us to bless His people Israel.” “Love” here refers to God’s love for Israel, not that of the cohanim.
However, it seems to me that the explanation is this: the Torah explicitly says that though the cohanim say the words, it is God who sends the blessing. “Let them put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” Normally when we fulfill a mitzvah, we are doing something. But when the cohanim bless the people, they are not doing anything in and of themselves. Instead they are acting as channels through which God’s blessing flows into the world and into our lives. Only love does this. Love means that we are focused not on ourselves but on another. Love is selflessness. And only selflessness allows us to be a channel through which flows a force greater than ourselves, the love that as Dante said, “moves the sun and the other stars”, the love that brings new life into the world.
To bless, we must love, and to be blessed is to know that we are loved by the One vaster than the universe who nonetheless turns His face toward us as a parent to a beloved child. To know that is to find true spiritual peace.
The parsha of Naso contains the laws relating to the nazirite – an individual who undertook, usually for a limited period of time, to observe special rules of holiness and abstinence: not to drink wine or other intoxicants (including anything made from grapes), not to have his hair cut and not to defile himself by contact with the dead.
The Torah does not make a direct evaluation of the nazirite. On the one hand it calls him “holy to God” (Num. 6: 8). On the other, it rules that when the period comes to an end the nazirite has to bring a sin offering (Num. 6: 13-14), as if he had done something wrong.
This led to a fundamental disagreement between the rabbis in Mishnaic, Talmudic and medieval times. According to Rabbi Elazar, and later to Nahmanides, the nazirite is worthy of praise. He has voluntarily chosen a higher level of holiness. The prophet Amos (2: 11) says, “I raised up some of your sons for prophets, and your young men for nazirites,” suggesting that the nazirite, like the prophet, is a person especially close to God. The reason he had to bring a sin offering was that he was now returning to ordinary life. The sin lay in ceasing to be a nazirite.
Rabbi Eliezer ha-Kappar and Shmuel held the opposite opinion. The sin lay in becoming a nazirite in the first place, thereby denying himself some of the pleasures of the world God created and declared good. Rabbi Eliezer added: “From this we may infer that if one who denies himself the enjoyment of wine is called a sinner, all the more so one who denies himself the enjoyment of other pleasures of life.”[1]
Clearly the argument is not merely textual. It is substantive. It is about asceticism, the life of self-denial. Almost every religion knows the phenomenon of people who, in pursuit of spiritual purity, withdraw from the pleasures and temptations of the world. They live in caves, retreats, hermitages, monasteries. The Qumran sect known to us through the Dead Sea Scrolls may have been such a movement.
In the Middle Ages there were Jews who adopted similar self-denial – among them the Hassidei Ashkenaz, the Pietists of Northern Europe, as well as many Jews in Islamic lands. In retrospect it is hard not to see in these patterns of behaviour at least some influence from the non-Jewish environment. The Hassidei Ashkenaz who flourished during the time of the Crusades lived among self-mortifying Christians. Their southern counterparts may have been familiar with Sufism, the mystical movement in Islam.
The ambivalence of Jews toward the life of self-denial may therefore lie in the suspicion that it entered Judaism from the outside. There were ascetic movements in the first centuries of the Common Era in both the West (Greece) and the East (Iran) that saw the physical world as a place of corruption and strife. They were, in fact, dualists, holding that the true God was not the creator of the universe. The physical world was the work of a lesser, and evil, deity. The two best known movements to hold this view were Gnosticism in the West and Manichaeism in the East. So at least some of the negative evaluation of the nazirite may have been driven by a desire to discourage Jews from imitating non-Jewish practices.
What is more puzzling is the position of Maimonides, who holds both views, positive and negative, in the same book, his law code the Mishneh Torah. In The Laws of Ethical Character, he adopts the negative position of R. Eliezer ha-Kappar: “A person may say: ‘Desire, honour and the like are bad paths to follow and remove a person from the world, therefore I will completely separate myself from them and go to the other extreme.’ As a result, he does not eat meat or drink wine or take a wife or live in a decent house or wear decent clothing . . . This too is bad, and it is forbidden to choose this way.”[2]
Yet in The Laws of the Nazirite he rules in accordance with the positive evaluation of Rabbi Elazar: “Whoever vows to G-d [to become a nazirite] by way of holiness, does well and is praiseworthy . . . Indeed Scripture considers him the equal of a prophet.”[3] How does any writer come to adopt contradictory positions in a single book, let alone one as resolutely logical as Maimonides?
The answer lies in one of Maimonides’ most original insights. He holds that there are two quite different ways of living the moral life. He calls them respectively the way of the saint (hassid) and the sage (hakham).
The sage follows the “golden mean,” the “middle way.” The moral life is a matter of moderation and balance, charting a course between too much and too little. Courage, for example, lies midway between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity lies between profligacy and miserliness. This is very similar to the vision of the moral life as set out by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics.
The saint, by contrast, does not follow the middle way. He or she tends to extremes, fasting rather than simply eating in moderation, embracing poverty rather than acquiring modest wealth, and so on.
At various points in his writings, Maimonides explains why people might embrace extremes. One reason is repentance and character transformation.[4] So a person might cure himself of pride by practicing, for a while, extreme self-abasement. Another is the asymmetry of the human personality. The extremes do not exert an equal pull. Cowardice is more common than recklessness, and miserliness than over-generosity, which is why the hassid leans in the opposite direction. A third reason is the lure of the surrounding culture. This may be so opposed to religious values that pious people choose to separate themselves from the wider society, “clothing themselves in woolen and hairy garments, dwelling in the mountains and wandering about in the wilderness,” differentiating themselves by their extreme behavior.
This is a very nuanced presentation. There are times, for Maimonides, when self-denial is therapeutic, others when it is factored into Torah law itself, and yet others when it is a response to an excessively hedonistic age. In general, though, Maimonides rules that we are commanded to follow the middle way, whereas the way of the saint is lifnim mi-shurat ha-din, beyond the strict requirement of the law.[5]
Moshe Halbertal, in his recent, impressive study of Maimonides,[6] sees him as finessing the fundamental tension between the civic ideal of the Greek political tradition and the spiritual ideal of the religious radical for whom, as the Kotzker Rebbe said, “The middle of the road is for horses.” To the hassid, Maimonides’ sage can look like a “self-satisfied bourgeois.”
Essentially, these are two ways of understanding the moral life itself. Is the aim of the moral life to achieve personal perfection? Or is it to create a decent, just and compassionate society? The intuitive answer of most people would be to say: both. That is what makes Maimonides so acute a thinker. He realises that you can’t have both. They are in fact different enterprises.
A saint may give all his money away to the poor. But what about the members of the saint’s own family? A saint may refuse to fight in battle. But what about the saint’s own country? A saint may forgive all crimes committed against him. But what about the rule of law, and justice? Saints are supremely virtuous people, considered as individuals. Yet you cannot build a society out of saints alone. Ultimately, saints are not really interested in society. Their concern is the salvation of the soul.
This deep insight is what led Maimonides to his seemingly contradictory evaluations of the nazirite. The nazirite has chosen, at least for a period, to adopt a life of extreme self-denial. He is a saint, a hassid. He has adopted the path of personal perfection. That is noble, commendable and exemplary.
But it is not the way of the sage – and you need sages if you seek to perfect society. The sage is not an extremist, because he or she realises that there are other people at stake. There are the members of one’s own family and the others within one’s own community. There is a country to defend and an economy to sustain. The sage knows he or she cannot leave all these commitments behind to pursue a life of solitary virtue. For we are called on by God to live in the world, not escape from it; in society not seclusion; to strive to create a balance among the conflicting pressures on us, not to focus on some while neglecting the others.
Hence, while from a personal perspective the nazirite is a saint, from a societal perspective he is, at least figuratively, a “sinner” who has to bring an atonement offering.
Maimonides lived the life he preached. We know from his writings that he longed for seclusion. There were years when he worked day and night to write his Commentary to the Mishnah, and later the Mishneh Torah. Yet he also recognised his responsibilities to his family and to the community. In his famous letter to his would-be translator Ibn Tibbon, he gives him an account of his typical day and week, in which he had to carry a double burden as a world-renowned physician and an internationally sought halakhist and sage. He worked to exhaustion. There were times when he was almost too busy to study from one week to the next. Maimonides was a sage who longed to be a saint – but knew he could not be, if he was to honour his responsibilities to his people. That seems to me a profound judgment, and one still relevant to Jewish life today.
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[1] Taanit 11a; Nedarim 10a.
[2] Hilkhot Deot 3:1.
[3] Hilkhot Nezirut 10: 14.
[4] See his Eight Chapters (the introduction to his commentary on Mishnah, Avot), ch. 4, and Hilkhot Deot, chapters 1, 2, 5 and 6.
We don’t talk much about grace in Judaism—it’s a word that we long ago handed over to our daughter religion, Christianity. We defined ourselves as a religion of justice, of holiness, of tikkun olam—and grace became “goyish.” And yet, apparently unaware that it is fallen out of fashion, grace persists throughout our sacred literature and plays a central role in this week’s parasha.
The Hebrew word for grace is chen, as in the name Chanah. It is an integral part of God’s self-description to Moses in Exodus 33, when God is revealed as “El chanun v’rachum”— God of Grace and Compassion. And, it stands at the very center of one of the most famous passages of the Torah, Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Blessing which is part of Parshat Naso. Recall the words:
Y’varechecha Adonai v’yishmarecha
Y’air Adonai panav eliecha v’yichunekha
Yisa Adanai pavav eliecha v’yasem l’kha shalom.
V’yichunekha is traditionally rendered as: “May God deal graciously with you.” Our teacher, the Rector of American Jewish University, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, translates it differently. He says: “May God grant you more than you deserve.” Grace, he teaches, is blessing that goes beyond what we strictly merit for our actions.
It is true, most of the good things that we experience in life have a direct correlation to the amount of effort that we invest into them. A loving relationship is sustained by hard work, open communication, and mutual respect. A child turns out well because of parents who made them a central priority in their lives; they are truly the product of their parents’ blood, sweat and tears. Maintaining our health, succeeding in our chosen profession, making a meaningful contribution to the world — there are no shortcuts to achieving the important things in life. We are blessed with them, because we worked hard to earn them.
And yet, that is never the whole picture. Each of our great successes: a happy child, an established practice, a loving marriage, a meaningful life, is the product both of our own hard work and of elements that we must admit are quite out of our hands: We met the right person, we were in the right place at the right time, we took the risk and it paid off. On top of all of our diligent hard work, it turns out we also need to get quite lucky. To claim no credit at all would be disingenuously humble, to claim all of the credit would be stunningly unrealistic. Our fortunes are governed by a partnership between the work of our hands and God’s grace.
Our response to those blessings that we earn is pride, and in Judaism a little bit of naches in our legitimate accomplishments is certainly no sin. Our response to grace, however, is deeper and purer — simple gratitude. It is the morning Modeh Ani, which invites us to start the day with thanksgiving for the gift of having woken up to new possibility and new life. It is the evening Sh’ma, that asks us to count our blessings before closing our eyes and surrendering to sleep. It is the pinnacle moment of the High Holy Days, when we get down on the ground and hold our palms up to the sky and say to God that we can’t do it by ourselves. To be a Jew is to pause 100 times a day in gratitude, recognizing that so much in our life is simply the product of God’s grace.
May we be blessed with more than we deserve. And may we be wise enough to recognize it.
Rituals, spiritual fidelity, and turning toward God (Naso)
Posted: 25 May 2014
In this week’s Torah portion (Naso) is the strange ritual of the Sotah, which on its face concerns an allegedly unfaithful wife, a jealous husband, and a magic brew of water and dust. When our sages say of Torah, “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it,” I believe they invited us to turn this Sotah passage so it reveals not only old-paradigm patriarchy and heterocentrism, but also deep wisdom for today. Before we can turn it, though, we need to look with open eyes at what it is we’re turning.
Here is the p’shat (the simple surface meaning) of the Sotah ritual. If a husband suspects his wife of infidelity, he should bring her to the priest with an unseasoned grain offering. The priest will dissolve dust from the temple floor in a vessel of sacred water; write the words of a magic spell on a piece of parchment; dissolve those words in the water; and make the woman drink it. The spell indicates that if she was unfaithful, her thigh will sag and her belly will distend. (Some commentators read these words to imply miscarriage; others see them as describing an immediately visible physical response to drinking these “waters of bitterness.”) If the woman has not been unfaithful, then nothing will happen and/or she will remain able to conceive. Either way, that’s the end of the strange Sotah story.
Almost everything about the Sotah ritual challenges our the modern sensibility. First, the gender inequality: a man could accuse his wife of adultery, but there’s no parallel ritual for a woman suspecting her husband of infidelity. While a woman’s sexuality is “owned” by her father or husband, a man’s sexuality is his own and untestable. Second, the Sotah assumes heterosexuality: there’s no ritual for a same-sex couple. Third, there’s the uncomfortable suggestion that an unfaithful woman will inevitably miscarry or become infertile, implying that anyone who miscarries or is infertile may be suspect. I have a sense for how emotionally and spiritually devastating miscarriage and infertility can be in the modern world, and I have no doubt that these experiences were equally powerful for our female ancestors. To link the pain of infertility with this kind of moral judgment adds insult to injury. For these reasons and others, we cannot read the Sotah to guide difficulties among intimate partners in today’s world. We need to turn it around to make it meaningful.
What if we read the Sotah, instead, as a psychological drama in which its actors represent different parts of the self? Through that lens, the verses about the Sotah tell an entirely different story: here’s what to do if I come to feel that some part of me has betrayed the greater unity to which I aspire. First, I must bring my whole self to a holy place, a place of prayer and connection with divinity. Body, heart, mind, and soul: all of me must present in order to move forward. In that holy place, I meet with a spiritual facilitator, someone who has a deep connection with God (symbolized by the Sotah ritual of appearing before a priest). With that person’s help, I articulate where I fear that I went wrong.
Then there’s a ritual of washing-away my misdeed. We write the words down and then let them dissolve. I drink from the living waters in which my misdeeds have dissolved — a way of internalizing, literally taking-into-myself, how my mistakes have been forgiven and washed away (symbolized by the physical drinking of the Sotah potion). If my teshuvah process is incomplete and I haven’t wholly integrated forgiveness, this process may make me feel worse (symbolized by the physical effects of drinking the Sotah potion when one is “guilty”). But if I’m able to release myself from my own misdeeds, then I come away with a clean slate, ready to begin again (symbolized by the Sotah promise of fertility).
Seen in this way, the ritual of the Sotah becomes a kind of spiritual direction session, an opportunity to work with a trained facilitator to fully effect the transformation of teshuvah, repentance and return.
In the writings of the Prophets, physical infidelity often is a metaphor for spiritual infidelity. Hosea in particular works with this theme at length. God is the “husband” whose “wife” – the people Israel – strays to other gods. (The patriarchal / heterocentrist language is Hosea’s; we might reframe his words as a teaching that the Holy Blessed One, a unity beyond all gender and division, enters into covenant with us and, in our human understanding, feels “hurt” when we stray.) Although God responds to this with furious anger for a time, God’s ultimate response is one of love. God is always ready to take us back.
Hosea teaches that teshuvah is endlessly possible, and that no matter what our transgressions might be, our covenant with the Holy Blessed One is reparable and will endure. Hosea too can be troubling if read as a prescription for contemporary marital counseling. But what I find most remarkable in Hosea is not his bitterness, but the turn he makes from anguish to reconciliation. Teshuvah, he argues passionately, is always possible and necessary. No matter how deeply we have betrayed our Beloved, we can and must make the shift of turning ourselves back in the right direction. And if we can make that leap of teshuvah — at once the most impossibly difficult, and profoundly simple, act in our lexicon — we will be received with open arms.
On June 3, just a few short days from now, we’ll reach the festival of Shavuot, our early-summer festival of first fruits and revelation, the day we symbolically re-receive Torah at Mount Sinai. Many of us may associate teshuvah, turning-toward or returning-to God, with Elul and the Days of Awe — a season still many months away. What does Shavuot have to do with teshuvah?
The Days of Awe come at the end of an intense period of reflection, introspection, and the inner soul-work of teshuvah. According to one way of thinking, that period begins with Tisha b’Av, the low point in our festival year when we recall the destruction of both Temples and mourn the brokenness of creation. After Tisha b’Av we count 49 days — seven weeks — until Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Days of Awe. Seven weeks for teshuvah and soul-work culminate in one of our year’s biggest opportunities for transformation and connection with God. (I learned this from Reb Zalman, who heard it from Cantor Michael Esformes.)
Shavuot too comes at the end of a seven-week period of reflection, introspection, and inner soul-work: the period of counting Omer, which links Pesach with Shavuot, liberation with revelation. The Omer period now finishing is our spring season of teshuvah; the months of Av and Elul before Rosh Hashanah are our fall season of teshuvah.
Teshuvah also is a monthly, weekly, and even daily practice — but our tradition gives us two corridors of the year to focus deeply on this work together. And when we do this work of teshuvah, and release ourselves from our misdeeds and our old baggage, we become able to stand wholly at Sinai and receive the new Torah which God will reveal this year.
Shavuot is seen in rabbinic tradition as the marriage between God and Israel. In the rabbinic imagination, God is the groom; Israel, the bride; the Torah, our ketubah outlining our and God’s mutual promises and responsibilities. (Here, too, we can shift the traditional gender categories as needed in order to make the metaphor resonant in today’s language.) There’s another midrash which suggests that God held Mount Sinai over us like an inverted barrel, threatening that if we didn’t accept the Torah, God would drop the mountain and bury us there; but the marriage midrash recasts it, arguing instead that Sinai suspended over our heads was in fact our beautiful chuppah or marriage canopy!
In reading about the Sotah a few days before our “wedding anniversary,” we remind ourselves that in any relationship there will be ebbs and flows of connection. And in any relationship, a leap of faith is necessary. One doesn’t enter into a marriage saying “tell me everything that might go wrong in the coming decades and then I’ll decide whether to commit.” We join with one another, and with God, in perpetual hope. And when we inevitably feel pulled astray, we trust that repair is possible. We trust that we can return to each other, that we can return to our deepest selves, that we can return to the Holy One of Blessing — and be received in love.
The Law and Lore of the Wayward Woman
Torah—with its rich narratives and poetry, glimpses of the Divine and profound wisdom—is a text we turn to for inspiration, intellectual stimulation and meaning. Yet there are moments in the Bible when culturally located prejudices come to the fore and the reader is left struggling with the tension between timeless writing and context-bound oppression. One such moment is the law of the sotah—or wayward woman—found in Parshat Naso.
The law reads as follows: If a man has suspicions (also translated as “jealousy” or “zealous indignation”1) that his wife has had an affair, he brings her before the kohen (priest), who makes her drink a mixture of holy waters and earth. He removes her head covering (which implies shaming2) and warns her that if she has indeed been with a man other than her husband, the ingested waters will cause her thigh to collapse and her stomach to distend. The sages are divided on whether this refers to miscarriage or the explosion of her uterus and genitals.3 Either way, the gruesome punishment seems to be a direct response to the alleged crime: sexual ‘waywardness’ is followed by sexual shaming and maiming. Alternatively, if the woman is revealed to have not been with another man, she returns home with her husband to bear a child—an uncomfortable consolation prize for one who has just been publicly defamed.
Having heard the kohen’s warning and just before drinking the water, the woman must answer “Amen, Amen.”4 In this context, we realize that ‘Amen,’ despite its benign, comforting associations today, actually means to submit to God’s will. ‘Amen’ is sinister here, as the woman is forced to surrender her fate to forces beyond her control.
It’s ironic that in this rare instance when a woman is given the opportunity to speak in a biblical ritual, she is simultaneously restricted in what she can say; these robotic and depersonalized words silence any defense she might have offered of her guilt or innocence. The subservient quality of ‘Amen’ also contrasts with her alleged waywardness. If she has been wayward, ‘Amen’ signifies the beginning of her return to compliance. If not, it is her forced acceptance that this shaming ordeal is God’s will despite her innocence.
In contrast to the passivity of the woman’s ‘Amen,’ the text places all of the agency and power among men. Her husband brings her to the male kohen, who administers the ritual. And the rite itself carries out the will of a Deity who is characterized as masculine in a biblical context. In this web of husband, priest and God controlling her fate, the woman’s story is absent.
In fact, it could be argued that the patriarchal nature of the ritual depends on the absence of her authentic voice and story. Her story—with all of its intricate details of how she got married, the nuanced unfolding of her relationship with her husband and her private desires and hopes—would identify the woman as an individual. In expressing her individual, lived experience, the woman’s complex story could pose a challenge to the unequal power dynamics and absolutes that the law attempts to enforce.
If the suppression of the woman’s story enables the oppression of women in the sotah ritual, it makes me think that the telling of women’s stories in their own voices can be a powerful antidote to oppression. Women’s stories are, in their own way, forms of “waywardness”—positive, powerful rejections of the status quo. By telling stories, we can challenge sexual norms, question the entire patriarchal system and develop women’s agency over their lives. Stories can serve as activist tools to help women in all cultures move beyond ‘Amen Amen’—and into empowerment.
Women across all cultures are working to author their own stories. Whether it is the sharing among Jewish women in a Rosh Chodesh circle or the oral narratives of women travelers in sub-Saharan Africa, stories are being used to make room for today’s wayward women’s voices to be heard.
Consider the story of Mukhtaran Bibi, a courageous warrior woman in Pakistan. After a tribal council determined that she should be gang raped to redress a family honor crime, Mukhtaran did not shrivel up in despair or commit suicide. Instead, she chose to step forward and, at great risk to herself and her family, she told her story. It created ripples, which turned into waves, and generated such interest that she became an activist, building schools and establishing networks to empower women further. She prosecuted her rapists and her courage gave strength to other women in similar situations to speak out and tell their stories.5 Individual stories are so powerful that they can inform and inspire activism and even bring about policy change.
It is worth contemplating how women’s waywardness is still punished in overt and subtle ways in the 21st century. The law of sotah in Parshat Naso invites us to consider how women’s stories have been suppressed and controlled by patriarchal conventions—and how unlocking them can lead to change in our own time. Storytelling, with its complex portrayals of humanity, helps shift women from the subservience of ‘Amen’ to the power of having a voice. Only then do they have the freedom to author their own lives.
1 Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary and Notes (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) 680.
Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004) 705.
2 Alter 707.
3 Ibid. 708.
4 Numbers, 5:22
5 “It’s not just a woman who has been raped, but a nation,” The Guardian, 14 March 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/mar/14/gender.pakistan. See also Nicholas D. Kristof, “Mother of a Nation,” The New York Times, 2 April 2006. http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/opinion/02kristof.html?ref=mukhtarmai
In Parshat Nasso, each Israelite tribal chieftain comes forward to make a gift to the mishkan, the newly-completed sanctuary at the centre of the camp. All twelve gifts are identical: a silver bowl, a silver basin, a golden spoon, four animals for the sanctuary, and seventeen animals to be eaten by the people at a celebratory meal.
The first leader to bring forward his gift is Nachshon ben Aminadav of the tribe of Yehudah. Nachshon is best known to us as the star of a famous midrash (interpretive story) in which the Israelites stand frozen at the edge of the Sea of Reeds, with the Egyptian army closing in behind them. Only Nachshon jumps into the sea. At that moment, the waters part, and the Israelites follow Nachshon across dry land to the other side.
Why was Nachshon chosen as the star of this story of courage? Perhaps to continue the Torah’s teaching about the importance of strong sibling bonds: Nachshon is Aharon’s brother-in-law, and assists Moshe-Miriam-Aharon with their leadership duties. Perhaps to teach that our virtues of character, once developed, serve us well in any situation. Torah tells us that Nachshon was appointed to lead the entire Israelite army in battle; midrash thus teaches that Nachson also led the entire Israelite people to safety.
Nachshon’s name means “snake.” A snake skeleton is a long spine; thus snakes are very flexibile. Snakes are sensitive to vibrations, infrared light, and the chemical composition of air particles around them; thus they notice details that escape most human beings. Nachshon’s ability to lead came from his sensitivity and flexibility…offering us all a lesson in how best to move forwards.
Gobble up the three-fold blessings
the priests our Kohanic ancestors
with their really great clothes
that hat mitznefet
the breastplate
summer breastplate with aeration
winter breastplate to keep the heart line
warm.
Linen
in a dry climate linen is fabulous
when it’s humid
it’s like wearing a wet towel.
The colors
deep crimson the color of a squashed worm
the mysterious blue
[the blue comes up once every seventy years]
nowadays the blue is not hidden
and the purple –
Is it on the reddish tint or the bluish tint
they’re so different
let’s mix up some imagined purple
and then invent another name for it.
O holy G*d of the tri-partite blessing
as brought down by the Sefas Emes
pores to spread out means to choose a partial
opening onto the whole
the individual as it opens onto the universal
the universal always sheleimut
shalom
l’sem lekha shalom
to bring the blessing from the individual instance
to the universal application
the conduit from the one to the many –
wild ride that.
The Sefas Emes connects blessing with wholeness with individuality
with blessing the power of the upper root descends
descends on the lower root on the individual on the instance
the upper root the anchoring above
roots above, so to speak.
The inner point of truth
this is shleimut shalom
the inner is experienced in the universal
wherever God dwells
there is blessing
wherever there is blessing
there is shalom
can you dig that?
I love the partial the broken individual incomplete
the fragment the wounded
I love the separate because it integrates
and even if not –
it is whole.
The many crystalled net
each facet reflecting the whole
the crazy skate from the one
to the Universal
the universal grasp of HaKol
the wild ride from here to There –
Dr. Lehman — I hear you dripping syllables
HaKol Pleroma the All
about which you can say too much –
From Melissa Carpenter
Naso (and Bemidbar): Four Duties, Four Directions
2011
Out of all the twelve tribes of Israel, only men from the tribe of Levi take care of the portable sanctuary (the inner Tent of Meeting, and the outer courtyard) and conduct the religious cult there. The original Levi is the third son of Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, in the book of Genesis/ Bereishit. He has three sons of his own: Geirshon, Kohat (or Kehat), and Merari. The descendants of these three sons are the three clans of Levites in the book of Numbers (called Bemidbar, “In the Wilderness”, in Hebrew).
Whenever the Israelites break camp and make another journey through the wilderness, someone has to dismantle the sanctuary, carry the pieces, and reassemble it at the next camp. Last week’s Torah portion assigns the priests (Aaron and his sons Elazar and Itamar, who happen to be descendants of Kohat) the job of wrapping up the most holy objects. These objects are they carried by the non-priests in the Kohat clan of Levites.
This week’s portion, Naso (“He Lifted”), begins with a description of what the other two clans of Levites carry.
Geirshonites: They shall carry the curtains of the santuary and of the Tent of Meeting; its roof-covering and the covering of the leather that is on top of it, and the covering of the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. This is the duty of the families of the sons of Geirshon in the Tent of Meeting; and their custody is in the hand of Itamar, son of Aaron the priest. (Numbers/ Bemidbar 4:25, 4:28)
Merarites: And this is their custody and their burden for all their duty in the Tent of Meeting: the planks of the sanctuary, and its cross-pieces and its uprights and its sockets. And the uprights of the courtyard all around, and their sockets and their pegs and their tent-ropes, including all of their tools for all of their duty; and you shall assign, by name, the tools for their custody and their burden. This is the duty of the families of the sons of Merari; all their duty in the Tent of Meeting is in the hand of Itamar, son of Aaron the priest. (Numbers 4:31-33)
avodah: = duty, labor, service; work done not for oneself, but for another person or for God
In the Torah, the priests rank the highest in the hierarchy, and get the “holiest” duties. When the sanctuary is dismantled, carried to the next camping-place, and reassembled, the priests’ duties include wrapping up the most sacred objects in various coverings, and supervising the other Levite men and assigning them their individual jobs.
The Kohatites carry the most sacred objects after they are wrapped: the ark itself, the lampstand, the table for the twelve loaves of bread, and the incense altar.
The Geirshonites carry the walls of the sanctuary, which are all woven fabric, and the two layers of roofing over the inner Tent of Meeting, a large panel of woven goat-hair and another of waterproof leather.
The Merarites carry all the pieces of framework that hold up the inner Tent of Meeting and the outer courtyard wall.
Thus the four groups (the priests and the three Levite clans) have four different duties when the people journey. And when the camp is set up again, these four groups pitch their personal family tents close to four different sides of the sanctuary.
Moses and the priests camp to the east, in front of the entrance to the sanctuary’s outer courtyard. (The entrances to the Tent of Meeting and the innermost Holy of Holies also face east.) The Kohatites camp on the south side of the sanctuary, the Gershonites on the west side, and the Merarites on the north side.
The words used in this part of the book of Numbers for east, south, west, and north all have another meaning:
keidmah = toward the east; toward the front, the origin, the ancient time
teymanah = toward the south; from the root word yamin = right hand (the hand of favor and power)
yamah = toward the west; toward the sea
tzafonah = toward the north; toward the hidden
The priests have the most perilous duty; they must touch the most holy objects in order to wrap them for transport. They are also responsible for what the Levites do. Their place is in the east, toward the ancient time, the origin of the human race. (In Genesis, as soon as God has created a human being, God puts the adam in the garden of Eden, which is in the “east”.)
Today, if we take on religious leadership, we need to remember that some people look up to us, and look to us for guidance. Whatever we model, as well as teach, will have a deep effect on other human beings. This is indeed a perilous duty.
The Kohatites get the next most dangerous job, carrying the holy objects on their shoulders without touching or seeing them directly. Their place is in the south, at the favored right hand of the priests.
Today, when we choose to follow a religious leader, to serve at their right hand, we receive the gift of everything we learn from them. But we are also responsible for carrying and passing on their teachings in a way that continues their good work—and does not degenerate into the idol-worship of mere objects and appearances.
The Geirshonites are responsible for walls and roofs. Their place is to the west, toward the sea.
We often assume that if we put up psychological walls, we can actually keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. If we put up a mental roof, we can operate in the mundane world without worrying about any inscrutable mysteries, anything that might be called God. But we need to remember that walls and roofs are not as permanent as they might seem. Something that looks solid may turn out to be flimsy fabric, as fluid as the sea. Like the wall of water when the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea, a psychological wall might protect us, or might crash down and drown us.
The Merarites are responsible for the supporting framework of the sanctuary. Their place is to the north, the place where things are hidden.
Many treasures are hidden from us, including knowledge and insight. We don’t even know ourselves. The only way we can find any hidden insights is by periodically dismantling the structure of our beliefs, carrying the pieces to a new place we have not been before, and erecting a new framework of supporting beliefs and theories.
Sometimes we can linger in one place in our lives, enjoying its blessings. Then something changes; the presence of God rises and moves on, so to speak, and our blessings disappear. That’s when we have to dismantle our lives, our own sanctuaries, and journey to a new place.
When we sense that we’ve arrived at the next place where God wants us, we have to rebuild our lives. First we do the work of the Merarites, erecting a new framework, a new set of theories about life to support us and allow us to continue uncovering hidden insights. Next we do the work of the Gershonites, hanging walls and draping roofs, separating our interior space from the exterior world while recognizing that the barriers are fluid. Then we do the work of the Kohatites, setting down the holy objects, our most sacred convictions, in their proper places so that they are no longer burdens. And finally we do the work of the priests, unwrapping the holy objects, revealing the golden treasures of our souls just enough so we can do the holy work of influencing the world for the good.
Between Routine and Passion
This week’s Torah reading begins with the words “Hashem spoke to Moshe…take a census…”(4;21-22)
This is a continuation of the census that began in last week’s reading. This week’s census focuses on the Levites and the Kohanim/Priests and the unique services and rituals that was their duty to perform in the Temple.
Later in the reading, the Torah speaks of the laws of the Nazir/Nazirite. The Nazir is a person who chooses to separate himself or herself from the norms of society, and live a life detached from earthliness.
Some of the practices of the Nazir are similar to the laws of conduct of the Kohen, such as the law of ensuring that one does not become defiled, or tameh.
While there are similarities between the Kohen and the Nazir there is also a marked distinction between the two. The priesthood is a birthright. You must be born a Kohen, and a non-Kohen can never become a Kohen, whereas the Nazir is a personal choice, anyone at any time can choose to live as a Nazir.
A reflection of this dynamic is also mirrored in the Nazir and the Kohen’s relationship with hair.
The Kohen needed to shave his head (8:7), his hair needed to be orderly; the high priest would cut his hair once a week and the other priests would cut their hair once a month (Tannis 17b), whereas for the Nazir it is written, “No razor shall pass over his head…it shall be sacred, and he shall allow the growth of the hair of his head to grow wild.” (6:5)
The Kohen represents the orderly and routine, the day-in-day-out service of the Temple, and thus serves with short and tamed hair. In direct contrast, the Nazir goes with long untamed hair that suggests the non-orderly and the rebellious, a breaking of the status quo.
Historically, in fact, many Nezirim/ Nazirites in Temple times were young, single and infused with passion. In their personal dedication they would vow to be a Nazir, most often for a temporary period of time, thirty days or so, and live for that period detached and removed from society.
The Kohen represents the one who upholds the order of the system, maintaining the organization which is impersonal. The Kohen serves in the Temple as the representative of the community, with the same routine each day, whereas the Nazir represents the non ordinary and more personal expression and passionate service.
Everything in life has both a context, which is it’s structure, and a content, which is how the structure is filled.
We need both.
To survive and flourish as both a human and a spiritual being we need both the structure/routine and the content/passion, the priest and the prophet as it were.
We need the day to day routines in life to give our lives structure, but we must also have our personal moments when we feel connected.
In a relationship, such as marriage, there is the underlying context – the structure and formality of the marriage agreement, yet within that structure there must also be passion, a non-order within the order, as it were.
Prayer is yet another example of this within our lives. We pray everyday, and we pray a set prayer within a set time. Yet, within the structure of prayer there needs to be our personal involvement, manifested in our Kavanah/intention and focus.
There is always the delicate balance between maintaining routine, which is preserving the underlying structure and simultaneously ensuring that the routine does not become stale. We need to be passionate and personally invested and engaged on all levels of our being in all that we do, and still be be supported by a strong and unshakeable structure of routine and ritual.
The Torah reading this week juxtaposes both these spiritual ways of being, the Kohen and the Nazir, to teach and inspire us to live within both of these frameworks. Keeping the structure and the passion, the order and beyond order and in this way upholding the system and infusing it with life and vitality.
THE WEEK’S ENERGY
Between Routine and Passion
This week’s Torah reading imbues us with the strength to maintain the balance between the required structure and orderliness of our lives and the passion and personal energy that we bring to it.
Review the structures of your life, be it relationships, lifestyle choices, livelihood related or spiritual context, and ensure that the structure is well supported and has firm grounding.
Look deeper into those structures and be sure that they are continuously infused with your own personal vitality and passion.
Ensure that all your passion and excitement is within a safe and grounded framework of order, and that this order is always infused with passion.
Torah Monologues News Blog Excerpts Programs And the priest will station the woman before God, and he will unbind the head of the woman … (Numbers 5:18; Nasso)
All the days of his vow of dedication-to-separateness, no razor will pass over his head; until the fulfillment of the days that he will dedicate-to-separateness, his big, unbound, bristling hair will be holy to God. (Numbers 6:5; Nasso)
para = he will unbind, unbraid, let loose, remove restraint from
pera = unbound, unbraided, loose, disarranged, wild and out of control
nizro = his dedication-to-separateness, his being a nazir, his being set apart; his crown
What do the ritual instructions for the sotah (the wife suspected of adultery) and the nazir (the man who sets himself apart for holiness by abstaining from certain actions) have in common, besides that they appear in the same Torah portion, Nasso?
One answer is: unbound hair.
The ritual to establish the guilt or innocence of a woman whose husband suspects her of adultery begins with the priest unbinding the wife’s hair. According to Rashi, this verse is the source for the teaching of the Sages, centuries later, that it is shameful for married Jewish women to expose their hair in public. The Torah does not say whether married women before the time of the Second Temple bound their hair in cloth, or merely put up their hair in braids or pins. But either way, a woman was humiliated if a priest let down her hair in public.
There seems to be no humiliation involved when a man becomes a nazir, someone who vows to set himself apart for a period of time, dedicate himself to separateness—not by leaving the community, but by letting his hair grow untrimmed and wild, abstaining from all grape products, and avoiding contact with corpses—even if a member of his own family dies. His unbound, untrimmed, unbraided, “bristling” head of hair is considered holy rather than shameful.
Most commentary says the nazir’s unconventional hair distances him from normal social intercourse, just as he is distanced by avoiding not only wine, but even grape juice (which might substitute for wine when his friends are drinking). This social distance marks the nazir as holy, dedicated to God.
When the period of his vow ends, the nazir shaves his head and puts his hair on the altar fire, under the peace-offering, thus making his wild mane an offering to God. According to Rabbi R.S. Hirsch, this indicates that the purpose of spending time as a nazir is self-improvement, so the nazir will rejoin society as a better member of the community—less vain about his hair, perhaps, or wiser because of the extra time for self-reflection.
But why isn’t a nazir allowed to mourn, even if a member of his family dies? Elsewhere the Torah says that loosening your hair and letting it grow untrimmed is an essential part of mourning. In Leviticus 10:6, after Nadav and Avihu are consumed by holy fire, the three remaining priests (their father Aaron and their brothers Elazar and Itamar) are told: “Don’t let the hair hang loose on your heads, and don’t tear up your clothes”, because they are not allowed to mourn.
Unbound hair seems to be a sign of shame for a married woman in public, a sign of holiness for a nazir, and a sign of mourning for everyone else. Why?
I see the answer in my mirror every morning when I’m getting ready to leave the house. One thing I always do is “fix” my hair.
Even today, an acceptable appearance in public includes hair that looks trimmed, combed, and arranged (sometimes in a carefully tousled style). When someone appears in public with loose, tangled, unkempt hair, it means something: either a loss of self-respect, or a disregard for social norms because something bigger commands all of the person’s attention.
The sotah (the wife suspected of adultery) is shamed, stripped of her self-respect, when the priest unbinds her hair. The nazir indicates with his wild hair that his attention is on spiritual communion rather than social intercourse. And the mourner’s long, loose hair signals that he or she is too overwhelmed by the death in the family to engage in normal society.
Hair is a more important symbol than I realized before I wrote this blog. The hippies of my youth were onto something.
Wendy’s Comment: I enjoy Reb Melissa’s commentary on the symbolism of hair. What is
also interesting to me is that both men and women could take the vow of the Nazir so that women’s unbound hair could also be a sign of holiness in this case.
From AJR/CA
Parshat Naso
Torah Reading for Week of May 16 – May 22, 2010
“The Blessings We Desire”
by Yolande Bloomstein, PhD, LCSW
AJR, CA Professor of Chaplaincy Studies
“Thus shall you bless the children of Israel. Say unto them: May the Lord bless you and protect you. May the Lord cause His Presence to illuminate you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord raise up His Presence before you and grant you peace.” (Numbers 6: 23 -25).
This is probably the best known blessing in the Western world, invoked regularly in synagogues and churches. Because of its rich cadences and power, interpretations on its three parts abound. I should like to offer a synthesis of many of these great commentaries.
‘May the Lord bless you” with material sustenance to free you to pursue your personal and spiritual growth. “And protect you’ from your material blessings. The danger of material success and the accumulation of wealth and material goods is that these may become ends in themselves, easily corrupting us and encouraging selfishness, greed, and corruption. Therefore, while we pray that the Lord will bless us with abundance, we pray too that we will be protected from the terrible things that abundance can do to us.
“May the Lord cause His Presence to illuminate”. Many of our Sages have associated this part of the blessing with our prayer for the illumination of insight and understanding. Not only does this follow from the first part of the blessing, but it captures the Jewish ideal of the pursuit of Torah enlightenment. Before we recite the Shema each morning we ask: “Illuminate our eyes with your Torah”. “And grant you grace.” One of the major aspects of the therapeutic relationship is the insight and understanding it gives simultaneously to client and to therapist in the process of healing and growth. Unfortunately, like wealth, Knowledge, too, can be corrupting. It can lead to arrogance, hubris, and the exploitation of the gullible. It is for this reason that we pray that the wisdom that G-d grants us will be used with grace, to benefit others rather than ourselves alone. “May the Lord raise up His Presence before you”. The commentators associate this part of the priestly blessing with our prayer that the Lord be palpably present in our lives protecting us and guiding us with divine providence. The Torah imagines nothing worse than the absence of the Divine from our lives-hester panim, the hiddeness of the Presence. Ultimately it is only when we are conscious of the protecting love of the divine Presence can we be assured of the fulfillment of the final clause of the blessing, “And grant you peace.
This is the law of the nazir on the day that the days of his abstention are completed… (6:13)
Once, in the early days of Chassidism, a learned Jew happened upon a farbrengen (a Chassidic gathering). Taking in the sight of half-empty vodka bottles on the table, of Jews singing and dancing instead of studying Torah, he cried: “Jews! The Holy Temple is in ruins, Israel is in exile, and you dance and drink?!”
Present at the farbrengen was Rabbi Dovid Ferkus, a senior disciple of the Baal Shem Tov. “I have a question for you,” said Rabbi Dovid to the visitor. “In one place, Rashi writes that a nazir’s vow to abstain from wine is an appropriate reaction for one who witnesses human susceptibility to corruption by physical appetites. But only a few verses later, Rashi quotes the Talmudic opinion which regards the nazir’s abstinence as a sin. Which is it? Is drinking wine a positive or a negative thing to do?
“Ill tell you the difference between the two cases,” continued Rabbi Dovid. “The first statement by Rashi is addressed to one who ‘sees a sotah’s ruin.’ A person who is capable of seeing the negative in a fellow Jew, had better not drink wine. Wine will agitate his heart, and he’ll probably be roused to discover more failings and deficiencies in his fellows. But someone who is blessed with the ability to see only the good in his fellow, for him to avoid getting together with other Jews for a lechaim! is nothing less than sinful. An infusion of wine into his heart will stimulate it to uncover the hidden good in the hearts of his fellows.”
The one who offered his offering on the first day was Nachshon the son of Aminadav, of the tribe of Judah. And his offering was: One silver dish, weighing 130 shekels. One silver bowl of 70 shekels… On the second day offered Nethanel the son of Tzuar, of the tribe of Issachar. And his offering was: One silver dish, weighing 130 shekels. One silver bowl of 70 shekels… (7:12-23)
The Torah is very mincing with words: many a complex chapter of Torah law is derived from a choice of context, a turn of language, even an extra letter. Yet in our Parshah, the Torah seemingly “squanders” dozens of verses by itemizing the gifts brought by the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel on the occasion of the inauguration of the Sanctuary. Each tribe brought its offering on a different day, but the gifts they each brought were identical in every respect, down to the weight of the silver plate and the age of the five lambs. Nevertheless, the Torah recounts each tribe’s gift separately, repeating the 35-item list twelve times in succession.
The Midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah 13 & 14) implies that while the twelve tribes made identical offerings, each experienced the event in a different manner. Each of the 35 items in the offering symbolized something–a personality or event in Jewish history, or a concept in Jewish faith or practice–but to each tribe, they symbolized different things, relating to that tribe’s role. For the twelve tribes represent the various vocations amongst the people of Israel–Judah produced Israel’s kings, leaders and legislators; Issachar its scholars; Zebulun its seafarers and merchants, and so on. All conform to the same Divinely ordained guidelines, all order their lives by the same Torah; yet each flavors the very same deeds with his individual nature and approach.
Often, we tend to see a tension between conformity and creativity, between tradition and innovation. On the one hand, we recognize the bedrock of absolutes upon which a meaningful existence must rest, the time-tested truths which transcend cultures and generations; on the other, we are faced with the powerful drive to create, to personalize, to grow and soar with our individualized talents and tools.
Our daily prayers, for example, follow the basic text instituted by the prophets and sages of the Great Assembly more than 2,400 years ago; as such, their content and wording optimally express the manner in which man relates to G-d. Yet how is the individual in man to be satisfied with a common formula for every person?
Is monotony the price we must pay for perfection? Does creativity compromise truth? Not so, say the 72 “repetitious” verses in our Parshah. An entire nation, including individuals of every conceivable character and calling, can do the very same deed, down to every last detail, and still imbue them with their uniquely personal input. Even as they relate to the ultimate common denominator of their bond with G-d, they each bring to the experience the richness of their own creative souls.
(The Lubavitcher Rebbe)
—————————————————————————————————
And when Moses would enter the Sanctuary to speak with [G-d], he would hear the voice speaking to him from above the cover of the Ark of Testimony… and it spoke to him (7:89)
A basic tenet of the Jewish faith is that man has been granted the freedom to choose between good and evil, between adherence to his divinely ordained mission in life and rebellion against, or even denial of, his Creator. As Maimonides writes, “Were G-d to decree that a person be righteous or wicked, of if there were to exist something in the essence of a person’s nature which would compel him toward a specific path, a specific conviction, a specific character trait or a specific deed…how could G-d command us through the prophets ‘do this’ and ‘do not do this’…? What place would the entire Torah have? And by what measure of justice would G-d punish the wicked and reward the righteous…?”
This is the deeper significance of the “short stop” made by the divine voice at the doorway of the Sanctuary. At Sinai, the words “I Am G-d your G-d” resounded throughout the universe, permeating every creature and creation. At that moment, there was no possibility of doubt in G-d’s reality or of nonconformity to His will. But then the world fell silent, and the voice retreated to hover over the “Ark of Testimony” that contains G-d’s Torah and to confine itself to the four walls of the Sanctuary that houses it.
The volume was not lowered—the voice is no less infinite and omnipotent than it was at Sinai. One who enters the Sanctuary hears a voice that penetrates and permeates all, a voice that knows no bounds or equivocations. But one can choose to remain outside of the domain of Torah, to deny himself the knowledge and the way of life in which G-d makes Himself heard. One can choose to remain outside, in the field of G-d’s self-imposed silence.
It is this choice that creates the challenge of life, making our every moral victory a true and significant achievement.
Bread and bitter water (Radical Torah repost)
Here’s the d’var Torah I wrote for this week’s portion back in 2006, originally published at Radical Torah.
This week’s Torah portion, Naso, features one of the most fascinatingly bizarre rulesets in Torah: the ritual to be performed if a husband suspects his wife of adultery.
The sotah ritual is strangely magical. The priest mixes “sacral water” and earth from the floor of the Tabernacle. The woman suspected of adultery must bare her head, and she holds the couple’s meal offering in her hands. (When else do women hold offerings to Adonai?) The priest offers a series of blessings and curses — if the woman is innocent let her be immune to harm; if she is guilty may her belly and thigh sag — and the woman echoes them with an “amen.” And then the curses are written down, the ink dissolved in the water which already holds a smidgen of earth, the offerings offered, and the woman drinks. If she is innocent, the text tells us, she shall bear children; if guilty, the curse will come true, and she will bear her iniquity.
That this is a problematic text for women today hardly needs reiteration. There is no analagous ritual to be performed by a woman who suspects her husband of straying. Female sexuality here is apparently owned by men, both husband and priests, and the text seems to presume feminine guilt. But this passage is not irredeemable, and a variety of thinkers have spun the straw of this text into exegetical gold.
One of these is Blu Greenberg, who writes, in The Law of the Sotah:
On the surface, and to a woman of contemporary sensibilities, this scene is awful; a jealous husband hauling his wife before the authorities, a humiliating public ritual, gory consequences. Some have used these verses to prove how Torah and tradition deprecate women.
But Sotah is much more complex than that. In many ways it is a paradigm for the dialectic regarding women that runs through Torah and Talmud — simultaneously hierarchical and protective, callous and compassionate.
She argues that the text can be read in at least two ways — though it’s possible to see this as an anti-feminist text which presupposes male ownership of female sexuality, it’s also possible to see the Sotah ritual as designed to painlessly prove womens’ innocence. Beyond that, she suggests that in the Talmud’s move to supercede this ritual we can discern a kind of proto-feminist consciousness, an awareness that gender roles and paradigms needed to change.
Reform rabbi Judith Abrams has wise things to say about this passage, too. In Midah K’Neged Midah, Rabbi Abrams explores the sotah ritual through the fourfold lens of PaRDeS, looking at the text’s pshat (simple meaning), remez (symbolic meaning), drash (the stories it tells us), and sod (the metaphors it can unfold for us.)
The sotah ritual, she points out, is strikingly similar to the ritual the Israelites undergo after the sin of the golden calf (which involves grinding the calf into dust, mixing that into water, and drinking the resultant potion.) The passage about the golden calf potion uses the phrase “great sin.” In legal documents of that era, she explains, the term refers to adultery. But when the term appears in Torah, four of its six instances are explicit references not to marital adultery but to the spiritual adultery of idolatry. The Talmud explicitly compares these two passages, implying similarity between these two kinds of covenantal betrayal. Rabbi Abrams expands on that notion, reading the sotah ritual in a way that relates to the covenant between us and God:
If we are interpreting this ritual on a symbolic level as opposed to a practical or historical level, it becomes one of hope and reconciliation rather than judgment and severity. We, Israel, stray from God by worshipping idols or flirting with other faiths. When we do, we have a way of salvaging the relationship and reconfirming the relationship with God…
I like her point that in this passage about brokenness in our relationships with each other, we can find lessons about brokenness in our relationships with our Source — and also, about repair.
For my own part, this year while studying the parasha I noticed something which hadn’t struck me before: the nature of the offering the couple is to bring before God when the situation arises. In the JPS translation, the text says:
If any man’s wife has gone astray and broken faith with him in that a man has had carnal relations with her unbeknown to her husband, and she keeps secret the fact that she has defiled herself without being forced, and there is no witness against her but a fit of jealousy 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 man shall bring his wife to the priest. And he shall bring as an offering for her one-tenth of an ephah of barley flour. No oil shall be poured upon it and no frankincense shall be laid on it, for it is a meal offering of jealousy, a meal offering of remembrance which recalls wrongdoing.
I’m fascinated that the barley flour brought as an offering in this instance is not anointed with oil, nor glorified with frankincense, because it is an offering of jealousy. (Everett Fox calls it “a grain-gift of jealousy / grain-gift of reminding that reminds of iniquity.”) There’s a poetic kind of appropriateness to the lack of oil and spice. Jealousy negates what is rich and valuable and beautiful. When jealousy consumes us, we are dulled in a way that obscures the flavor of our relationships, even our relationship with God.
In the ritual outlined by Torah, the woman who stands accused drinks a literal water of bitterness, in which dust and the words of a curse have been suspended. But the way the text describes the jealousy offering suggests to me that in truth, both partners partook of bitterness. When an accusation of sexual misconduct is levied, neither partner can truly access the splendor of thanksgiving or holiness until the fears of betrayal have been laid to rest.
Today the Sotah ritual is long gone. A spouse who suspects infidelity has different resources at her or his disposal. But I think this week’s Torah portion hints at emotional truths that still resonate even so. Maybe the story of the Sotah can help us face jealousy’s capacity to damage our relationships, and can give us insight into the necessary journey (both personal and partnered) between accusation and resolution.
This portion gives us the ancient Priestly Blessing. It also describes the ordeal of the woman who is accused of unfaithfulness by her jealous husband.
THE BLESSING
AT THIS TIME OF NASO we give and receive the great and ancient Priestly Blessing. Our arms are outstretched above the tumult of our lives and our hands imitate cloven hooves, invoking the power of the animals of our shepherding ancestors who bless this world through us.
God commands the priests (and the priest or priestess within each of us) to bless each other with these words:
“May God bless you and guard you.
May God shine his faces upon you and grace you.
May God lift up his face to you and give you peace.”1
May you be filled with the Divine Flow
and may its essence transform you
so that you are protected from your habits of distortion.
May the fierce and loving light of God shine
through all illusions of self, dissolving the walls
that seem to keep out the miracle of grace.
May the face of God that is hidden in everything
remove its mask and reveal the truth
of our inter-connectedness.
And may the love that shines through
the face-of-all-things give you peace.
The Divine command concludes: “So shall they put my name upon the Israelites and I will bless them.”2
Through this blessing, God’s name – the Divine Essence – rests upon us.
The privilege of carrying the Name/Essence of God into the world is the greatest blessing we can bear. It is giving and receiving at once. It is the pure state of becoming and being a blessing. When I carry that essence consciously, every moment begins to sparkle with meaning – even moments of suffering, moments of terror, even the moment of my death….
Each moment is received by a heart that is as vast as the sea and alive with compassion. Carrying that Divine Essence is like being a drop that knows the ocean within it. The Divine Name/Essence makes us infinitely large, certainly big enough to absorb and endure the events of our lives.
THE SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE
NASO DESCRIBES A SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE that all of us must at some point endure. This challenge is symbolized by a woman who is accused of adultery by her jealous husband. She undergoes a test to determine if she has indeed been unfaithful.
That woman is each of us, married to the Divine Essential Mystery. Our relationship to that mystery is dynamic and complex: dynamic, because we are always moving in and out of connection – remembering, forgetting and remembering again; complex, because the ego is oftentimes engaged in a subtle (or not-so-subtle) practice of deception.
In the ordeal that Naso describes, we ask the truth to make itself known, even if it will make us uncomfortable. We ask to cut through the web of self-deception in order to discover if we have truly “gone astray.”
WHEN I WAS A CHILD I had frequent stomach-aches. I was outwardly very shy, but had an active inner life. As a teenager, I began to notice a pattern to my stomach-aches. Whenever I had something to say and didn’t say it, the unsaid words would immediately go to my stomach. My body would not let me withhold my truth without paying the price. My body became a strict teacher, and I listened to its signals in order to find my voice. I was the woman who had gone astray, set back on my path through the power of a fierce love.
When the woman who is tested in Naso proves her innocence, her loyalty to Truth, she is made fruitful; failing the test, she is left barren.
So too, our creative lives depend on the unwavering commitment to our essential wholeness and integrity, and we betray that integrity at our peril.
THE SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE of Naso is to receive the ordeals of our own lives as agents of Truth. Through them we are tested, humbled and refined. Our defenses are stripped away. We are distilled to our essence. In response to this challenge, I vow to use everything in my life, in service to the Truth – to let life’s bitter waters dissolve the web of self-deception that I weave. If I have been led astray by my fears or delusions, I ask that the flow of my life lead me back to the Truth.
This is no small request. Making such a request of life requires that we pay close attention and be prepared to receive the response in the language in which life speaks to us: that of everyday circumstances.
I HAVE LEARNED that this perspective on life must be limited to the personal. I do not have permission to see someone else’s life this way or to interpret their hardship as a gift. Compassion is the correct response to the suffering of others. The perception of my own ordeal, however, may be transformed into a force of healing and truth.
God commanded Aaron and his descendants, the kohanim, to bless the people with three special blessings:
“Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying: This is how you must bless the Israelites. Say to them:
•May God bless you and keep watch over you.
•May God make His presence enlighten you, and grant you grace.
•May God lift His face toward you, and grant you peace.” (Num. 6:23-26)
The last blessing, however, is not clear. What does it mean that God should “lift His face toward you”?
The Need for Leniency
While the first blessing refers to our physical welfare, the second blessing is concerned with our spiritual well-being. Spiritual enlightenment, however, brings with it additional responsibilities. As we gain knowledge and enlightenment, the expectations for ethical living, purity of thought, and refinement of character are greater.
If we consider the consequential moral demands, we may become apprehensive and even discouraged. In order to counter this concern, the kohanim bestow a third blessing, “May God lift His face towards you”.
To ‘lift one’s face’ is a Hebrew idiom, meaning to show favor or leniency. The Torah commands a judge, for example, not to ‘lift his face’ towards one of the litigants. The judge must be careful to avoid even the impression that he favors one side of the case, even though he is in reality impartial. The other litigant may feel that the case is already lost, and lose heart.
The kohanim bless us that, despite the ethical expectations that come with spiritual enlightenment, we should not lose heart. God will be lenient, taking into account the material reality in which we live.
We may, however, feel embarrassed or uncomfortable about this Divine leniency. Therefore, the final blessing ends with the gift of peace — peace of mind. “And grant you peace.”
The integrity of the family unit is of fundamental importance in Judaism. For this unit to function properly, the husband-wife relationship must be one of trust and constancy. But what happens when this trust, so vital for a healthy marriage, is broken?
The Torah discusses the situation of the Sotah, the suspected adulteress. This tragic case occurs when a woman, previously warned by her husband not to be alone with a particular man, violates his warning and is witnessed secluding herself with that man.
The Torah prescribes an unusual ceremony for the potentially explosive situation. The woman is brought to the entrance of the Temple, and she brings a special offering of barley meal. The kohen uncovers her hair, and administers to her a special oath. If the suspected adulteress insists on her innocence, the kohen lets her drink from the Sotah waters. If she was unfaithful to her husband, these waters poison her. But if the wife was in fact innocent, the waters are beneficial. “She will remain unharmed and will become pregnant” (Num. 5:28).
“She will become pregnant”
The sages disagreed on the exact nature of the positive effect of the Sotah waters. Rabbi Yishmael understood the verse literally: if she was barren, she became pregnant. Rabbi Akiva, however, disagreed. If that were the case, all childless women would purposely seclude themselves with another man and drink the Sotah waters, in order to bear children! Rather, Rabbi Akiva explained, the waters would ease the pain of child-birth, or make the babies healthier, or cause multiple births. (Berachot 31a)
Rabbi Akiva had a good point — the law of the Sotah could potentially turn the holy Temple into a fertility clinic. In fact, the Talmud tells us that one famous woman threatened to do just that. Hannah, the barren wife of Elkana, threatened to go through the Sotah process if her prayers for a child went unanswered. (Her prayers were in fact granted, and her son became the famous prophet Samuel.) How could Rabbi Yishmael say that the waters would cause barren women to bear children?
Rav Kook explained that the Temple ritual for suspected adulteresses was so degrading and terrifying, that no woman would willingly submit to it — not even a barren woman desperate for children.
Hannah’s exceptional yearning for a child
Hannah, however, was a special case.
This amazing woman foresaw that her child was destined for spiritual greatness. Hannah’s profound yearning for a child went far beyond the natural desire of a barren woman to have children. She was motivated by spiritual goals greater than her own personal needs and wants. Hannah felt that these spiritual ambitions alone might not be enough, so she was willing to actively demonstrate that her longing for a child surpassed the normal desire of a barren woman. Thus, Hannah was willing to undergo the ordeal of the Sotah ceremony. And by merit of her extraordinary yearning, her prayers were miraculously answered.
Only in this unusual case was the natural deterrent of the ordeal of the Sotah insufficient.
From JTS
NASO
BY : BENJAMIN D. SOMMER
The final verse of Parashat Naso is easy to miss. It comes after a long passage that describes the gifts the leader of each tribe presented at the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting (both names are used for the structure) in the wilderness. Twelve times we read six verses listing the exact same set of items donated from each tribe. The substantial amount of repetition may lead readers to lose some focus as they move through the passage. But Numbers 7:89, the verse that comes right after those twelve sets of six verses, is highly significant. It provides crucial information about the nature of revelation as understood by the kohanim (Priests) who wrote this section of the Torah.
Numbers 7:89 describes what transpires between God and Moses at the Tent of Meeting. In doing so, it uses an unusual verb that I’ll leave untranslated for now:
When Moses came to the Tent of Meeting to speak with Him, he heard the voice middabbeir-ing to him from above the covering that was on top of Ark of the Covenant, from between the two kerubim, and He spoke to him.
To understand what the Torah tells us about God’s way of talking to Moses, we need to realize that the word our verse uses for God’s speaking, middabbeir, is quite rare. It is related to another verb that means “speak,” m’dabbeir, which appears over a thousand times in the Bible. But the verb middabbeir shows up only three or four times in the Bible.[1] The grammatical construction of the verb as it appears in our verse is known as the hitpa’el (whereas the much more frequent construction, m’dabbeir, is known as a pi’el verb).[2] The hitpa’el construction carries several types of meaning. It describes a reciprocal action—that is, action that goes back and forth between two parties. (In modern Hebrew, the verb mitkatteiv, “correspond, exchange mail,” is an example of this use of the hitpa’el verb.) If middabbeir conveys that sort of meaning in our verse, then, it refers to communication that moves back and forth between God and Moses. In this case, the Priestly author of our verse is telling us that the revelation of the law was not just a top-down affair; it involved some degree of dialogue between God and Moses. This conception of revelation fits well with five other Priestly passages in the Torah, where Moses and the Israelites request clarification from God on specific points of law and God responds by producing new legislation that answers the questions they ask. This Priestly picture of lawgiving as being at least in part dialogical, as involving some sort of human input and not just divine decree, may be indicated in our verse through the hitpa’el verb it uses.
Additional possibilities exist as well. Sometimes the hitpa’el construction conveys ongoing action, which suggests that we can translate our verb, “he would hear the voice continually speaking to him,” “he would hear the voice as it went on speaking to him.” (This understanding is suggested by the modern biblical commentators Baruch Levine and Everett Fox.) Further, the construction often conveys a reflexive meaning—that is, it describes an action that people do to themselves. This possibility leads Rashi to suggest that this voice “would speak to itself, and Moses would hear on his own”—that is, at the Tent, Moses somehow attained access to God’s internal ruminations. These various meanings, it should be clear, are not mutually exclusive; it’s possible that all of them or several of them are implied at once in Numbers 7:89.
By choosing this rare hitpa’el verb to explain what took place when God communicated with Moses, our text suggests that this communication was not a simple matter of speaking in the way that humans speak. A voice that entails both giving and taking information, or one that allows for continuous rather than punctual communication, or for overhearing internal dialogue, is not a voice speaking in any normal sense of the word. The phrasing of our verse indicates that its description applies to all the times God communicated laws to Moses. It informs us that whatever communication transpired when Moses went to the Tent differs from what happens when one human talks to another human. In its own subtle and allusive way, then, Numbers 7:89 is making a significant theological claim similar to one that Maimonides would much later expound in The Guide of the Perplexed: God doesn’t literally speak, and whenever the Torah refers to God as “speaking,” we need to understand that something much more complex and mysterious was occurring.
This sense is especially strong in one other possible meaning of our verb. The hitpa’el construction can denote simulation—that is, it can be used when the subject of the verb acts as if he were doing something. For example, in 2 Samuel 13:5 the verb mitḥalleh means “pretend to be sick”; in Genesis 42:7 and 1 Kings 14:5–6, the verb mitnakkeir means “act like a stranger.” If our verse employs this sense of the hitpa’el construction, then our narrative is indicating that “speaking” is not something that the deity really does, and whenever the narrator attaches the verb “speak” to the subject “God,” it intends something different from that verb’s usual meaning. God’s “speaking” is something that only a prophet has experienced, and therefore something for which no word exists among us non-prophets who make up the narrative’s audience. My use of quotes in the previous sentence, in fact, may be exactly what the Priestly authors of our passage intend when they use the strange hitpa’el form of this verb: it reminds us that God’s “speaking” is not really speaking at all.
In that case, mattan Torah or lawgiving did not involve God literally pronouncing or writing the words we find in the Torah. God’s commands to the nation Israel were not conveyed in language, and one of the most important roles played by Moses, by the prophets who came after him, and by the sages who succeeded them, has been to translate God’s communications into human terms. The process of parshanut or interpretation, then, did not begin after the revelation of the Torah. Instead, interpretation was part of the ongoing, dialogical process of revelation itself. Interpretation is not only an activity that is performed on the Torah; interpretation helped to create the Torah. We read each day in the paragraph that precedes the Shema in the Morning Service that all Jews have the responsibility of studying and teaching the law, fulfilling it and guarding it. When we do so, we continue Moses’ work: by studying and interpreting the law, we contribute to the ongoing process of creating the law anew. Since we celebrated the holiday of Shavuot, the season of the giving of the law, earlier this week, now is a good time to think about this lesson from the little-noticed but highly important verse that concludes our parashah.
From Rabbi Gershon Winkler
The Wholeness of Fragments
A Teaching from Gershon
In the Hebrew Scriptural Book of Bamidbar (Numbers), members of the Israelite tribe of Leyvee are recorded as having been assigned to carry the sacred implements of the Mishkan (portable finite venue of the Infinite), as well as the Tent of Meeting and the Ark of the Covenant.
However, when we pulled up camp to continue our journey, we were warned not to witness the disassembling of the Mishkan, the taking-apart of the sacred implements and the structure in which they were kept, or we could die (Numbers 4:20).
Only the Kohanim (priests) alone were designated to disassemble the Mishkan, but anyone else was warned not to come anywhere near this event, let alone observe it. Rather, all of the parts were covered with blue-dyed dolphin skins before being handed over to the Levites, so that the only thing the carriers of the Mishkan got to see was pretty sky-blue decorated tapestry (Numbers 4:11). Blue — the color of the infinitely wide expanses of the heavens as well as their reflection in the sea below — the window, so to speak, to the One Creator of the Many.
There is a lot of practical wisdom in all of this, a wisdom which sets the stage for the instructions that follow, cascading from the warning not to watch the disassembling of the Mishkan, to the quarantining of contagiously-diseased individuals, to rituals of restitution, to dealing with paranoid husbands who suspect their wives of having affairs, to people bent on taking vows of abstinence – and then concluding with the priestly blessings and a brief note on how Moses would hear the Voice of Creator from the empty space between the Cherubic sculptures that sat atop the Ark of the Covenant.
But isn’t it so?
That if you have witnessed wholeness, completeness, an intact system of things, whether it is the efficiently-erected edifice of the Mishkan, or the well-oiled structure of our society, our economy, our values, and then suddenly we watch it all come apart — that what we’d imagined as immutable and unbreakable suddenly becomes disassembled into parts, shattering our vision of the Whole, then – yes – we can “die” in that our faith can ebb away, as can our hopes, our sense of security, our trust in one another, our worldview. We can easily slip-slide into disconnect which can in turn implode into getting sick, or wreaking havoc, or becoming suspicious of those we once trusted, or even distancing ourselves from this world altogether by detaching ourselves from it!
But the Torah here reminds us not to get caught-up in the chaos of the disassembly, in watching what we once knew as Whole come apart. Rather, we are to focus on the sky-blue of the expanse that overlays it all, and be thereby reminded that the wholeness of life is infinitely far more vast than its parts, and not to become overly focused on the parts to the neglect of the whole. Like Abraham Joshua Heschel once said: “Disregard of the fullness of what transpires leads to the danger of regarding the part as the whole” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 162).
And so, the Torah continues with the Kohanic blessings (Numbers 6:22-26), as in “We interrupt this scripture to bring you the following messages: (1) Yevare’che’cha — focus on the blessings you have right now, on what is NOT wrong, what is NOT hurting, what has NOT come apart; (2) Ya’er — keep the light burning, the light of joy, the light of hope, the light of possibility. And finally: (3) Yee’sa — lift your head up high, high above that which seeks to bring you down from your vision of a better tomorrow.
And if the images are too vivid, and the visuals too disturbing for you, remember that although Moses would face toward the images of the Cherubim when he sought the comfort and counsel of Creator, the Voice always responded to him not from the images themselves but from the empty space between them. He understood that the Presence resides in the Absence, and that, in the words of the 2nd-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yo’hai: “There is no light as brilliant as that which emerges from out of the Dark.”
And so, just like the Levites of 3,400 years ago, we are today challenged to carry the fragments scattered around us with our eyes focused on the blue, on the deep knowing and faith that the parts will one day become reassembled again; and that until they do, to remember always that wholeness itself is made up entirely of fragments.
From My Jewish Learning
Birkat Kohanim — Blessing of the Priests or of the Community?
How the Priestly Blessing is manifested within the community’s needs.
BY RACHEL FARBIARZ
Parashat Nasso provides the script for one of the more penetrating segments of the Hebrew liturgy — the birkat kohanim, or priestly blessing. Over the millennia, this benediction has remained a seminal means of invoking the Divine in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. In this Torah portion, God dictates the blessing to Moses, who is to teach it to Aaron and his sons, the kohanim, or priests:
May God bless you and guard you.
May God make God’s face shine upon you and grant grace to you.
May God lift up God’s face to you and give you peace (Numbers 6:22-26).
At the Sephardic synagogue in which I was raised, Shabbat mornings were punctuated by the eerie call-and-response of the benediction and the congregation’s hopeful rejoinder: “May it be God’s will.” Integral to the priests’ recitation were the rituals accompanying the blessing that seemed to suspend kohanim and congregation together in a humbled thrall.
Recitation of the Priestly Blessing
At a specified time in the service, the community’s kohanim discreetly excused themselves to perform their preparatory ablutions. The faint sound of the priests’ shuffling was followed by a call-to-attention — Koh-Haahh-Neeeeeem! –summoning them to their posts before the ark. The men of the congregation gathered their children and their children’s children under the prayer shawls they had drawn over their heads.
The kohanim faced them, cloaked too in their billowing shawls. Their arms outstretched, their fingers extended and conjoined in the cultic v-shape, the priests swayed and chanted the blessing–distending its syllables, trilling its notes. Only after the kohanim had finished the blessing did the face-off of masquerading ghosts end: Modestly, the priests turned their backs to the congregation and took down their shawls, unveiling themselves before the ark.
I actually was not supposed to have witnessed any of this. All of us, kohanim and congregation alike, were to have had our eyes closed or averted downward, to shield ourselves–it is traditionally said–from the awesome power that emanated from between the kohanim’s fingers. I have always suspected though that we protected ourselves not only from the Divine, but also from something very human: the tendency to turn an act of blessing into an act that invests one group with power at the expense of the other.
The Blessing Resides in the Community
The tented shawls, the downcast gazes, shield the community from the inevitable psychological contortions that easily transform a blessing into an act that underscores the hierarchy between blesser and blessed.
The benediction is therefore given and received blindly. The kohanim cannot see those upon whom they confer God’s blessing and the congregation cannot identify the priests who have done so. Rather than simply given or received, the blessing is instead resident within a community of both givers and receivers. The heavy presence of this shared blessing, I would proffer, helps explain the palpable mystery that is experienced as kohanim and congregation emerge together from beneath their shawls.
The aspiration to draw forth the shared blessing resident within a community is a defining feature of the posture taken by organizations, such as AJWS, in their pursuit of global development and justice through grassroots work. Grassroots work means facilitating change that is realized from within the community that seeks it. The goal is not to achieve blessing via the roles of priest and congregant, blesser and blessed. Rather, it is to discover together the blessing that already lives there–forged by a community’s own needs, developed according to its own vision, and pursued via the methods it itself identifies.
The Illusion of Blindness
Of course, the cultivated blindness of the birkat kohanim is in many ways an illusion. We are shielded from the priests’ faces, but we know their identities from other liturgical encounters–such as the calling of the kohanim to the Torah–that are plainly public.
Through these encounters there is thus an already-intact hierarchy of ritual status, in which kohanim are separated and elevated from the congregation of Israel. In the moment of blessing, however, we invoke the illusion of blindness –choosing to shed, or at least mask, the hierarchical relationship that is elsewhere respected.
We strive to cultivate similar illusions in pursuing global justice through grassroots work. Inevitably, there are power imbalances between those who give and those who receive aid and assistance. But through grassroots engagement we gesture toward blindness. We pull our shawls over our heads and turn our eyes downward in an effort to undo the hierarchy between giver and receiver, to render ourselves both recipients and givers of blessing.
May it be God’s will that when we emerge from beneath our shawls, we — givers and recipients alike — find our global community rife with blessing: guarded from harm, infused with grace, and joyful in its peace.
Provided by American Jewish World Service, pursuing global justice through grassroots change.
From My Jewish Learning
Princely Gifts
The princes’ gifts to the Tabernacle illustrate important principles of leadership and methods of balancing personal and communal needs.
BY RABBI SHIMON FELIX
This week’s Torah portion continues to discuss the arrangements for the trek the Jewish nation is about to make through the desert to the Land of Israel. The Levites, who are responsible for transporting the Tabernacle, are counted, and their work-load is apportioned among them. This is followed by a number of laws concerning ritual purity, aimed at keeping the encampment pure, and a number of other laws whose placement here seems odd and which I will not talk about.
Then, towards the end of the portion, after everything seems to have been arranged, and the nation should be ready to start to make its way to the promised land, with the Tabernacle in place at the center of the camp and all the tribes arranged appropriately around it as they travel through the desert, the nesi’im, the leaders of the twelve tribes, suddenly approach Moses.
They bring him a gift — “six covered wagons and twelve cattle, a wagon for every two leaders and an ox for each one, and they brought them near to the Tabernacle.” Moses is unsure what to do with this voluntary gift, until God tells him: “Take these from them, that they may be for the work of the Tent of Meeting, and give them to the Levites, each man according to his work-load.” Moses then apportioned the wagons and oxen among the Levites, according to the amount of material from the Tabernacle that they had to transport.
A Voluntary Gift
This voluntary, spontaneous gift to the Levites on the part of the heads of the tribes contains many interesting messages. First of all, we have the theme of the Torah’s ‘leaving space.’ After dozens, no, hundreds, of verses relating to the way the Tabernacle should be designed, constructed and transported, there was still room left for improvement–still room for a new, innovative technological (!) way to make the work of transporting the parts of the Tabernacle easier and more efficient.
This is not the only occasion on which the Torah seems to leave space in this way for suggestions, improvements, challenges, or changes to the orders handed down by God to the people through Moses. In an interesting parallel, Rashi points out that the heads of the 12 tribes, as leaders, also ‘left space’ for the Jewish people, the people they were leading, in which to act. Rashi explains that all through the process of donating materials for the Tabernacle — the silver, gold, fabrics, and other materials needed — the nesi’im are not mentioned. This is because they did not, as nesi’im, bring any specific donations. Instead, Rashi tells us, they held back, leaving room for the people to act first and bring what they could, thinking that they, the leaders, would fill in later whatever was missing.
They were surprised that the people brought as much as they did; at the end of the process there was very little left for them to donate. This, according to Rashi, is the reason why they hurried to bring the gifts of the wagons and oxen; to fill a gap that they perceived, before one of the people did. The nesi’im wanted this opportunity, which, until now, because of their leadership style, they had not had, to bring something of their own for the Tabernacle.
This model of leadership, wherein those in charge leave room for their ‘followers’ to act, and see themselves as being there only to do whatever is left undone, is a fascinating one. I have often thought about parenting in this way–the challenge is to leave space for your kids to do the right thing on their own. The Jewish people, at this early sage of their nationhood, were getting some very good parenting.
A former teacher of mine, Rabbi Jay Miller, once compared the Ari’s (16th century Safed) Kabbalistic model of the creation of the world to parenting. God has to do an act of tzimtzum–shrinking, contracting–in order to make room for something other than himself to exist–that something being the created universe. Parents, too, must do an act of tzimtzum in order to leave space for their children to function and grow. The difficulty that the nesi’im had with this, when they saw that their ‘children’, the people of Israel, had gone ahead and done just about everything for themselves, leaving them to scramble to try and find some area where thy could make a contribution, is interesting and beautiful.
There is also the theme of egalitarianism, and brotherhood. The Levites are assisted in their role in the Tabernacle by the rest of the people; the nesi’im, representing their tribes, act sensitively, and in harmony, to make the Levites’ work easier. In this way, the entire nation has an ongoing stake in the day-to-day functioning of God’s Temple. The S’forno (15th-16th century Italy) also points out that having every two nesi’im give one ox is another sign of cooperation and brotherhood.
After this section, the nesi’im again approach Moses, with yet another voluntary gift. Each one of the 12 nesi’im brings a series of animal and vegetable sacrifices to be offered on the altar, along with vessels that they donate to the Tabernacle. Once again, Moses is nonplussed, until God gives him the go-ahead, and orders each one of the nesi’im to bring his sacrifice separately, one day at a time. What is the purpose of this second round of unbidden gifts? Why did the nesi’im bring them? What need do they serve, what hitherto un-thought role do they play?
Rashi’s Explanation
Rashi has a beautiful explanation: “After they offered the wagons and cattle used to transport the Tabernacle, their hearts moved them to volunteer these sacrifices to dedicate the altar.” The language Rashi uses is highly suggestive. If their first batch of giving — the wagons and the oxen — was essentially a response to a real need that the Levites had, this second round is an answer to an inner need on the part of the nesi’im to give. The nesi’im inspired themselves: they were moved by their unselfish, creative, sensitive and brotherly act of giving to give more.
Moses was at first unsure of how to respond to this. God’s response–let them bring the sacrifices, one day at a time–seems to not only accept the spontaneous gift of each nasi, but to spotlight it, individualize it. God’s decision to give each nasi a separate day in which to bring his sacrifice seems to underscore the individuality of each gift. This, in spite of the fact that they all gave the exact same thing.
The Torah, in fact, at the very end of our portion, goes through the same list, twelve times, of animals and incense and grain offerings and utensils that each one of the leaders brought. This seemingly unnecessary repetition of the same list of offerings creates, I think, a balance. A balance between the individual expression of each nasi’s desire to give of himself to the Tabernacle — underscored by each nasi getting his own day and his own separate mention–and the collective nature of their act — they all originally approached Moses together and they all give the exact same thing.
This balance between the individual and the collective, between the urge to stand out from and the urge to be a part of, is a balance that all of us must struggle to achieve in our personal and communal lives.
From Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies
Shabbat Parashat Naso
By: Rabbi Adam Greenwald
Have You Seen My Alps?
A story is told of Rabbi Sampson Raphael Hirsch (Germany, 1808-1888), the intellectual giant behind the founding of contemporary Orthodox Judaism: It is said that late in his life, the old rabbi surprised his students by scheduling himself a long trip to Switzerland. When they inquired about why he insisted on making such a journey, he replied:
“Soon, I will stand before the Almighty. I will be held answerable to many questions. But, what will I say when I am asked, ‘Shimson, my son, it is true you did many mitzvot, but did you also remember to see My Alps?”
The Jewish tradition indeed contains within it many rules – foods that we are told to abstain from eating, activities that are not to be done on Shabbat and holidays, and other ways in which we are supposed to limit ourselves in the name of a larger holiness. Yet, it would be wrong to characterize Judaism as an ascetic tradition. Quite the opposite – ours is a community that is taught to celebrate life and to bless the beauty and bounty of this world. With very few exceptions in our 3,000-year religious history we have had no monastic ideal; in fact, the Sages of the Talmud had harsh words for those who chose to remove themselves from the ordinary pleasures of daily life.
This attitude in particular comes to play concerning a peculiar category of religious vows described in this week’s Torah portion – the vow of the nazir. A nazirite was a person who elected to undertake a period of self-denial, avoiding wine and cutting their hair, abstaining from mourning rites, even if they were to lose a close member of their family. At the conclusion of the nazirite’s vow, they were instructed to bring a sin offering to the Temple (Number 6:10-11), before resuming ordinary life.
The Rabbis ask, why does the Torah specify that the nazirite must bring a “sin” offering? In what way were they suspected of having sinned? The answer: the act of asceticism itself is a sin, as the Talmud states: “Is it not enough what the Torah has forbidden you that you wish to forbid yourself more things?” (Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9:1). Maimonides echoes this sentiment in his comment on the verse in Ecclesiastes: “Be not over-righteous” (7:6), stating: “No one should, by vow or oath, forbid themselves that which has otherwise been permitted” (Mishneh Torah, Deot 3:1). On the basis of this overwhelming attitude of disdain for voluntary self-denial, the institution the nazir vow vanished from Jewish life nearly two millennia ago.
We often find so-called religious voices equating pleasure with sin, and denouncing things of “this world” as unholy distractions from “the next.” Yet, this is not the normative approach of the Jewish tradition. Instead, we are called upon to offer blessings while standing at the seashore and upon seeing a rainbow, to feast and dance at the myriad celebrations that punctuate our calendar, and to make sure – if we haven’t visited them yet – to get a look at God’s Alps. When our time comes, we don’t want to have visited this world without having taken the time to catch that magnificent view.
From JTS
Going to the Head of the Prayer Line
NASO
BY Rabbi JOEL ALTER,
Sharp elbows at shul extend beyond the kiddush table line and back into the sanctuary. Prayer—or giving honor to God—can be a competitive business. There are lots of reasons why this is so, and some of them even have to do with loving God. But showing off how we love God can get us into trouble. Against this background, let’s consider Numbers, chapter 7, the concluding chapter of Parashat Naso.
At 89 verses, chapter 7 is a wall of words, built mostly from 12 near-identical blocks. Each block records the same gift brought by each of the 12 nesi’im—chieftains of the 12 Tribes of Israel—on 12 successive days to join in dedicating the Mishkan (Tabernacle) upon the inauguration of its service. On the first day, Nahshon ben Aminadav, nasi chieftain of the Tribe of Judah, brings a bowl, a basin, and a ladle, and a specific array of 21 animals for the Levites’ sheepfold and pens. On the second day, Netanel ben Tzu’ar, nasi of the Tribe of Issachar, brings the same, as does Eliav ben Helon of Zevulun on the third day. While my increasingly terse telling about each day’s gift is efficient and still clear, the Torah chooses to recount each gift with elaborate, repetitive precision.
The dignified procession of nesi’im, each stepping forward in turn to present their dedicatory offerings on their appointed days, seems the very model of serene, noncompetitive equality. Robert Alter (no relation) writes,
This passage is . . . a kind of epic inventory. Each of the tribes, here accorded absolutely equal status before the sanctuary without political hierarchy, brings exactly the same offering. One can readily imagine that the members of each tribe in the ancient audience of this text would be expected to relish the sumptuousness of its own tribal offering exactly equal to all the others, as it hears the passage read. (The Five Books of Moses, 716–717)
No sharp elbows here. Why else would the Torah tell of it thus, rather than in shorthand? The Torah does not quite answer this question, but it gives us clues. The Rabbis, characteristically, leap upon them.
First, while the nesi’im assemble their gifts on their own initiative (Num. 7:10), it is God who instructs Moshe to have them offered on 12 successive days. If God wants the presentation so evenly arranged, then the Torah rightly records it in discrete portions. But there are other hints. Of the 12 nesi’im involved, Nahshon, the giver on the first day, is the only one not recognized as a nasi in our passage. We know he is a nasi from last week’s Parashat Bemidbar (1:16, 2:3), yet here he is named without his title (7:12). The commentator Hezekiah ben Manoah, known as the Hizkuni, points out: “Nahshon is not called nasi here so that his being first to offer the sacred gift would not go to his head, while all the others are called nesi’im because they humbled themselves in offering their gifts after his.” Hizkuni recognizes that the nesi’im are dignified men deserving of (and possibly accustomed to) tribute, and that the opportunity to publicly honor God might play on their pride. So the Torah manages the chieftains’ prestige with careful application of their honorifics.
While Netanel ben Tzu’ar’s gift on the second day is the same as Nahshon’s on the first, the Rabbis pick up on a variation in the telling. Everett Fox’s distinct translation best conveys the redundancy in the Hebrew: “On the second day, Netanel son of Tzu’ar, leader [nasi] of Yissakhar, brought-(it)-near; he brought-near [my italics] his near-offering.” Fox is indicating that the Torah employs the verb hikriv (“offered” or “brought near”) twice with Netanel, when for all the other nesi’im, it uses it but once. Remember, this passage is all about what Alter calls “verbatim repetition.” Midrash Rabbah 13:15 asks,
Why is hikriv used in connection with Netanel? Because Reuven lodged a complaint when he saw that the tribe of Issachar was to make the second offering and not him: “It’s enough that Judah [Nahshon’s tribe] already precedes me in the marching order. But I should be able to make my offering according to birth order!”
A little explanatory context: in last week’s parashah, we learned how the tribes were encamped around the Mishkan, and that the Tribe of Judah was placed by God in the vanguard. In our midrash, we see that Reuven has no choice but to accept Judah’s priority position in that context, but he expects that his status as firstborn among Jacob’s sons/tribes will be recognized in the dedication ceremony for the Mishkan. Note that, while we might expect the nasi of Reuven to advocate for his own honor, the midrash places the complaint in the mouth of Reuven himself. This cannot mean what it says, though, as Reuven, the man, is long dead. Reuven, here, must be the personification of the tribe, probably in the person of its nasi, Elitzur ben Shedei’ur. The pride of the entire tribe is carried by its nasi.
But the appeal fails. In the midrash, Moshe rebukes “Reuven,” explaining that the order of the offerings is dictated by God, no less than the arrangement of the camp. The offerings are made by Judah, then Issachar, then Zevulun, and only then firstborn Reuven. So much for pride of place. It goes further, taking a different tack. It’s not an unassailable divine decree that puts Issachar before Reuven. Rather, Issachar demonstrates a piety that Reuven did not. He earns his place near the front of the line. How? We learn in the midrash that it is Issachar’s nasi who has the idea to organize all of the nesi’im to offer a group gift in the first place. He prompts them to give. (In the first verses of our chapter, the nesi’im give gifts collectively before they bring the offerings on behalf of their respective tribes.)
The “absolutely equal status” of the respective tribes and their nesi’im in this inauguration ceremony,then, barely contains the resentments and rivalries among them behind the scenes. Over what do the nesi’im contend? Is it their honor? God’s honor? The honor of honoring God? Yes.
Our passage calls to mind the disaster of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. No one told Cain to make an offering to God. He did so spontaneously out of love and gratitude. Abel was inspired by Cain. Did he intend to one-up his brother with a more lavish offering? Cain thought so. (Troublingly,) God favored Abel’s offering over Cain’s. For Cain, the demotion and rejection were intolerable.
Honoring God—in the Torah, often through material gifts, in our experience, often in prayer—is a high-stakes matter. Earlier in Midrash Rabbah (13:6), we learn in a gorgeous passage that God’s existential loneliness spurred God to create the world, and that, since Creation, God craved intimacy with humanity—a craving fully answered only with the establishment of the Mishkan. The procession of gifts from the nesi’im is like the procession of the bridal party at a wedding, weighted with love and longing. Those who perceive God’s yearning love, of course, want to reciprocate and proclaim their love for the world to see. That urge to proclaim can sometimes yield preening displays and, other times, motivate ugliness, even violence. Rising above the quibbling heard in the midrash, Numbers 7 portrays a community of individuals united in their love for God, generously claiming no monopoly on it, and humble in disregarding human hierarchies as they stand equally before God.
Without diminishing the vitality and beauty of spontaneous prayer, the dedication of the Mishkan points to a benefit and a challenge in the imposed uniformity inherent in communal worship. When we observe another recite the same words in prayer we’ve said countless times before, may we strive to say appreciatively, “I hope to offer something just as lovely when my turn comes.”
The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (z”l) Hassenfeld.
From Rabbi David Kasher
THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS – Parshat Naso
This post originally appears at Kevah.org.
Asceticism – the idea that physical pleasure stands in the way of spiritual enlightenment – has a long and storied history in the annals of religious thought. All the great religious traditions have some expression of it, including such practices as: fasting, celibacy, sleep-deprivation, wearing simple clothing, poverty, and even – in the most extreme cases – the active pursuit of pain.
But Judaism has always had an uncomfortable relationship with the uncomfortable life. While it is always impossible to define a single, official Jewish theology, it seems fair to say that most modern Jews have inherited a basic assumption that Jewish tradition – from the Garden of Eden on – regards the physical world as a fundamentally good place, full of things that are meant to be enjoyed by human beings.
In rabbinic literature, perhaps the most explicit celebration of physical pleasure is this statement from the Jerusalem Talmud Kiddushin 4:12:
Rabbi Hizkiah the Cohen, in the name of Rav, said, “A person will have to give a justification and accounting for any delight he saw but did not consume.”
רבי חזקיה ר’ כהן בשם רב עתיד אדם ליתן דין וחשבון על כל שראת עינו ולא אכל
But then, on the other end of the spectrum, we can find more ascetic rabbinic voices, like this one from Pirkei Avot 6:4:
This is the Way of Torah: Eat bread with salt, drink small amounts of water, and sleep on the ground; live a life of deprivation and toil in the Torah.
כַּךְ הִיא דַּרְכָּהּ שֶׁל תּוֹרָה, פַּת בְּמֶלַח תֹּאכַל, וּמַיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה תִשְׁתֶּה, וְעַל הָאָרֶץ תִּישַׁן, וְחַיֵּי צַעַר תִּחְיֶה, וּבַתּוֹרָה אַתָּה עָמֵל
So which is it? What is the Jewish ideal – pain or pleasure? Well, these rabbis can debate it all they want, but what does it say in the Torah itself?
Many have claimed that the ascetic tradition in Judaism finds its roots in this week’s parsha, with the laws of the “Nazir.” We have already come across the institution of vows (nedarim – נדרים), whereby someone can verbally pledge something she owns to God. But the Nazirite vow is a particularly intense version of this practice, in that the Nazir essentially pledges herself to God for a temporary period.
There are three prominent manifestations of this commitment:
1. No wine or any other grape product.
2. No cutting of hair.
3. No contact with the dead (even one’s own parents).
The prohibition on hair-cutting may remind us of the most famous Nazir in the Bible – Samson (though he was a bit of an unusual case, because he had been pledged from birth). But it is the first rule – abstinence from wine – that most strongly suggests asceticism. Sobriety as a religious commitment is one of the classic forms of self-denial, and we find a prohibition on intoxicants in many spiritual traditions, from Islam to Buddhism.
Judaism does not ban wine, as a general rule. Quite the opposite – wine is used prominently for sacred purposes. So if this Nazirite practice is an authentic expression of Jewish asceticism, it seems to distinctly frame this kind of religious expression as the exception, rather than the rule. You can take on these extreme practices, but it is not expected, or even encouraged.
However, even this small a nod to the value of asceticism gets vehement pushback from a parade of Jewish thinkers throughout history:
First, in the Talmud (Taanit 11a), Rabbi Eliezer HaKappar, understands the Nazir not merely as an extremist, but in fact, a sinner:
His sin refers to his denying himself the enjoyment of wine. If then, the one who merely denied himself the enjoyment of wine is called a sinner, how much more so does that apply to the person who denies himself the enjoyment of the other pleasures of life!
וכי באיזה נפש חטא זה אלא שציער עצמו מן היין והלא דברים קל וחומר ומה זה שלא ציער עצמו אלא מן היין נקרא חוטא המצער עצמו מכל דבר ודבר על אחת כמה וכמה
Then, in the medieval period, Maimonides, who famously revived Aristotle’s concept of “the golden mean,” or “middle path,” wrote the following about the Nazirite vow:
If a person should say… He will not eat meat or drink wine, or get married, or live in a nice house, or wear fine clothes, but only wool and sackcloth, like the heathen priests – this is an evil path, and it is forbidden to walk down it.
Therefore the sages commanded that a person should not deny himself anything beyond what the Torah itself prohibits, and should not take on vows of abstinence on things permitted to him. (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Deot, 3:1,3)
שמא יאמר אדם… שלא יאכל בשר ולא ישתה יין ולא יישא אישה ולא יישב בדירה נאה ולא ילבוש מלבוש נאה אלא השק והצמר הקשה וכיוצא בהן, כגון כומרי אדום–גם זו דרך רעה היא, ואסור לילך בה.
לפיכך ציוו חכמים שלא ימנע אדם עצמו אלא מדברים שמנעה התורה בלבד, ולא יהיה אוסר עצמו בנדרים ובשבועות על דברים המותרים.
And finally, when we come to the modern Hassidic movement, we find that one of the key features of their theology was a strong affirmation of engagement with the physical world, not just as a form of pleasure, but as a means of unlocking spiritual potencies. So Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky, in Netivot Shalom, writes this about the Nazirite vow:
The purpose of Creation and the purpose of divine service is for the Jew to immerse in all the physical things, and then to elevate them all in the name of God, for then he joins the lower with the upper. The path of separating from the things of this world is an easier path. But the higher level is to raise all the things of this world to the Holy One, Blessed be He. And that is the desired purpose.
תכלית הבריאה ותכלית עבודת ה׳ היא שיהודי יעסוק בכל הענינים הגשמיים וירים את הכל לשם ה׳, שאז הריהו מחבר תחתונים בעליונים. אמנם הדרך לפרוש להתנער מעניני עוה׳׳ז היא דרך יותר קלה, אבל המדרגה היותר גבוהה היא להעלות את כל עניני עוה׳׳ז להשי׳׳ת שזוהי התכלית הנרצית.
Here the Nazirite path is not a problematic form of extremism. Just the opposite – it’s total a cop-out! The real work of the world is to be immersed in its physicality, and then to lift it up, merging the material with the spiritual. The Nazir takes the “easier path,” just letting go of the world entirely. Sure, he has found a more direct way to a spiritual experience. But he has also forsaken his true divine purpose.
But wait a minute. Before we allow these voices to write the Nazir out of the Torah altogether, we ought to wonder what he’s doing there in the first place. Is it really plausible that the Torah would go out of its way to create this elaborate ritual if it were totally undesirable – even sinful – to carry it out?!
And after all, the Torah itself describes the Nazir with what seems to be quite lofty language:
All the days of his being a Nazir, he is holy unto the Lord. (Numbers 6:8)
כֹּל, יְמֵי נִזְרוֹ, קָדֹשׁ הוּא, לַה
“Holy unto the Lord” sounds pretty good! Surely there is something deeply valuable in this practice.
In that spirit, one of the most celebratory approaches to the Nazir comes from the commentary of the Ibn Ezra, who – in his typical fashion – first focuses on linguistic nuances:
Some say that Nazir comes from the term nezer, meaning crown. Which is why it refers to the Nazirite hair “for God, upon his head.” And this seems likely.
And know that all people are slaves to their worldly desires, and the true king, the one with the Nazirite crown upon his head, is the one who is free from these desires.
ויש אומרים כי מלת נזיר מנזרת נזר והעד כי נזר אלהיו על ראשו ואיננו רחוק ודע כי כל בני אדם עבדי תאות העולם והמלך באמת שיש לו נזר ועטרת מלכות בראשו כל מי שהוא חפשי מן התאות
So back and forth, back and forth – the rabbis keep debating. Is it good to become a Nazir or not? Is it good to cut oneself off from the pleasures of the world, or is it contrary to the very purpose of creation?
But there is something that we have been ignoring all along, the great 19th-century German commentator, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch points out. And that is – these Nazirite practices do not really constitute such a rigorous program of asceticism.
No wine, no haircuts, and no dead bodies? That’s it?! What about fasting and sleeping on the ground? What about wearing sackcloth or going celibate?
In fact, the Nazir can still enjoy all kinds of physical pleasure. If the point of the Nazirite vow was to free the vower from all worldly desire, it really didn’t take us too far down the list of desires.
Instead, Rabbi Hirsch understands the function of the Nazirite vow quite differently:
The basic meaning of nezer is quite definitely: to keep aloof, to keep separate…. So that just as nezer means a royal diadem which marks the person whose head it surrounds as being set apart and inaccessible, so here nezer designates a regime of living and striving that raises the person who vows of his own free will to undertake it, out of and about the midst of people amongst whom he lives and sets him the task to be completely “holy to God,” to belong with the whole of his being and will exclusively to his God. He wishes to draw a circle round about himself in which only God is to be present.
The obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, according to this model, is not physical pleasure, but social pleasure. It is not temptations of the flesh that that will keep me away from God, but the bonds of friendly and familial obligation. How can I cultivate a deep relationship to the Divine, if I am balancing it with all my other relationships? I need space to myself. I need time alone with my God.
And yet, Jewish life does not offer too much alone time. The laws that make up Jewish practice presume a community of practitioners. This is not a religion for individuals; it is the religion of a people. These people need me, and I need them. We cannot escape from one another.
But then, how does one ever find God, in the midst of all these people? How does one hear the still, small voice of God calling above the buzzing noise of human society? Religion takes place in the congregation, but sometimes God can only be found alone.
Rabbi Hirsch acknowledges this tension as he finishes his comments, and offers us a strange solution:
One who does so isolate himself [with and for God] is called a Nazir. But this is no hermit-like isolation, no shutting oneself up in the wilderness. It is an isolation of one’s mind and spirit with God in the midst of the most active ordinary life.
I will not run away – the Nazir is saying – far from the madding crowd. I will find a way to be alone with God right here, amongst you all. I will live in society, and I will give to it – but I will have a place of retreat, in my mind.
How will I do this? I will not drink wine, for then I will lose myself in the joy of celebrating, and drift away into the crowd of revelers. I will not cut my hair, so that I begin to appear strange, and others keep their distance from me. And for a time, I will not go to funerals, for in sorrow I am always bonded to my people.
For now I must be alone. I am searching for something, and I have to find it by myself.
But this period of isolation will come to an end. And then I will return to you. For I belong here, in this world, with all its wonders and pleasures. And of all those earthly delights, you are chief among them.
“And from the ground the Lord God caused every tree to grow that was pleasurable to the sight and good for consumption…
… and the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for a person to be alone.”
– Genesis 2:9,18
From AJR/CA
Parshat Naso
“Lessons of the Midbar”
By Rabbi Diane Elliot, ’06
We Jews have often been called “people of the book,” but perhaps a better appellation would be “people of words.” A people forged in the wilderness, the midbar—a Hebrew word whose root, l’daber, means “to speak,”—a people defined by Aseret ha-Dibrot, The Ten Speakings of an invisible and awesome Divine mouth, our Torah unfolds as a saga of the spoken word: “va-yidaber YHVH el moshe leymor…,” “and the Infinite spoke to/through Moses, saying…,” “va-yidaber moshe el b’nai yisrael…,” “and Moses spoke to the children of Israel….”
In my rare and precious times in desert wilderness—in Ein Gedi near the Dead Sea, in the high desert of New Mexico, in the Anza-Borrego desert east of San Diego, in the Panamint Valley just outside of Death Valley—what’s been palpable and deeply healing for me has been the silence. A rich, thick silence that lies upon the land like a cloak, in which any minute sound seems to echo for miles; a silence shattered at times by the wailing of wind and storm, inchoate, like wild beasts rampaging through the valleys and dry river beds.
So how, in our tradition, does midbar, this wild place of palpable silence and nature’s unpredictable blasts, become transmuted into m’daber, a mishkan built from the sayings, speakings, pronouncements of Divine Presence, channeled through the throat of Moses? And how, over the course of the Israelites’ wilderness sojourn, does this pristine space fill to overflowing with so many words of confusion, doubt, complaint, conflict, pleading, punishment, forgiveness, and threat of further punishment?
In her recent book, Moses, A Human Life, the great contemporary darshan, Dr. Avivah Zornberg, presents the voice of Moses—that great transmitter of God’s words, whose own speech was deficient, impaired in some way—as a harking back to “tehom,” “the murmuring deep,” the rumbling, inchoate flood of sound that precedes Creation, a buzzing, vibrating ocean of sound that contains all possible human vocalizations. Inarticulate, at times requiring translation by his brother Aaron, the voice of Moses, holds the full, raw range of pre-verbal feeling. And it is precisely this voice, the voice beneath words, beyond even silence, that God needs to convey Godself to this ragtag bunch of erstwhile slaves, these descendants of Jacob the trickster, of Yisrael, the angel-wrestler.
For, in the human mouth, well-formed words are often not trustworthy. Some blockage, some distortion often intervenes between the true intent and its expression, between the raw emotion, the deep intuition, and its verbal shaping. We see this in the current travesty of our public discourse. Misunderstanding blossoms, explodes into anger and hurt, and freezes into intransigent opposition.
This week’s parshah, Naso, which unfolds fairly close to the beginning of what, yet unbeknownst to them, will become the Israelites’ forty-year sojourn bamidbar, in the wilderness, includes the extremely troubling description of a “trial by water” imposed upon a wife suspected by her husband of infidelity, the sotah. The scenario described here is clearly one of broken communication, something sensed but not spoken, for, without concrete evidence, the jealousy of the husband is aroused against his mate: “…a man could have lain with her carnally, but it was hidden from the eyes of her husband, and she became secluded and could have been defiled, but there was no witness against her, and she had not been forced, and a spirit of jealousy had passed over him…” (Numbers 5:13-14, my italics).
The unlucky woman is to be brought to the Tabernacle and made to stand, her head uncovered, before the High Priest and before God. A “meal offering of jealousies” (minkhat k’na’ot) is brought by her husband, and she is made to drink from a vessel of holy water, mixed with earth from the floor of the Tabernacle and seasoned with curses, inscribed on a scroll and then scraped into the water. If, upon drinking the cursed water, her “belly distends and thigh collapses,” she is proven guilty and cursed; if not she is exonerated.
Of course, being forced to submit to this low-tech lie detector test would’ve been extremely humiliating for any woman. And though the “bitter waters” contained only a little earth and ink, the destructive power of her husband’s mistrust, or of her own guilt, if she had, in fact, slept with another, intensified by the pressure of this very public shaming, might well have caused the woman so accused to physically collapse, to become, in Torah’s words, “a curse amid her people.”
As disturbing as this description of the sotah is, can we not in some way see foreshadowed here, in microcosm, the distortions, the hiddennesses, the half-truths, untruths, and unkept promises—the repeated failures of words—that will plague the Israelite people throughout their desert sojourn, evinced both in the evolving relationship between HaShem, the Divine husband, and Israel, his reluctant, often terrified bride, and also in the people’s relationships with Moses, their leader, and with one another?
Perhaps the truth of any relationship rests not in the multitudes of words that will inevitably be shared, but in the attentive stratum of silence underlying those words, and in the tehom—the murmuring, groaning, cooing, crying, burbling resonance of shared souls—beneath the silence. Perhaps the word “midbar” points us not to a place of everyday speech, but to all that underlies and surrounds our speaking—to the great, cosmic hum that births Creation and to the matrix of silence out of which words arise. As Avivah Zornberg so eloquently puts it, “In our deepest aloneness, we listen for the elemental in each other’s voice—which, strangely, is also the particular sound of the other. He is unknown to me, it is her unknownness that I draw on, to help me be at home in the alien elements of my own world.” (Moses, A Human Life; p. 55)
As rabbis, cantors, chaplains, spiritual directors, and spiritual friends to one another, we are charged with the challenging task of conveying wisdom, comfort, remembrance, and sometimes challenge and rebuke through the tricky medium of words. How essential then that we steep ourselves in the matrix of silence and the unformed sounds of the human heart that prefigure language—that we privilege listening and the expectant space between breaths, not jumping reflexively to speech, which can so polarize, so alienate. Truth, ever elusive in our speaking, sometimes shines through most radiantly in our silences, in the simple loving act of our listening.
From Rabbi James Stone Goodman
I See You
God’s face shining toward you: see it over there?
You can pick up the shining a long way away.
You can appreciate it from across the room or
Across the Universe.
God’s face lifted up toward you
That’s relationship
Intimacy.
God’s face right there
I see it moving lifting up and
Toward me.
Wow.
That’s peace baby.
Also what is it about a face in Hebrew that English
Does not signify.
Panim. B’fanim. Bif-nim.
Face and within
The face in Hebrew has some transparency
Hey. Look at that face.
There’s a soul in there. I see it.
What did I learn this week.
Our beloveds are like mirrors for us
They reflect our souls.
Our beloveds say: look at me.
I am seeing you.
Here is the gift I am giving you
This is who you are
As I see you.
jsg
Numbers 6:24 ff.
From Maggid Jhos Singer
A dizzying array of rituals, censuses, sacrifices and job descriptions fill this week’s Torah portion, Nasso (Numbers 4:21-7:89). And smack in the middle of the hurly burly is one whopper of a blessing:
May God bless you and protect you
May God’s face illuminate and be gracious to you,
May God’s face be lifted to you and place peace in you
-Numbers 6:24-26
These are among the most famous, oft repeated and ecumenical words in the Hebrew Bible, and rightly so. They capture exactly what most of us crave spiritually, physically, psychologically and emotionally— to be cared for, to be safe, to be seen, and to be comforted.
Aptly they occur almost randomly in the midst of a flurry of human activity—tasks needing our attention, cases to hear, numbers to crunch and wrongs to right. The preoccupation with keeping the spiritual scales balanced through the temple rites fills page after page with arcane rules regarding priestly power, the feral nature of public tribunals, and the establishment of a cosmic social order delineating who is who and what is what. And there wedged between all of that formality are words of blessing, to be bestowed from human to human, as if to remember what all the fuss is about.
Like us, our ancient forebears lived busy, difficult lives. They suffered bouts of jealous rage, they lifted and carried, and they struggled into and out of sociological pigeonholes. They erred and dared, doing whatever was necessary to ensure their survival while also discovering their purpose, their destiny, their legacy. And like us, right in the middle of their train wrecks and triumphs, they needed blessings to stay the course.
Modern culture is woefully lacking in this simple practice—perhaps this week’s Torah portion is a reminder that even amidst the blaring activity gets and unpaid bills, even when wrongs have yet to be righted, what really counts, what we remember and return to most, what sustains and inspires us, are our blessings.
As this Shabbat arrives, with its invitation to let go of the week’s clattering business long enough to enter into the rarified time of spiritual liberation, take a moment to review your blessings. Step in even deeper; wrap these words around yourself, those you love, and even those you don’t: May you be cared for and safe, may you be filled with light and grace, and may every twist and turn in the path ahead bring you closer to fullness and peace. Amen. Amen.
Blessin’s, for real—Jhos
From Brian Yosef Schachter- Brooks
Why Did I Wake Up Lonely? Parshat Nasso
6/17/2016
One night we were woken up around 1:00 AM when our two-year old daughter wandered into our bedroom and cried, “Why did I wake up lonely?”
I think she meant to ask why she woke up alone, not lonely. But, I realized, this can be a concern for many people on the Path- “If I wake up spiritually, will I be lonely?”
Put another way- “If I awaken to a new level of consciousness, will I still be able to relate to people? Will I feel all alone if I let go of all the games and dramas that I am used to playing out with people?”
It’s true, there is an aspect of waking up that requires aloneness, but not necessarily loneliness.
On the inner level, there has to be a willingness to let go of your addiction to thinking. As long as the mind is constantly generating a stream of thought, the world will appear as a projection of your thought. Let go of your stream of thinking, and you open to the Divine Presence that is your own awareness, seeing Its own glory and unity in everything.
This happens when your consciousness fully stands alone, not seduced by the compulsive narratives of the mind.
This week’s reading, Parshat Nasso, is the finale for describing the construction of the Mishkan- the sanctuary of the Divine Presence. In preparation for the Mishkan becoming activated, the Israelites are told to expel anyone who is a tzaru’a, a zav, or who is tamei lanafesh.
All three of these terms have to do with bodily things that many people would consider to be kind of gross. Metaphorically, they are related to ways that our thoughts, speech and actions can keep us unconscious and in “exile” from the Presence.
“Tzaru’a” means someone with a particular skin affliction, and is associated with the sin of lashon hara- gossip and slander. Since the skin is the boundary of a person but also the place of intimate connection with others, this mythic disease is an expression of relationships getting tarnished through destructive speech.
“Zav” means some kind of bodily emission and is associated with sexuality. Metaphorically, the outward emission represents the way thoughts of sexuality can be a kind of “reaching” or “grasping” for gratification, a loss of vital energy and presence.
These two represent the polarity of unconsciousness-
“Tzaru’a” is negativity, and “Zav” is wanting, grasping, neediness. Both of these lead to an absence of Presence in the body, which brings us to the third one: “Tamei Lanefesh” means spiritually contaminated by a corpse.
To the degree that you become seduced by the energies of “I hate” and “I want,” your body is temporarily dead to the Presence that is not separate from your own Being. In order for your body to become a sanctuary again, these forces and the thoughts they produce must be “expelled from the camp” in a sense.
You must stand alone from them- let go of your resistance, and you will come to know your inner Wholeness. Once you know your inner Wholeness, you can let go of your wanting as well. It’s enough to be with what is.
Rabbi David Novaodok would say-
“Why is it that people don’t have what they want? It’s because they don’t want what they have. If they wanted only what they have, they would have what they want!”
On this Shabbat Nasso, the Sabbath of Carrying, may we constantly carry with us the knowledge of letting go, so that we cease to carry the burdens of resistance and wanting. And in so doing, may the Presence that we are reveal Itself ever more deeply, making our bodies into temples of the Presence.
Good Shabbos!!
From Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
The Blessing of Love (Naso 5776)
At 176 verses, Naso is the longest of the parshiyot. Yet one of its most moving passages, and the one that has had the greatest impact over the course of history, is very short indeed and is known by almost every Jew, namely the priestly blessings:
The Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘Thus shall you bless the Israelites. Say to them:
May Lord bless you and protect you;
May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you;
May the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.’
Let them set My name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” (Num. 6:23-27)
This is among the oldest of all prayer texts. It was used by the priests in the Temple. It is said today by the cohanim in the reader’s repetition of the Amidah, in Israel every day, in most of the Diaspora only on festivals. It is used by parents as they bless their children on Friday night. It is often said to the bride and groom under the chuppah. It is the simplest and most beautiful of all blessings.
It also appears in the oldest of all biblical texts that have physically survived to today. In 1979 the archeologist Gabriel Barkay was examining ancient burial caves at Ketef Hinnom, outside the walls of Jerusalem in the area now occupied by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. A thirteen-year-old boy who was assisting Barkay discovered that beneath the floor of one of the caves was a hidden chamber. There the group discovered almost one thousand ancient artefacts including two tiny silver scrolls no more than an inch long.
They were so fragile that it took three years to work out a way of unrolling them without causing them to disintegrate. Eventually the scrolls turned out to be kemayot, amulets, containing, among other texts, the priestly blessings. Scientifically dated to the sixth century BCE, the age of Jeremiah and the last days of the First Temple, they are four centuries older than the most ancient of biblical texts known hitherto, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Today the amulets can be seen in the Israel Museum, testimony to the ancient connection of Jews to the land and the continuity of Jewish faith itself.
What gives them their power is their simplicity and beauty. They have a strong rhythmic structure. The lines contain three, five, and seven words respectively. In each, the second word is “the Lord”. In all three verses the first part refers to an activity on the part of God – “bless”, “make His face shine”, and “turn His face toward”. The second part describes the effect of the blessing on us, giving us protection, grace and peace.
They also travel inward, as it were. The first verse “May Lord bless you and protect you,” refers, as the commentators note, to material blessings: sustenance, physical health and so on. The second, “May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you,” refers to moral blessing. Chen, grace, is what we show to other people and they to us. It is interpersonal. Here we are asking God to give some of His grace to us and others so that we can live together without the strife and envy that can so easily poison relationships.
The third is the most inward of all. There is a lovely story about a crowd of people who have gathered on a hill by the sea to watch a great ship pass by. A young child is waving vigorously. One of the men in the crowd asks him why. He says, “I am waving so the captain of the ship can see me and wave back.” “But,” said the man, “the ship is far away, and there is a crowd of us here. What makes you think that the captain can see you?” “Because,” said the boy, “the captain of the ship is my father. He will be looking for me among the crowd.”
That is roughly what we mean when we say, “May the Lord turn His face toward you.” There are seven billion people now living on this earth. What makes us any of us more than a face in the crowd, a wave in the ocean, a grain of sand on the sea shore? The fact that we are God’s children. He is our parent. He turns His face toward us. He cares.
The God of Abraham is not a mere force of nature or even all the forces of nature combined. A tsunami does not pause to ask who its victims will be. There is nothing personal about an earthquake or a tornado. The word Elokim means something like “the force of forces, cause of causes, the totality of all scientifically discoverable laws.” It refers to those aspects of God that are impersonal. It also refers to God in His attribute of justice, since justice is essentially impersonal.
But the name we call Hashem – the name used in the priestly blessings, and in almost all the priestly texts – is God as He relates to us as persons, individuals, each with our unique configuration of hopes and fears, gifts and possibilities. Hashem is the aspect of God that allows us to use the word “You”. He is the God who speaks to us and who listens when we speak to Him. How this happens, we do not know, but that it happens is central to Jewish faith.
That we call God Hashem is the transcendental confirmation of our significance in the scheme of things. We matter as individuals because God cares for us as a parent for a child. That, incidentally, is one reason why the priestly blessings are all in the singular, to emphasise that God blesses us not only collectively but also individually. One life, said the sages, is like a universe.
Hence the meaning of the last of the priestly blessings. The knowledge that God turns His face toward us – that we are not just an indiscernible face in a crowd, but that God relates to us in our uniqueness and singularity – is the most profound and ultimate source of peace. Competition, strife, lawlessness and violence come from the psychological need to prove that we matter. We do things to prove that I am more powerful, or richer, or more successful than you. I can make you fear. I can bend you to my will. I can turn you into my victim, my subject, my slave. All of these things testify not to faith but to a profound failure of faith.
Faith means that I believe that God cares about me. I am here because He wanted me to be. The soul He gave me is pure. Even though I am like the child on the hill watching the ship pass by, I know that God is looking for me, waving to me as I wave to Him. That is the most profound inner source of peace. We do not need to prove ourselves in order to receive a blessing from God. All we need to know is that His face is turned toward us. When we are at peace with ourselves, we can begin to make peace with the world.
So the blessings become longer and deeper: from the external blessing of material goods to the interpersonal blessing of grace between ourselves and others, to the most inward of them all, the peace of mind that comes when we feel that God sees us, hears us, holds us in His everlasting arms.
One further detail of the priestly blessings is unique, namely the blessing that the sages instituted to be said by the cohanim over the mitzvah: “Blessed are you … who has made us holy with the holiness of Aaron and has commanded us to bless His people Israel with love.”
It is the last word, be-ahavah, that is unusual. It appears in no other blessing over the performance of a command. It seems to make no sense. Ideally we should fulfill all the commands with love. But an absence of love does not invalidate any other command. In any case, the blessing over the performance of as command is a way of showing that we are acting intentionally. There was an argument between the sages as to whether mitzvoth in general require intention (kavanah) or not. But whether they do or not, making a blessing beforehand shows that we do have the intention to fulfill the command. But intention is one thing, emotion is another. Surely what matters is that the cohanim recite the blessing and God will do the rest. What difference does it make whether they do so in love or not?
The commentators wrestle with this question. Some say that the fact that the cohanim are facing the people when they bless means that they are like the cherubim in the Tabernacle, whose faces “were turned to one another” as a sign of love. Others change the word order. They say that the blessing really means, “who has made us holy with the holiness of Aaron and with love has commanded us to bless His people Israel.” “Love” here refers to God’s love for Israel, not that of the cohanim.
However, it seems to me that the explanation is this: the Torah explicitly says that though the cohanim say the words, it is God who sends the blessing. “Let them put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” Normally when we fulfill a mitzvah, we are doing something. But when the cohanim bless the people, they are not doing anything in and of themselves. Instead they are acting as channels through which God’s blessing flows into the world and into our lives. Only love does this. Love means that we are focused not on ourselves but on another. Love is selflessness. And only selflessness allows us to be a channel through which flows a force greater than ourselves, the love that as Dante said, “moves the sun and the other stars”, the love that brings new life into the world.
To bless, we must love, and to be blessed is to know that we are loved by the One vaster than the universe who nonetheless turns His face toward us as a parent to a beloved child. To know that is to find true spiritual peace.
From Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Two Versions of the Moral Life (Naso 5775)
The parsha of Naso contains the laws relating to the nazirite – an individual who undertook, usually for a limited period of time, to observe special rules of holiness and abstinence: not to drink wine or other intoxicants (including anything made from grapes), not to have his hair cut and not to defile himself by contact with the dead.
The Torah does not make a direct evaluation of the nazirite. On the one hand it calls him “holy to God” (Num. 6: 8). On the other, it rules that when the period comes to an end the nazirite has to bring a sin offering (Num. 6: 13-14), as if he had done something wrong.
This led to a fundamental disagreement between the rabbis in Mishnaic, Talmudic and medieval times. According to Rabbi Elazar, and later to Nahmanides, the nazirite is worthy of praise. He has voluntarily chosen a higher level of holiness. The prophet Amos (2: 11) says, “I raised up some of your sons for prophets, and your young men for nazirites,” suggesting that the nazirite, like the prophet, is a person especially close to God. The reason he had to bring a sin offering was that he was now returning to ordinary life. The sin lay in ceasing to be a nazirite.
Rabbi Eliezer ha-Kappar and Shmuel held the opposite opinion. The sin lay in becoming a nazirite in the first place, thereby denying himself some of the pleasures of the world God created and declared good. Rabbi Eliezer added: “From this we may infer that if one who denies himself the enjoyment of wine is called a sinner, all the more so one who denies himself the enjoyment of other pleasures of life.”[1]
Clearly the argument is not merely textual. It is substantive. It is about asceticism, the life of self-denial. Almost every religion knows the phenomenon of people who, in pursuit of spiritual purity, withdraw from the pleasures and temptations of the world. They live in caves, retreats, hermitages, monasteries. The Qumran sect known to us through the Dead Sea Scrolls may have been such a movement.
In the Middle Ages there were Jews who adopted similar self-denial – among them the Hassidei Ashkenaz, the Pietists of Northern Europe, as well as many Jews in Islamic lands. In retrospect it is hard not to see in these patterns of behaviour at least some influence from the non-Jewish environment. The Hassidei Ashkenaz who flourished during the time of the Crusades lived among self-mortifying Christians. Their southern counterparts may have been familiar with Sufism, the mystical movement in Islam.
The ambivalence of Jews toward the life of self-denial may therefore lie in the suspicion that it entered Judaism from the outside. There were ascetic movements in the first centuries of the Common Era in both the West (Greece) and the East (Iran) that saw the physical world as a place of corruption and strife. They were, in fact, dualists, holding that the true God was not the creator of the universe. The physical world was the work of a lesser, and evil, deity. The two best known movements to hold this view were Gnosticism in the West and Manichaeism in the East. So at least some of the negative evaluation of the nazirite may have been driven by a desire to discourage Jews from imitating non-Jewish practices.
What is more puzzling is the position of Maimonides, who holds both views, positive and negative, in the same book, his law code the Mishneh Torah. In The Laws of Ethical Character, he adopts the negative position of R. Eliezer ha-Kappar: “A person may say: ‘Desire, honour and the like are bad paths to follow and remove a person from the world, therefore I will completely separate myself from them and go to the other extreme.’ As a result, he does not eat meat or drink wine or take a wife or live in a decent house or wear decent clothing . . . This too is bad, and it is forbidden to choose this way.”[2]
Yet in The Laws of the Nazirite he rules in accordance with the positive evaluation of Rabbi Elazar: “Whoever vows to G-d [to become a nazirite] by way of holiness, does well and is praiseworthy . . . Indeed Scripture considers him the equal of a prophet.”[3] How does any writer come to adopt contradictory positions in a single book, let alone one as resolutely logical as Maimonides?
The answer lies in one of Maimonides’ most original insights. He holds that there are two quite different ways of living the moral life. He calls them respectively the way of the saint (hassid) and the sage (hakham).
The sage follows the “golden mean,” the “middle way.” The moral life is a matter of moderation and balance, charting a course between too much and too little. Courage, for example, lies midway between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity lies between profligacy and miserliness. This is very similar to the vision of the moral life as set out by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics.
The saint, by contrast, does not follow the middle way. He or she tends to extremes, fasting rather than simply eating in moderation, embracing poverty rather than acquiring modest wealth, and so on.
At various points in his writings, Maimonides explains why people might embrace extremes. One reason is repentance and character transformation.[4] So a person might cure himself of pride by practicing, for a while, extreme self-abasement. Another is the asymmetry of the human personality. The extremes do not exert an equal pull. Cowardice is more common than recklessness, and miserliness than over-generosity, which is why the hassid leans in the opposite direction. A third reason is the lure of the surrounding culture. This may be so opposed to religious values that pious people choose to separate themselves from the wider society, “clothing themselves in woolen and hairy garments, dwelling in the mountains and wandering about in the wilderness,” differentiating themselves by their extreme behavior.
This is a very nuanced presentation. There are times, for Maimonides, when self-denial is therapeutic, others when it is factored into Torah law itself, and yet others when it is a response to an excessively hedonistic age. In general, though, Maimonides rules that we are commanded to follow the middle way, whereas the way of the saint is lifnim mi-shurat ha-din, beyond the strict requirement of the law.[5]
Moshe Halbertal, in his recent, impressive study of Maimonides,[6] sees him as finessing the fundamental tension between the civic ideal of the Greek political tradition and the spiritual ideal of the religious radical for whom, as the Kotzker Rebbe said, “The middle of the road is for horses.” To the hassid, Maimonides’ sage can look like a “self-satisfied bourgeois.”
Essentially, these are two ways of understanding the moral life itself. Is the aim of the moral life to achieve personal perfection? Or is it to create a decent, just and compassionate society? The intuitive answer of most people would be to say: both. That is what makes Maimonides so acute a thinker. He realises that you can’t have both. They are in fact different enterprises.
A saint may give all his money away to the poor. But what about the members of the saint’s own family? A saint may refuse to fight in battle. But what about the saint’s own country? A saint may forgive all crimes committed against him. But what about the rule of law, and justice? Saints are supremely virtuous people, considered as individuals. Yet you cannot build a society out of saints alone. Ultimately, saints are not really interested in society. Their concern is the salvation of the soul.
This deep insight is what led Maimonides to his seemingly contradictory evaluations of the nazirite. The nazirite has chosen, at least for a period, to adopt a life of extreme self-denial. He is a saint, a hassid. He has adopted the path of personal perfection. That is noble, commendable and exemplary.
But it is not the way of the sage – and you need sages if you seek to perfect society. The sage is not an extremist, because he or she realises that there are other people at stake. There are the members of one’s own family and the others within one’s own community. There is a country to defend and an economy to sustain. The sage knows he or she cannot leave all these commitments behind to pursue a life of solitary virtue. For we are called on by God to live in the world, not escape from it; in society not seclusion; to strive to create a balance among the conflicting pressures on us, not to focus on some while neglecting the others.
Hence, while from a personal perspective the nazirite is a saint, from a societal perspective he is, at least figuratively, a “sinner” who has to bring an atonement offering.
Maimonides lived the life he preached. We know from his writings that he longed for seclusion. There were years when he worked day and night to write his Commentary to the Mishnah, and later the Mishneh Torah. Yet he also recognised his responsibilities to his family and to the community. In his famous letter to his would-be translator Ibn Tibbon, he gives him an account of his typical day and week, in which he had to carry a double burden as a world-renowned physician and an internationally sought halakhist and sage. He worked to exhaustion. There were times when he was almost too busy to study from one week to the next. Maimonides was a sage who longed to be a saint – but knew he could not be, if he was to honour his responsibilities to his people. That seems to me a profound judgment, and one still relevant to Jewish life today.
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[1] Taanit 11a; Nedarim 10a.
[2] Hilkhot Deot 3:1.
[3] Hilkhot Nezirut 10: 14.
[4] See his Eight Chapters (the introduction to his commentary on Mishnah, Avot), ch. 4, and Hilkhot Deot, chapters 1, 2, 5 and 6.
From Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies
Shabbat Parashat Naso
May 30, 2015 / 12 Sivan 5775
Rabbi Adam Greenwald
Amazing Grace
Torah Reading: Numbers 4:21 – 7:89
Haftarah Reading: Judges 13:2-25
We don’t talk much about grace in Judaism—it’s a word that we long ago handed over to our daughter religion, Christianity. We defined ourselves as a religion of justice, of holiness, of tikkun olam—and grace became “goyish.” And yet, apparently unaware that it is fallen out of fashion, grace persists throughout our sacred literature and plays a central role in this week’s parasha.
The Hebrew word for grace is chen, as in the name Chanah. It is an integral part of God’s self-description to Moses in Exodus 33, when God is revealed as “El chanun v’rachum”— God of Grace and Compassion. And, it stands at the very center of one of the most famous passages of the Torah, Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Blessing which is part of Parshat Naso. Recall the words:
Y’varechecha Adonai v’yishmarecha
Y’air Adonai panav eliecha v’yichunekha
Yisa Adanai pavav eliecha v’yasem l’kha shalom.
V’yichunekha is traditionally rendered as: “May God deal graciously with you.” Our teacher, the Rector of American Jewish University, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, translates it differently. He says: “May God grant you more than you deserve.” Grace, he teaches, is blessing that goes beyond what we strictly merit for our actions.
It is true, most of the good things that we experience in life have a direct correlation to the amount of effort that we invest into them. A loving relationship is sustained by hard work, open communication, and mutual respect. A child turns out well because of parents who made them a central priority in their lives; they are truly the product of their parents’ blood, sweat and tears. Maintaining our health, succeeding in our chosen profession, making a meaningful contribution to the world — there are no shortcuts to achieving the important things in life. We are blessed with them, because we worked hard to earn them.
And yet, that is never the whole picture. Each of our great successes: a happy child, an established practice, a loving marriage, a meaningful life, is the product both of our own hard work and of elements that we must admit are quite out of our hands: We met the right person, we were in the right place at the right time, we took the risk and it paid off. On top of all of our diligent hard work, it turns out we also need to get quite lucky. To claim no credit at all would be disingenuously humble, to claim all of the credit would be stunningly unrealistic. Our fortunes are governed by a partnership between the work of our hands and God’s grace.
Our response to those blessings that we earn is pride, and in Judaism a little bit of naches in our legitimate accomplishments is certainly no sin. Our response to grace, however, is deeper and purer — simple gratitude. It is the morning Modeh Ani, which invites us to start the day with thanksgiving for the gift of having woken up to new possibility and new life. It is the evening Sh’ma, that asks us to count our blessings before closing our eyes and surrendering to sleep. It is the pinnacle moment of the High Holy Days, when we get down on the ground and hold our palms up to the sky and say to God that we can’t do it by ourselves. To be a Jew is to pause 100 times a day in gratitude, recognizing that so much in our life is simply the product of God’s grace.
May we be blessed with more than we deserve. And may we be wise enough to recognize it.
From the Maqam Project
From Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
Rituals, spiritual fidelity, and turning toward God (Naso)
Posted: 25 May 2014
In this week’s Torah portion (Naso) is the strange ritual of the Sotah, which on its face concerns an allegedly unfaithful wife, a jealous husband, and a magic brew of water and dust. When our sages say of Torah, “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it,” I believe they invited us to turn this Sotah passage so it reveals not only old-paradigm patriarchy and heterocentrism, but also deep wisdom for today. Before we can turn it, though, we need to look with open eyes at what it is we’re turning.
Here is the p’shat (the simple surface meaning) of the Sotah ritual. If a husband suspects his wife of infidelity, he should bring her to the priest with an unseasoned grain offering. The priest will dissolve dust from the temple floor in a vessel of sacred water; write the words of a magic spell on a piece of parchment; dissolve those words in the water; and make the woman drink it. The spell indicates that if she was unfaithful, her thigh will sag and her belly will distend. (Some commentators read these words to imply miscarriage; others see them as describing an immediately visible physical response to drinking these “waters of bitterness.”) If the woman has not been unfaithful, then nothing will happen and/or she will remain able to conceive. Either way, that’s the end of the strange Sotah story.
Almost everything about the Sotah ritual challenges our the modern sensibility. First, the gender inequality: a man could accuse his wife of adultery, but there’s no parallel ritual for a woman suspecting her husband of infidelity. While a woman’s sexuality is “owned” by her father or husband, a man’s sexuality is his own and untestable. Second, the Sotah assumes heterosexuality: there’s no ritual for a same-sex couple. Third, there’s the uncomfortable suggestion that an unfaithful woman will inevitably miscarry or become infertile, implying that anyone who miscarries or is infertile may be suspect. I have a sense for how emotionally and spiritually devastating miscarriage and infertility can be in the modern world, and I have no doubt that these experiences were equally powerful for our female ancestors. To link the pain of infertility with this kind of moral judgment adds insult to injury. For these reasons and others, we cannot read the Sotah to guide difficulties among intimate partners in today’s world. We need to turn it around to make it meaningful.
What if we read the Sotah, instead, as a psychological drama in which its actors represent different parts of the self? Through that lens, the verses about the Sotah tell an entirely different story: here’s what to do if I come to feel that some part of me has betrayed the greater unity to which I aspire. First, I must bring my whole self to a holy place, a place of prayer and connection with divinity. Body, heart, mind, and soul: all of me must present in order to move forward. In that holy place, I meet with a spiritual facilitator, someone who has a deep connection with God (symbolized by the Sotah ritual of appearing before a priest). With that person’s help, I articulate where I fear that I went wrong.
Then there’s a ritual of washing-away my misdeed. We write the words down and then let them dissolve. I drink from the living waters in which my misdeeds have dissolved — a way of internalizing, literally taking-into-myself, how my mistakes have been forgiven and washed away (symbolized by the physical drinking of the Sotah potion). If my teshuvah process is incomplete and I haven’t wholly integrated forgiveness, this process may make me feel worse (symbolized by the physical effects of drinking the Sotah potion when one is “guilty”). But if I’m able to release myself from my own misdeeds, then I come away with a clean slate, ready to begin again (symbolized by the Sotah promise of fertility).
Seen in this way, the ritual of the Sotah becomes a kind of spiritual direction session, an opportunity to work with a trained facilitator to fully effect the transformation of teshuvah, repentance and return.
In the writings of the Prophets, physical infidelity often is a metaphor for spiritual infidelity. Hosea in particular works with this theme at length. God is the “husband” whose “wife” – the people Israel – strays to other gods. (The patriarchal / heterocentrist language is Hosea’s; we might reframe his words as a teaching that the Holy Blessed One, a unity beyond all gender and division, enters into covenant with us and, in our human understanding, feels “hurt” when we stray.) Although God responds to this with furious anger for a time, God’s ultimate response is one of love. God is always ready to take us back.
Hosea teaches that teshuvah is endlessly possible, and that no matter what our transgressions might be, our covenant with the Holy Blessed One is reparable and will endure. Hosea too can be troubling if read as a prescription for contemporary marital counseling. But what I find most remarkable in Hosea is not his bitterness, but the turn he makes from anguish to reconciliation. Teshuvah, he argues passionately, is always possible and necessary. No matter how deeply we have betrayed our Beloved, we can and must make the shift of turning ourselves back in the right direction. And if we can make that leap of teshuvah — at once the most impossibly difficult, and profoundly simple, act in our lexicon — we will be received with open arms.
On June 3, just a few short days from now, we’ll reach the festival of Shavuot, our early-summer festival of first fruits and revelation, the day we symbolically re-receive Torah at Mount Sinai. Many of us may associate teshuvah, turning-toward or returning-to God, with Elul and the Days of Awe — a season still many months away. What does Shavuot have to do with teshuvah?
The Days of Awe come at the end of an intense period of reflection, introspection, and the inner soul-work of teshuvah. According to one way of thinking, that period begins with Tisha b’Av, the low point in our festival year when we recall the destruction of both Temples and mourn the brokenness of creation. After Tisha b’Av we count 49 days — seven weeks — until Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Days of Awe. Seven weeks for teshuvah and soul-work culminate in one of our year’s biggest opportunities for transformation and connection with God. (I learned this from Reb Zalman, who heard it from Cantor Michael Esformes.)
Shavuot too comes at the end of a seven-week period of reflection, introspection, and inner soul-work: the period of counting Omer, which links Pesach with Shavuot, liberation with revelation. The Omer period now finishing is our spring season of teshuvah; the months of Av and Elul before Rosh Hashanah are our fall season of teshuvah.
Teshuvah also is a monthly, weekly, and even daily practice — but our tradition gives us two corridors of the year to focus deeply on this work together. And when we do this work of teshuvah, and release ourselves from our misdeeds and our old baggage, we become able to stand wholly at Sinai and receive the new Torah which God will reveal this year.
Shavuot is seen in rabbinic tradition as the marriage between God and Israel. In the rabbinic imagination, God is the groom; Israel, the bride; the Torah, our ketubah outlining our and God’s mutual promises and responsibilities. (Here, too, we can shift the traditional gender categories as needed in order to make the metaphor resonant in today’s language.) There’s another midrash which suggests that God held Mount Sinai over us like an inverted barrel, threatening that if we didn’t accept the Torah, God would drop the mountain and bury us there; but the marriage midrash recasts it, arguing instead that Sinai suspended over our heads was in fact our beautiful chuppah or marriage canopy!
In reading about the Sotah a few days before our “wedding anniversary,” we remind ourselves that in any relationship there will be ebbs and flows of connection. And in any relationship, a leap of faith is necessary. One doesn’t enter into a marriage saying “tell me everything that might go wrong in the coming decades and then I’ll decide whether to commit.” We join with one another, and with God, in perpetual hope. And when we inevitably feel pulled astray, we trust that repair is possible. We trust that we can return to each other, that we can return to our deepest selves, that we can return to the Holy One of Blessing — and be received in love.
Keyn yehi ratzon: may it be so
From Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Personal Status and Jewish Leadership
http://rabbicreditor.blogspot.com/2013/05/naso-57732013-personal-status-and.html
Sound file from Rabbi David Ingber:
We’ve Got to Go Through It
From American Jewish World Service
5772 > Naso
Adina Roth
The Law and Lore of the Wayward Woman
Torah—with its rich narratives and poetry, glimpses of the Divine and profound wisdom—is a text we turn to for inspiration, intellectual stimulation and meaning. Yet there are moments in the Bible when culturally located prejudices come to the fore and the reader is left struggling with the tension between timeless writing and context-bound oppression. One such moment is the law of the sotah—or wayward woman—found in Parshat Naso.
The law reads as follows: If a man has suspicions (also translated as “jealousy” or “zealous indignation”1) that his wife has had an affair, he brings her before the kohen (priest), who makes her drink a mixture of holy waters and earth. He removes her head covering (which implies shaming2) and warns her that if she has indeed been with a man other than her husband, the ingested waters will cause her thigh to collapse and her stomach to distend. The sages are divided on whether this refers to miscarriage or the explosion of her uterus and genitals.3 Either way, the gruesome punishment seems to be a direct response to the alleged crime: sexual ‘waywardness’ is followed by sexual shaming and maiming. Alternatively, if the woman is revealed to have not been with another man, she returns home with her husband to bear a child—an uncomfortable consolation prize for one who has just been publicly defamed.
Having heard the kohen’s warning and just before drinking the water, the woman must answer “Amen, Amen.”4 In this context, we realize that ‘Amen,’ despite its benign, comforting associations today, actually means to submit to God’s will. ‘Amen’ is sinister here, as the woman is forced to surrender her fate to forces beyond her control.
It’s ironic that in this rare instance when a woman is given the opportunity to speak in a biblical ritual, she is simultaneously restricted in what she can say; these robotic and depersonalized words silence any defense she might have offered of her guilt or innocence. The subservient quality of ‘Amen’ also contrasts with her alleged waywardness. If she has been wayward, ‘Amen’ signifies the beginning of her return to compliance. If not, it is her forced acceptance that this shaming ordeal is God’s will despite her innocence.
In contrast to the passivity of the woman’s ‘Amen,’ the text places all of the agency and power among men. Her husband brings her to the male kohen, who administers the ritual. And the rite itself carries out the will of a Deity who is characterized as masculine in a biblical context. In this web of husband, priest and God controlling her fate, the woman’s story is absent.
In fact, it could be argued that the patriarchal nature of the ritual depends on the absence of her authentic voice and story. Her story—with all of its intricate details of how she got married, the nuanced unfolding of her relationship with her husband and her private desires and hopes—would identify the woman as an individual. In expressing her individual, lived experience, the woman’s complex story could pose a challenge to the unequal power dynamics and absolutes that the law attempts to enforce.
If the suppression of the woman’s story enables the oppression of women in the sotah ritual, it makes me think that the telling of women’s stories in their own voices can be a powerful antidote to oppression. Women’s stories are, in their own way, forms of “waywardness”—positive, powerful rejections of the status quo. By telling stories, we can challenge sexual norms, question the entire patriarchal system and develop women’s agency over their lives. Stories can serve as activist tools to help women in all cultures move beyond ‘Amen Amen’—and into empowerment.
Women across all cultures are working to author their own stories. Whether it is the sharing among Jewish women in a Rosh Chodesh circle or the oral narratives of women travelers in sub-Saharan Africa, stories are being used to make room for today’s wayward women’s voices to be heard.
Consider the story of Mukhtaran Bibi, a courageous warrior woman in Pakistan. After a tribal council determined that she should be gang raped to redress a family honor crime, Mukhtaran did not shrivel up in despair or commit suicide. Instead, she chose to step forward and, at great risk to herself and her family, she told her story. It created ripples, which turned into waves, and generated such interest that she became an activist, building schools and establishing networks to empower women further. She prosecuted her rapists and her courage gave strength to other women in similar situations to speak out and tell their stories.5 Individual stories are so powerful that they can inform and inspire activism and even bring about policy change.
It is worth contemplating how women’s waywardness is still punished in overt and subtle ways in the 21st century. The law of sotah in Parshat Naso invites us to consider how women’s stories have been suppressed and controlled by patriarchal conventions—and how unlocking them can lead to change in our own time. Storytelling, with its complex portrayals of humanity, helps shift women from the subservience of ‘Amen’ to the power of having a voice. Only then do they have the freedom to author their own lives.
1 Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary and Notes (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) 680.
Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004) 705.
2 Alter 707.
3 Ibid. 708.
4 Numbers, 5:22
5 “It’s not just a woman who has been raped, but a nation,” The Guardian, 14 March 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/mar/14/gender.pakistan. See also Nicholas D. Kristof, “Mother of a Nation,” The New York Times, 2 April 2006. http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/opinion/02kristof.html?ref=mukhtarmai
From Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan
Naso
Snake Courage (5770/2010)
In Parshat Nasso, each Israelite tribal chieftain comes forward to make a gift to the mishkan, the newly-completed sanctuary at the centre of the camp. All twelve gifts are identical: a silver bowl, a silver basin, a golden spoon, four animals for the sanctuary, and seventeen animals to be eaten by the people at a celebratory meal.
The first leader to bring forward his gift is Nachshon ben Aminadav of the tribe of Yehudah. Nachshon is best known to us as the star of a famous midrash (interpretive story) in which the Israelites stand frozen at the edge of the Sea of Reeds, with the Egyptian army closing in behind them. Only Nachshon jumps into the sea. At that moment, the waters part, and the Israelites follow Nachshon across dry land to the other side.
Why was Nachshon chosen as the star of this story of courage? Perhaps to continue the Torah’s teaching about the importance of strong sibling bonds: Nachshon is Aharon’s brother-in-law, and assists Moshe-Miriam-Aharon with their leadership duties. Perhaps to teach that our virtues of character, once developed, serve us well in any situation. Torah tells us that Nachshon was appointed to lead the entire Israelite army in battle; midrash thus teaches that Nachson also led the entire Israelite people to safety.
Nachshon’s name means “snake.” A snake skeleton is a long spine; thus snakes are very flexibile. Snakes are sensitive to vibrations, infrared light, and the chemical composition of air particles around them; thus they notice details that escape most human beings. Nachshon’s ability to lead came from his sensitivity and flexibility…offering us all a lesson in how best to move forwards.
From Rabbi James Stone Goodman
Bless you Earth-ling 2011
Gobble up the three-fold blessings
the priests our Kohanic ancestors
with their really great clothes
that hat mitznefet
the breastplate
summer breastplate with aeration
winter breastplate to keep the heart line
warm.
Linen
in a dry climate linen is fabulous
when it’s humid
it’s like wearing a wet towel.
The colors
deep crimson the color of a squashed worm
the mysterious blue
[the blue comes up once every seventy years]
nowadays the blue is not hidden
and the purple –
Is it on the reddish tint or the bluish tint
they’re so different
let’s mix up some imagined purple
and then invent another name for it.
O holy G*d of the tri-partite blessing
as brought down by the Sefas Emes
pores to spread out means to choose a partial
opening onto the whole
the individual as it opens onto the universal
the universal always sheleimut
shalom
l’sem lekha shalom
to bring the blessing from the individual instance
to the universal application
the conduit from the one to the many –
wild ride that.
The Sefas Emes connects blessing with wholeness with individuality
with blessing the power of the upper root descends
descends on the lower root on the individual on the instance
the upper root the anchoring above
roots above, so to speak.
The inner point of truth
this is shleimut shalom
the inner is experienced in the universal
wherever God dwells
there is blessing
wherever there is blessing
there is shalom
can you dig that?
I love the partial the broken individual incomplete
the fragment the wounded
I love the separate because it integrates
and even if not –
it is whole.
The many crystalled net
each facet reflecting the whole
the crazy skate from the one
to the Universal
the universal grasp of HaKol
the wild ride from here to There –
Dr. Lehman — I hear you dripping syllables
HaKol Pleroma the All
about which you can say too much –
Amen.
jsg, usa
From Melissa Carpenter
Naso (and Bemidbar): Four Duties, Four Directions
2011
Out of all the twelve tribes of Israel, only men from the tribe of Levi take care of the portable sanctuary (the inner Tent of Meeting, and the outer courtyard) and conduct the religious cult there. The original Levi is the third son of Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, in the book of Genesis/ Bereishit. He has three sons of his own: Geirshon, Kohat (or Kehat), and Merari. The descendants of these three sons are the three clans of Levites in the book of Numbers (called Bemidbar, “In the Wilderness”, in Hebrew).
Whenever the Israelites break camp and make another journey through the wilderness, someone has to dismantle the sanctuary, carry the pieces, and reassemble it at the next camp. Last week’s Torah portion assigns the priests (Aaron and his sons Elazar and Itamar, who happen to be descendants of Kohat) the job of wrapping up the most holy objects. These objects are they carried by the non-priests in the Kohat clan of Levites.
This week’s portion, Naso (“He Lifted”), begins with a description of what the other two clans of Levites carry.
Geirshonites: They shall carry the curtains of the santuary and of the Tent of Meeting; its roof-covering and the covering of the leather that is on top of it, and the covering of the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. This is the duty of the families of the sons of Geirshon in the Tent of Meeting; and their custody is in the hand of Itamar, son of Aaron the priest. (Numbers/ Bemidbar 4:25, 4:28)
Merarites: And this is their custody and their burden for all their duty in the Tent of Meeting: the planks of the sanctuary, and its cross-pieces and its uprights and its sockets. And the uprights of the courtyard all around, and their sockets and their pegs and their tent-ropes, including all of their tools for all of their duty; and you shall assign, by name, the tools for their custody and their burden. This is the duty of the families of the sons of Merari; all their duty in the Tent of Meeting is in the hand of Itamar, son of Aaron the priest. (Numbers 4:31-33)
avodah: = duty, labor, service; work done not for oneself, but for another person or for God
In the Torah, the priests rank the highest in the hierarchy, and get the “holiest” duties. When the sanctuary is dismantled, carried to the next camping-place, and reassembled, the priests’ duties include wrapping up the most sacred objects in various coverings, and supervising the other Levite men and assigning them their individual jobs.
The Kohatites carry the most sacred objects after they are wrapped: the ark itself, the lampstand, the table for the twelve loaves of bread, and the incense altar.
The Geirshonites carry the walls of the sanctuary, which are all woven fabric, and the two layers of roofing over the inner Tent of Meeting, a large panel of woven goat-hair and another of waterproof leather.
The Merarites carry all the pieces of framework that hold up the inner Tent of Meeting and the outer courtyard wall.
Thus the four groups (the priests and the three Levite clans) have four different duties when the people journey. And when the camp is set up again, these four groups pitch their personal family tents close to four different sides of the sanctuary.
Moses and the priests camp to the east, in front of the entrance to the sanctuary’s outer courtyard. (The entrances to the Tent of Meeting and the innermost Holy of Holies also face east.) The Kohatites camp on the south side of the sanctuary, the Gershonites on the west side, and the Merarites on the north side.
The words used in this part of the book of Numbers for east, south, west, and north all have another meaning:
keidmah = toward the east; toward the front, the origin, the ancient time
teymanah = toward the south; from the root word yamin = right hand (the hand of favor and power)
yamah = toward the west; toward the sea
tzafonah = toward the north; toward the hidden
The priests have the most perilous duty; they must touch the most holy objects in order to wrap them for transport. They are also responsible for what the Levites do. Their place is in the east, toward the ancient time, the origin of the human race. (In Genesis, as soon as God has created a human being, God puts the adam in the garden of Eden, which is in the “east”.)
Today, if we take on religious leadership, we need to remember that some people look up to us, and look to us for guidance. Whatever we model, as well as teach, will have a deep effect on other human beings. This is indeed a perilous duty.
The Kohatites get the next most dangerous job, carrying the holy objects on their shoulders without touching or seeing them directly. Their place is in the south, at the favored right hand of the priests.
Today, when we choose to follow a religious leader, to serve at their right hand, we receive the gift of everything we learn from them. But we are also responsible for carrying and passing on their teachings in a way that continues their good work—and does not degenerate into the idol-worship of mere objects and appearances.
The Geirshonites are responsible for walls and roofs. Their place is to the west, toward the sea.
We often assume that if we put up psychological walls, we can actually keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. If we put up a mental roof, we can operate in the mundane world without worrying about any inscrutable mysteries, anything that might be called God. But we need to remember that walls and roofs are not as permanent as they might seem. Something that looks solid may turn out to be flimsy fabric, as fluid as the sea. Like the wall of water when the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea, a psychological wall might protect us, or might crash down and drown us.
The Merarites are responsible for the supporting framework of the sanctuary. Their place is to the north, the place where things are hidden.
Many treasures are hidden from us, including knowledge and insight. We don’t even know ourselves. The only way we can find any hidden insights is by periodically dismantling the structure of our beliefs, carrying the pieces to a new place we have not been before, and erecting a new framework of supporting beliefs and theories.
Sometimes we can linger in one place in our lives, enjoying its blessings. Then something changes; the presence of God rises and moves on, so to speak, and our blessings disappear. That’s when we have to dismantle our lives, our own sanctuaries, and journey to a new place.
When we sense that we’ve arrived at the next place where God wants us, we have to rebuild our lives. First we do the work of the Merarites, erecting a new framework, a new set of theories about life to support us and allow us to continue uncovering hidden insights. Next we do the work of the Gershonites, hanging walls and draping roofs, separating our interior space from the exterior world while recognizing that the barriers are fluid. Then we do the work of the Kohatites, setting down the holy objects, our most sacred convictions, in their proper places so that they are no longer burdens. And finally we do the work of the priests, unwrapping the holy objects, revealing the golden treasures of our souls just enough so we can do the holy work of influencing the world for the good.
From Rav DovBer Pinson
B”H
Week’s Energy for Parshas Naso
Rav DovBer Pinson
Between Routine and Passion
This week’s Torah reading begins with the words “Hashem spoke to Moshe…take a census…”(4;21-22)
This is a continuation of the census that began in last week’s reading. This week’s census focuses on the Levites and the Kohanim/Priests and the unique services and rituals that was their duty to perform in the Temple.
Later in the reading, the Torah speaks of the laws of the Nazir/Nazirite. The Nazir is a person who chooses to separate himself or herself from the norms of society, and live a life detached from earthliness.
Some of the practices of the Nazir are similar to the laws of conduct of the Kohen, such as the law of ensuring that one does not become defiled, or tameh.
While there are similarities between the Kohen and the Nazir there is also a marked distinction between the two. The priesthood is a birthright. You must be born a Kohen, and a non-Kohen can never become a Kohen, whereas the Nazir is a personal choice, anyone at any time can choose to live as a Nazir.
A reflection of this dynamic is also mirrored in the Nazir and the Kohen’s relationship with hair.
The Kohen needed to shave his head (8:7), his hair needed to be orderly; the high priest would cut his hair once a week and the other priests would cut their hair once a month (Tannis 17b), whereas for the Nazir it is written, “No razor shall pass over his head…it shall be sacred, and he shall allow the growth of the hair of his head to grow wild.” (6:5)
The Kohen represents the orderly and routine, the day-in-day-out service of the Temple, and thus serves with short and tamed hair. In direct contrast, the Nazir goes with long untamed hair that suggests the non-orderly and the rebellious, a breaking of the status quo.
Historically, in fact, many Nezirim/ Nazirites in Temple times were young, single and infused with passion. In their personal dedication they would vow to be a Nazir, most often for a temporary period of time, thirty days or so, and live for that period detached and removed from society.
The Kohen represents the one who upholds the order of the system, maintaining the organization which is impersonal. The Kohen serves in the Temple as the representative of the community, with the same routine each day, whereas the Nazir represents the non ordinary and more personal expression and passionate service.
Everything in life has both a context, which is it’s structure, and a content, which is how the structure is filled.
We need both.
To survive and flourish as both a human and a spiritual being we need both the structure/routine and the content/passion, the priest and the prophet as it were.
We need the day to day routines in life to give our lives structure, but we must also have our personal moments when we feel connected.
In a relationship, such as marriage, there is the underlying context – the structure and formality of the marriage agreement, yet within that structure there must also be passion, a non-order within the order, as it were.
Prayer is yet another example of this within our lives. We pray everyday, and we pray a set prayer within a set time. Yet, within the structure of prayer there needs to be our personal involvement, manifested in our Kavanah/intention and focus.
There is always the delicate balance between maintaining routine, which is preserving the underlying structure and simultaneously ensuring that the routine does not become stale. We need to be passionate and personally invested and engaged on all levels of our being in all that we do, and still be be supported by a strong and unshakeable structure of routine and ritual.
The Torah reading this week juxtaposes both these spiritual ways of being, the Kohen and the Nazir, to teach and inspire us to live within both of these frameworks. Keeping the structure and the passion, the order and beyond order and in this way upholding the system and infusing it with life and vitality.
THE WEEK’S ENERGY
Between Routine and Passion
This week’s Torah reading imbues us with the strength to maintain the balance between the required structure and orderliness of our lives and the passion and personal energy that we bring to it.
Review the structures of your life, be it relationships, lifestyle choices, livelihood related or spiritual context, and ensure that the structure is well supported and has firm grounding.
Look deeper into those structures and be sure that they are continuously infused with your own personal vitality and passion.
Ensure that all your passion and excitement is within a safe and grounded framework of order, and that this order is always infused with passion.
Reb Sholom Brodt transcription of Reb Shlomo teaching.
From Melissa Carpenter
Let Down Your Hair
Torah Monologues News Blog Excerpts Programs And the priest will station the woman before God, and he will unbind the head of the woman … (Numbers 5:18; Nasso)
All the days of his vow of dedication-to-separateness, no razor will pass over his head; until the fulfillment of the days that he will dedicate-to-separateness, his big, unbound, bristling hair will be holy to God. (Numbers 6:5; Nasso)
para = he will unbind, unbraid, let loose, remove restraint from
pera = unbound, unbraided, loose, disarranged, wild and out of control
nizro = his dedication-to-separateness, his being a nazir, his being set apart; his crown
What do the ritual instructions for the sotah (the wife suspected of adultery) and the nazir (the man who sets himself apart for holiness by abstaining from certain actions) have in common, besides that they appear in the same Torah portion, Nasso?
One answer is: unbound hair.
The ritual to establish the guilt or innocence of a woman whose husband suspects her of adultery begins with the priest unbinding the wife’s hair. According to Rashi, this verse is the source for the teaching of the Sages, centuries later, that it is shameful for married Jewish women to expose their hair in public. The Torah does not say whether married women before the time of the Second Temple bound their hair in cloth, or merely put up their hair in braids or pins. But either way, a woman was humiliated if a priest let down her hair in public.
There seems to be no humiliation involved when a man becomes a nazir, someone who vows to set himself apart for a period of time, dedicate himself to separateness—not by leaving the community, but by letting his hair grow untrimmed and wild, abstaining from all grape products, and avoiding contact with corpses—even if a member of his own family dies. His unbound, untrimmed, unbraided, “bristling” head of hair is considered holy rather than shameful.
Most commentary says the nazir’s unconventional hair distances him from normal social intercourse, just as he is distanced by avoiding not only wine, but even grape juice (which might substitute for wine when his friends are drinking). This social distance marks the nazir as holy, dedicated to God.
When the period of his vow ends, the nazir shaves his head and puts his hair on the altar fire, under the peace-offering, thus making his wild mane an offering to God. According to Rabbi R.S. Hirsch, this indicates that the purpose of spending time as a nazir is self-improvement, so the nazir will rejoin society as a better member of the community—less vain about his hair, perhaps, or wiser because of the extra time for self-reflection.
But why isn’t a nazir allowed to mourn, even if a member of his family dies? Elsewhere the Torah says that loosening your hair and letting it grow untrimmed is an essential part of mourning. In Leviticus 10:6, after Nadav and Avihu are consumed by holy fire, the three remaining priests (their father Aaron and their brothers Elazar and Itamar) are told: “Don’t let the hair hang loose on your heads, and don’t tear up your clothes”, because they are not allowed to mourn.
Unbound hair seems to be a sign of shame for a married woman in public, a sign of holiness for a nazir, and a sign of mourning for everyone else. Why?
I see the answer in my mirror every morning when I’m getting ready to leave the house. One thing I always do is “fix” my hair.
Even today, an acceptable appearance in public includes hair that looks trimmed, combed, and arranged (sometimes in a carefully tousled style). When someone appears in public with loose, tangled, unkempt hair, it means something: either a loss of self-respect, or a disregard for social norms because something bigger commands all of the person’s attention.
The sotah (the wife suspected of adultery) is shamed, stripped of her self-respect, when the priest unbinds her hair. The nazir indicates with his wild hair that his attention is on spiritual communion rather than social intercourse. And the mourner’s long, loose hair signals that he or she is too overwhelmed by the death in the family to engage in normal society.
Hair is a more important symbol than I realized before I wrote this blog. The hippies of my youth were onto something.
Wendy’s Comment: I enjoy Reb Melissa’s commentary on the symbolism of hair. What is
also interesting to me is that both men and women could take the vow of the Nazir so that women’s unbound hair could also be a sign of holiness in this case.
From AJR/CA
Parshat Naso
Torah Reading for Week of May 16 – May 22, 2010
“The Blessings We Desire”
by Yolande Bloomstein, PhD, LCSW
AJR, CA Professor of Chaplaincy Studies
“Thus shall you bless the children of Israel. Say unto them: May the Lord bless you and protect you. May the Lord cause His Presence to illuminate you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord raise up His Presence before you and grant you peace.” (Numbers 6: 23 -25).
This is probably the best known blessing in the Western world, invoked regularly in synagogues and churches. Because of its rich cadences and power, interpretations on its three parts abound. I should like to offer a synthesis of many of these great commentaries.
‘May the Lord bless you” with material sustenance to free you to pursue your personal and spiritual growth. “And protect you’ from your material blessings. The danger of material success and the accumulation of wealth and material goods is that these may become ends in themselves, easily corrupting us and encouraging selfishness, greed, and corruption. Therefore, while we pray that the Lord will bless us with abundance, we pray too that we will be protected from the terrible things that abundance can do to us.
“May the Lord cause His Presence to illuminate”. Many of our Sages have associated this part of the blessing with our prayer for the illumination of insight and understanding. Not only does this follow from the first part of the blessing, but it captures the Jewish ideal of the pursuit of Torah enlightenment. Before we recite the Shema each morning we ask: “Illuminate our eyes with your Torah”. “And grant you grace.” One of the major aspects of the therapeutic relationship is the insight and understanding it gives simultaneously to client and to therapist in the process of healing and growth. Unfortunately, like wealth, Knowledge, too, can be corrupting. It can lead to arrogance, hubris, and the exploitation of the gullible. It is for this reason that we pray that the wisdom that G-d grants us will be used with grace, to benefit others rather than ourselves alone. “May the Lord raise up His Presence before you”. The commentators associate this part of the priestly blessing with our prayer that the Lord be palpably present in our lives protecting us and guiding us with divine providence. The Torah imagines nothing worse than the absence of the Divine from our lives-hester panim, the hiddeness of the Presence. Ultimately it is only when we are conscious of the protecting love of the divine Presence can we be assured of the fulfillment of the final clause of the blessing, “And grant you peace.
From Chabad.org
This is the law of the nazir on the day that the days of his abstention are completed… (6:13)
Once, in the early days of Chassidism, a learned Jew happened upon a farbrengen (a Chassidic gathering). Taking in the sight of half-empty vodka bottles on the table, of Jews singing and dancing instead of studying Torah, he cried: “Jews! The Holy Temple is in ruins, Israel is in exile, and you dance and drink?!”
Present at the farbrengen was Rabbi Dovid Ferkus, a senior disciple of the Baal Shem Tov. “I have a question for you,” said Rabbi Dovid to the visitor. “In one place, Rashi writes that a nazir’s vow to abstain from wine is an appropriate reaction for one who witnesses human susceptibility to corruption by physical appetites. But only a few verses later, Rashi quotes the Talmudic opinion which regards the nazir’s abstinence as a sin. Which is it? Is drinking wine a positive or a negative thing to do?
“Ill tell you the difference between the two cases,” continued Rabbi Dovid. “The first statement by Rashi is addressed to one who ‘sees a sotah’s ruin.’ A person who is capable of seeing the negative in a fellow Jew, had better not drink wine. Wine will agitate his heart, and he’ll probably be roused to discover more failings and deficiencies in his fellows. But someone who is blessed with the ability to see only the good in his fellow, for him to avoid getting together with other Jews for a lechaim! is nothing less than sinful. An infusion of wine into his heart will stimulate it to uncover the hidden good in the hearts of his fellows.”
(Reshimat Devarim)
—————————————————————————————————–
The one who offered his offering on the first day was Nachshon the son of Aminadav, of the tribe of Judah. And his offering was: One silver dish, weighing 130 shekels. One silver bowl of 70 shekels… On the second day offered Nethanel the son of Tzuar, of the tribe of Issachar. And his offering was: One silver dish, weighing 130 shekels. One silver bowl of 70 shekels… (7:12-23)
The Torah is very mincing with words: many a complex chapter of Torah law is derived from a choice of context, a turn of language, even an extra letter. Yet in our Parshah, the Torah seemingly “squanders” dozens of verses by itemizing the gifts brought by the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel on the occasion of the inauguration of the Sanctuary. Each tribe brought its offering on a different day, but the gifts they each brought were identical in every respect, down to the weight of the silver plate and the age of the five lambs. Nevertheless, the Torah recounts each tribe’s gift separately, repeating the 35-item list twelve times in succession.
The Midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah 13 & 14) implies that while the twelve tribes made identical offerings, each experienced the event in a different manner. Each of the 35 items in the offering symbolized something–a personality or event in Jewish history, or a concept in Jewish faith or practice–but to each tribe, they symbolized different things, relating to that tribe’s role. For the twelve tribes represent the various vocations amongst the people of Israel–Judah produced Israel’s kings, leaders and legislators; Issachar its scholars; Zebulun its seafarers and merchants, and so on. All conform to the same Divinely ordained guidelines, all order their lives by the same Torah; yet each flavors the very same deeds with his individual nature and approach.
Often, we tend to see a tension between conformity and creativity, between tradition and innovation. On the one hand, we recognize the bedrock of absolutes upon which a meaningful existence must rest, the time-tested truths which transcend cultures and generations; on the other, we are faced with the powerful drive to create, to personalize, to grow and soar with our individualized talents and tools.
Our daily prayers, for example, follow the basic text instituted by the prophets and sages of the Great Assembly more than 2,400 years ago; as such, their content and wording optimally express the manner in which man relates to G-d. Yet how is the individual in man to be satisfied with a common formula for every person?
Is monotony the price we must pay for perfection? Does creativity compromise truth? Not so, say the 72 “repetitious” verses in our Parshah. An entire nation, including individuals of every conceivable character and calling, can do the very same deed, down to every last detail, and still imbue them with their uniquely personal input. Even as they relate to the ultimate common denominator of their bond with G-d, they each bring to the experience the richness of their own creative souls.
(The Lubavitcher Rebbe)
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And when Moses would enter the Sanctuary to speak with [G-d], he would hear the voice speaking to him from above the cover of the Ark of Testimony… and it spoke to him (7:89)
A basic tenet of the Jewish faith is that man has been granted the freedom to choose between good and evil, between adherence to his divinely ordained mission in life and rebellion against, or even denial of, his Creator. As Maimonides writes, “Were G-d to decree that a person be righteous or wicked, of if there were to exist something in the essence of a person’s nature which would compel him toward a specific path, a specific conviction, a specific character trait or a specific deed…how could G-d command us through the prophets ‘do this’ and ‘do not do this’…? What place would the entire Torah have? And by what measure of justice would G-d punish the wicked and reward the righteous…?”
This is the deeper significance of the “short stop” made by the divine voice at the doorway of the Sanctuary. At Sinai, the words “I Am G-d your G-d” resounded throughout the universe, permeating every creature and creation. At that moment, there was no possibility of doubt in G-d’s reality or of nonconformity to His will. But then the world fell silent, and the voice retreated to hover over the “Ark of Testimony” that contains G-d’s Torah and to confine itself to the four walls of the Sanctuary that houses it.
The volume was not lowered—the voice is no less infinite and omnipotent than it was at Sinai. One who enters the Sanctuary hears a voice that penetrates and permeates all, a voice that knows no bounds or equivocations. But one can choose to remain outside of the domain of Torah, to deny himself the knowledge and the way of life in which G-d makes Himself heard. One can choose to remain outside, in the field of G-d’s self-imposed silence.
It is this choice that creates the challenge of life, making our every moral victory a true and significant achievement.
(The Lubavitcher Rebbe
From Rabbi Rachel Barenblat
Bread and bitter water (Radical Torah repost)
Here’s the d’var Torah I wrote for this week’s portion back in 2006, originally published at Radical Torah.
This week’s Torah portion, Naso, features one of the most fascinatingly bizarre rulesets in Torah: the ritual to be performed if a husband suspects his wife of adultery.
The sotah ritual is strangely magical. The priest mixes “sacral water” and earth from the floor of the Tabernacle. The woman suspected of adultery must bare her head, and she holds the couple’s meal offering in her hands. (When else do women hold offerings to Adonai?) The priest offers a series of blessings and curses — if the woman is innocent let her be immune to harm; if she is guilty may her belly and thigh sag — and the woman echoes them with an “amen.” And then the curses are written down, the ink dissolved in the water which already holds a smidgen of earth, the offerings offered, and the woman drinks. If she is innocent, the text tells us, she shall bear children; if guilty, the curse will come true, and she will bear her iniquity.
That this is a problematic text for women today hardly needs reiteration. There is no analagous ritual to be performed by a woman who suspects her husband of straying. Female sexuality here is apparently owned by men, both husband and priests, and the text seems to presume feminine guilt. But this passage is not irredeemable, and a variety of thinkers have spun the straw of this text into exegetical gold.
One of these is Blu Greenberg, who writes, in The Law of the Sotah:
On the surface, and to a woman of contemporary sensibilities, this scene is awful; a jealous husband hauling his wife before the authorities, a humiliating public ritual, gory consequences. Some have used these verses to prove how Torah and tradition deprecate women.
But Sotah is much more complex than that. In many ways it is a paradigm for the dialectic regarding women that runs through Torah and Talmud — simultaneously hierarchical and protective, callous and compassionate.
She argues that the text can be read in at least two ways — though it’s possible to see this as an anti-feminist text which presupposes male ownership of female sexuality, it’s also possible to see the Sotah ritual as designed to painlessly prove womens’ innocence. Beyond that, she suggests that in the Talmud’s move to supercede this ritual we can discern a kind of proto-feminist consciousness, an awareness that gender roles and paradigms needed to change.
Reform rabbi Judith Abrams has wise things to say about this passage, too. In Midah K’Neged Midah, Rabbi Abrams explores the sotah ritual through the fourfold lens of PaRDeS, looking at the text’s pshat (simple meaning), remez (symbolic meaning), drash (the stories it tells us), and sod (the metaphors it can unfold for us.)
The sotah ritual, she points out, is strikingly similar to the ritual the Israelites undergo after the sin of the golden calf (which involves grinding the calf into dust, mixing that into water, and drinking the resultant potion.) The passage about the golden calf potion uses the phrase “great sin.” In legal documents of that era, she explains, the term refers to adultery. But when the term appears in Torah, four of its six instances are explicit references not to marital adultery but to the spiritual adultery of idolatry. The Talmud explicitly compares these two passages, implying similarity between these two kinds of covenantal betrayal. Rabbi Abrams expands on that notion, reading the sotah ritual in a way that relates to the covenant between us and God:
If we are interpreting this ritual on a symbolic level as opposed to a practical or historical level, it becomes one of hope and reconciliation rather than judgment and severity. We, Israel, stray from God by worshipping idols or flirting with other faiths. When we do, we have a way of salvaging the relationship and reconfirming the relationship with God…
I like her point that in this passage about brokenness in our relationships with each other, we can find lessons about brokenness in our relationships with our Source — and also, about repair.
For my own part, this year while studying the parasha I noticed something which hadn’t struck me before: the nature of the offering the couple is to bring before God when the situation arises. In the JPS translation, the text says:
If any man’s wife has gone astray and broken faith with him in that a man has had carnal relations with her unbeknown to her husband, and she keeps secret the fact that she has defiled herself without being forced, and there is no witness against her but a fit of jealousy 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 man shall bring his wife to the priest. And he shall bring as an offering for her one-tenth of an ephah of barley flour. No oil shall be poured upon it and no frankincense shall be laid on it, for it is a meal offering of jealousy, a meal offering of remembrance which recalls wrongdoing.
I’m fascinated that the barley flour brought as an offering in this instance is not anointed with oil, nor glorified with frankincense, because it is an offering of jealousy. (Everett Fox calls it “a grain-gift of jealousy / grain-gift of reminding that reminds of iniquity.”) There’s a poetic kind of appropriateness to the lack of oil and spice. Jealousy negates what is rich and valuable and beautiful. When jealousy consumes us, we are dulled in a way that obscures the flavor of our relationships, even our relationship with God.
In the ritual outlined by Torah, the woman who stands accused drinks a literal water of bitterness, in which dust and the words of a curse have been suspended. But the way the text describes the jealousy offering suggests to me that in truth, both partners partook of bitterness. When an accusation of sexual misconduct is levied, neither partner can truly access the splendor of thanksgiving or holiness until the fears of betrayal have been laid to rest.
Today the Sotah ritual is long gone. A spouse who suspects infidelity has different resources at her or his disposal. But I think this week’s Torah portion hints at emotional truths that still resonate even so. Maybe the story of the Sotah can help us face jealousy’s capacity to damage our relationships, and can give us insight into the necessary journey (both personal and partnered) between accusation and resolution.
~ Rabbi Shefa Gold’s Torah Journeys ~
Naso
(Lift/Add)
NUMBERS 4:21 – 7:89
This portion gives us the ancient Priestly Blessing. It also describes the ordeal of the woman who is accused of unfaithfulness by her jealous husband.
THE BLESSING
AT THIS TIME OF NASO we give and receive the great and ancient Priestly Blessing. Our arms are outstretched above the tumult of our lives and our hands imitate cloven hooves, invoking the power of the animals of our shepherding ancestors who bless this world through us.
God commands the priests (and the priest or priestess within each of us) to bless each other with these words:
“May God bless you and guard you.
May God shine his faces upon you and grace you.
May God lift up his face to you and give you peace.”1
May you be filled with the Divine Flow
and may its essence transform you
so that you are protected from your habits of distortion.
May the fierce and loving light of God shine
through all illusions of self, dissolving the walls
that seem to keep out the miracle of grace.
May the face of God that is hidden in everything
remove its mask and reveal the truth
of our inter-connectedness.
And may the love that shines through
the face-of-all-things give you peace.
The Divine command concludes: “So shall they put my name upon the Israelites and I will bless them.”2
Through this blessing, God’s name – the Divine Essence – rests upon us.
The privilege of carrying the Name/Essence of God into the world is the greatest blessing we can bear. It is giving and receiving at once. It is the pure state of becoming and being a blessing. When I carry that essence consciously, every moment begins to sparkle with meaning – even moments of suffering, moments of terror, even the moment of my death….
Each moment is received by a heart that is as vast as the sea and alive with compassion. Carrying that Divine Essence is like being a drop that knows the ocean within it. The Divine Name/Essence makes us infinitely large, certainly big enough to absorb and endure the events of our lives.
THE SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE
NASO DESCRIBES A SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE that all of us must at some point endure. This challenge is symbolized by a woman who is accused of adultery by her jealous husband. She undergoes a test to determine if she has indeed been unfaithful.
That woman is each of us, married to the Divine Essential Mystery. Our relationship to that mystery is dynamic and complex: dynamic, because we are always moving in and out of connection – remembering, forgetting and remembering again; complex, because the ego is oftentimes engaged in a subtle (or not-so-subtle) practice of deception.
In the ordeal that Naso describes, we ask the truth to make itself known, even if it will make us uncomfortable. We ask to cut through the web of self-deception in order to discover if we have truly “gone astray.”
WHEN I WAS A CHILD I had frequent stomach-aches. I was outwardly very shy, but had an active inner life. As a teenager, I began to notice a pattern to my stomach-aches. Whenever I had something to say and didn’t say it, the unsaid words would immediately go to my stomach. My body would not let me withhold my truth without paying the price. My body became a strict teacher, and I listened to its signals in order to find my voice. I was the woman who had gone astray, set back on my path through the power of a fierce love.
When the woman who is tested in Naso proves her innocence, her loyalty to Truth, she is made fruitful; failing the test, she is left barren.
So too, our creative lives depend on the unwavering commitment to our essential wholeness and integrity, and we betray that integrity at our peril.
THE SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE of Naso is to receive the ordeals of our own lives as agents of Truth. Through them we are tested, humbled and refined. Our defenses are stripped away. We are distilled to our essence. In response to this challenge, I vow to use everything in my life, in service to the Truth – to let life’s bitter waters dissolve the web of self-deception that I weave. If I have been led astray by my fears or delusions, I ask that the flow of my life lead me back to the Truth.
This is no small request. Making such a request of life requires that we pay close attention and be prepared to receive the response in the language in which life speaks to us: that of everyday circumstances.
I HAVE LEARNED that this perspective on life must be limited to the personal. I do not have permission to see someone else’s life this way or to interpret their hardship as a gift. Compassion is the correct response to the suffering of others. The perception of my own ordeal, however, may be transformed into a force of healing and truth.
1 Numbers 6:24-26
2 Numbers 6:27
For Guidelines for Practice please click link to website.
http://www.rabbishefagold.com/naso/
From Rav Kook
Naso: Three Priestly Blessings
“Birkat kohanim”
God commanded Aaron and his descendants, the kohanim, to bless the people with three special blessings:
“Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying: This is how you must bless the Israelites. Say to them:
•May God bless you and keep watch over you.
•May God make His presence enlighten you, and grant you grace.
•May God lift His face toward you, and grant you peace.” (Num. 6:23-26)
The last blessing, however, is not clear. What does it mean that God should “lift His face toward you”?
The Need for Leniency
While the first blessing refers to our physical welfare, the second blessing is concerned with our spiritual well-being. Spiritual enlightenment, however, brings with it additional responsibilities. As we gain knowledge and enlightenment, the expectations for ethical living, purity of thought, and refinement of character are greater.
If we consider the consequential moral demands, we may become apprehensive and even discouraged. In order to counter this concern, the kohanim bestow a third blessing, “May God lift His face towards you”.
To ‘lift one’s face’ is a Hebrew idiom, meaning to show favor or leniency. The Torah commands a judge, for example, not to ‘lift his face’ towards one of the litigants. The judge must be careful to avoid even the impression that he favors one side of the case, even though he is in reality impartial. The other litigant may feel that the case is already lost, and lose heart.
The kohanim bless us that, despite the ethical expectations that come with spiritual enlightenment, we should not lose heart. God will be lenient, taking into account the material reality in which we live.
We may, however, feel embarrassed or uncomfortable about this Divine leniency. Therefore, the final blessing ends with the gift of peace — peace of mind. “And grant you peace.”
(adapted from Olat Ri’ah vol. I, p.62)
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Copyright © 2006 by Chanan Morrison
Naso: The Benefits of the Sotah Waters
The Suspected Adulteress
The integrity of the family unit is of fundamental importance in Judaism. For this unit to function properly, the husband-wife relationship must be one of trust and constancy. But what happens when this trust, so vital for a healthy marriage, is broken?
The Torah discusses the situation of the Sotah, the suspected adulteress. This tragic case occurs when a woman, previously warned by her husband not to be alone with a particular man, violates his warning and is witnessed secluding herself with that man.
The Torah prescribes an unusual ceremony for the potentially explosive situation. The woman is brought to the entrance of the Temple, and she brings a special offering of barley meal. The kohen uncovers her hair, and administers to her a special oath. If the suspected adulteress insists on her innocence, the kohen lets her drink from the Sotah waters. If she was unfaithful to her husband, these waters poison her. But if the wife was in fact innocent, the waters are beneficial. “She will remain unharmed and will become pregnant” (Num. 5:28).
“She will become pregnant”
The sages disagreed on the exact nature of the positive effect of the Sotah waters. Rabbi Yishmael understood the verse literally: if she was barren, she became pregnant. Rabbi Akiva, however, disagreed. If that were the case, all childless women would purposely seclude themselves with another man and drink the Sotah waters, in order to bear children! Rather, Rabbi Akiva explained, the waters would ease the pain of child-birth, or make the babies healthier, or cause multiple births. (Berachot 31a)
Rabbi Akiva had a good point — the law of the Sotah could potentially turn the holy Temple into a fertility clinic. In fact, the Talmud tells us that one famous woman threatened to do just that. Hannah, the barren wife of Elkana, threatened to go through the Sotah process if her prayers for a child went unanswered. (Her prayers were in fact granted, and her son became the famous prophet Samuel.) How could Rabbi Yishmael say that the waters would cause barren women to bear children?
Rav Kook explained that the Temple ritual for suspected adulteresses was so degrading and terrifying, that no woman would willingly submit to it — not even a barren woman desperate for children.
Hannah’s exceptional yearning for a child
Hannah, however, was a special case.
This amazing woman foresaw that her child was destined for spiritual greatness. Hannah’s profound yearning for a child went far beyond the natural desire of a barren woman to have children. She was motivated by spiritual goals greater than her own personal needs and wants. Hannah felt that these spiritual ambitions alone might not be enough, so she was willing to actively demonstrate that her longing for a child surpassed the normal desire of a barren woman. Thus, Hannah was willing to undergo the ordeal of the Sotah ceremony. And by merit of her extraordinary yearning, her prayers were miraculously answered.
Only in this unusual case was the natural deterrent of the ordeal of the Sotah insufficient.
(adapted from Ein Eyah vol. I, p.135)
Copyright © 2006 by Chanan Morrison