Nasso 2021
Displays of unity; the oddbods; and peace revisited
Hey friends!
Here’s the link to the printable sheet.
Here’s the link if you prefer reading this and much more on the TorahRedux website.
And here’s some of what I have to say about this week’s Parsha; I hope you enjoy it, and as always, I hope you have a fabulous Shabbos. If you have questions or comments, or just want to say hello, you can reply to this message directly - it’s a point of pride for me to hear that my work positively impacted you, and I’ll always respond. If some of this is familiar, please forgive me as it was a very short week to write anything new!
Achdus; What Is Unity?
< 1 minute
At the inauguration of the Mishkan, the princes of each tribe offered a sacrifice. The Torah records what each prince offered separately, despite being completely identical, and they delivered the twelve sets of gifts on six wagons:
וַיָּבִיאוּ אֶת קָרְבָּנָם לִפְנֵי ה שֵׁשׁ עֶגְלֹת צָב וּשְׁנֵי עָשָׂר בָּקָר עֲגָלָה עַל שְׁנֵי הַנְּשִׂאִים וְשׁוֹר לְאֶחָד וַיַּקְרִיבוּ אוֹתָם לִפְנֵי הַמִּשְׁכָּן – They brought their gifts before the Lord: six covered wagons and twelve oxen, a wagon for each two chieftains, and an ox for each one; they presented them in front of the Mishkan. (7:3)
The Sforno understands that the six wagons were a perfect act of unity. This illustrates that each prince’s gift, while the same as the others in substance, retained a sense of individuality.
Unity cannot require an individual to be subsumed into a homogenous, uniform entity; this would entirely compromise the individual.
It cannot be that the way to accept another person is when they are just like you.
However, this begs the question; for the ultimate display of unity, why not merge all the gifts into one wagon?
R’ Shlomo Farhi suggests that something done as a display is only a display! Unity is not an ideological principle; it is practical, grassroots, and organic. One individual has to get on with another individual specifically! The example set by the princes is perfect – it is not institutional or societal; it is personal – human to human.
Unity means actually identifying and sharing a common bond and spirit with something – not the display.
Social Context
2 minute read
The Book of Vayikra, also known as Toras Kohanim, or Leviticus. It deals with the Tribe of Levi, the kohanim, their roles, and duties throughout. The Book of Shemos, or Exodus, deals with the Exodus and all that ensued.
The Book of Bamidbar is known as Sefer Pikudim, the Book of Numbers, after the census numbers.
But the census occurs only twice, in Bamidbar and Pinchas. The numbers aren’t actually a theme of the book!
So why is the whole book called Pikudim?
R’ Matis Weinberg explains that the book is not called Numbers for the counting, but context and logistics. The theme of every section is about the development, establishment, and formation of society – the מחנה.
Part of building a society is finding space for the people who don’t seem to fit.
Among the guidance for the different clans of Levi and their respective roles, there are four interceding sections before the main discussion continues; how certain types of sick people, the metzora and zav, must leave the camp and quarantine before we can rehabilitate them; that when a convert dies with no family, his assets are distributed to kohanim; the law of Sotah; and the law of Nazir.
R’ Matis Weinberg explains that these laws aren’t interrupting the discussion of establishing a society; they are an essential part of it. Any decent society needs to find a place to deal with the exceptions, the people who don’t fit.
The laws of metzora and zav don’t pertain to the sick person so much as ourselves, society. The Torah teaches that his presence impacts our society while he is a part of it, and that is why he must quarantine.
The convert with no family poses a difficulty. Jews tend to have an integrated community setup – with common ancestry, everyone is related when you go far enough up the family tree, yet a convert has no one. This is a system failure; how do we deal with it? The Torah explains how his assets are distributed, and his estate does not lapse into limbo.
The Sotah tramples on society’s norms and violates the marriage by associating with men after direct warnings not to. The Torah explains the procedure of how society ought to respond to people who tear it apart from within.
The Nazir, with all his commitment, has deviated from what the norm too. Drinking wine and cutting hair are normal things to do; abstaining is abnormal. The Torah teaches that we tolerate odd people and have a place for them in our society.
The Book is called Numbers because God does not ask us for homogeneity. Everyone is part of the setup, even those who don’t quite fit. The establishment of an ideal society is interrupted specifically to include the less than ideal people, too, reflecting the grounded realism that there can probably only be an imperfect but still ultimately no less ideal society; odd people are part of our numbers too.
The presence of undesirables does not detract from a community’s wholeness; it’s an essential part of it.
Peace Flows from Within
5 minute read
For most of history, the utopian ideal that most cultures and societies strived for has been domination, subjugation, and victory; the pages of history are written in the blood and tears of conflict.
In stark contrast, Judaism’s religious texts overwhelmingly endorse compassion and peace; love and the pursuit of peace is one of Judaism’s fundamental ideals and is a near-universal characteristic in our pantheon of heroes – בקש שלום ורדפהו. R’ Jonathan Sacks notes that the utopian ideal of peace is one of Judaism’s great original revolutionary contributions.
Avos d’Rabbi Nosson suggests that the mightiest heroism lies not in defeating your foes, but in turning enemies into friends. The Midrash says that the world can only persist with peace, and the Gemara teaches that all of Torah exists to further peace – דְּרָכֶיהָ דַרְכֵי-נֹעַם; וְכָל-נְתִיבוֹתֶיהָ שָׁלוֹם. Peace features prominently in the Priestly Blessing, and the visions of peace and prosperity in the Land of Israel – וְנָתַתִּי שָׁלוֹם בָּאָרֶץ / יִשָּׂא ה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם.
We ask for peace every time we pray and every time we eat – שים שלום / עושה שלום במרומיו. Wishing for peace has been the standard Jewish greeting for millennia – שלום עליכם. Peace is ubiquitous in our lexicon, and it’s not a trivial thing.
We all know peace is important, and peace sounds great in theory, but uncomfortably often, the reality is that peace is too abstract, too difficult, too distant, and too remote.
What does peace look like practically speaking, and how do we bring more of it into our lives?
Before explaining what peace is, it’s important to rule out what it’s not. Peace is not what many or most people seem to think.
Peace doesn’t mean turning the other cheek and suffering in silence. Your non-response to conflict contributes to a lack of overt hostility that is superficial and only a negative peace at best. Sure, there is no external conflict, but everyone recognizes that conflict is there, even if it’s unspoken and even if it’s only internal. It’s a position of discomfort and resentment – possibly only unilateral – and it may genuinely be too difficult or not worth the headache to attempt to resolve. Be that as it may, that is obviously not what peace is; it’s not a state of blessing at all. It’s the kind of status quo that lasts only as long as sufficiently tolerable, but it’s a lingering poison that slowly suffocates; it’s only a ceasefire or stalemate, it’s certainly not peace.
Peace also isn’t the lack of conflict that stems from being weak and harmless. It’s not good morality if you don’t fight when you’re meek and harmless. You haven’t made that choice; you simply have no alternatives. Pirkei Avos is dismissive and disdainful of people who don’t stand up for themselves – אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי. In a world of pacifists, a bully with a stick would rule the world. There’s nothing moral about being harmless.
There absolutely are moments the Torah requires us to stand up for ourselves and each other; authorizing and sometimes even mandating aggression as just and necessary – עֵת לֶאֱהֹב וְעֵת לִשְׂנֹא, עֵת מִלְחָמָה וְעֵת שָׁלוֹם. But we do not value or respect strength and power for its own sake; the One God of Judaism is not the god of strength and power and is firmly opposed to domination and subjugation. Our God is the god of liberty and liberated slaves, who loved the Patriarchs because of their goodness, not their power, who commands us to love the stranger and take care of the orphan and widow. So being powerful and strong doesn’t mean you go around asserting yourself, bullying and intimidating people; but it does mean that if someone threatens you and the people you love, or the orphans and widows in your community, you are equipped to do something about it. Carl Jung called this integrating the shadow, making peace with a darker aspect of yourself. When you know you can bite, you’ll rarely have to.
R’ Shlomo Farhi teaches that peace is more than a state of non-aggression; peace is a state of mutual acceptance and respect. Peace does not require the absence of strength and power; peace is only possible precisely through the presence and proper application of strength and power – they are prerequisites – ה’ עֹז לְעַמּוֹ יִתֵּן, ה’ יְבָרֵךְ אֶת עַמּוֹ בַשָּׁלוֹם. Peace requires us to cultivate the inner strength and courage to allow others to get what they need.
In Isaiah’s hopeful visions, today featured prominently and optimistically on the wall of the United Nations building, world governments disband their armies and repurpose their weapons into agricultural tools. In this utopian vision, it’s not that states are too weak to defend themselves, a negative peace with no violent conflict; it’s the opposite. It’s a vision of positive peace; complete and perfect security with mutual respect and tolerance, where states will resolve differences peacefully without resorting to hostilities.
As the Ohr HaChaim notes, the word for peace is cognate to wholesomeness, a holistic and symbiotic harmony of constituent parts – שָּׁלוֹם / שלמות.
Peace isn’t a lack of external conflict, and it doesn’t even necessarily mean a lack of conflict at all. Even in Isaiah’s visions of a peaceful future, does anyone seriously think husbands and wives won’t still sometimes disagree about whose family to spend the holiday with? Which school to send their kid to? That organizations won’t have internal disagreements about budget or direction? Then and now, humans are human; we are not robots, and inevitably, we will have our differences! But if peace simply means that those differences can be accepted or settled peacefully, then perhaps peace isn’t the unreachable idealism we may prefer to imagine. It’s just about putting in the effort to learn to live with our differences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson quipped that nobody can bring you peace but yourself. When you feel secure, you’ll have security. It takes benevolence, confidence, and unshakeable strength and power; those come from within. If you do not have peace, it’s because you are not yet at peace.
If we value and desire peace, we must first regulate and then free ourselves from looking at others with grudges, grievances, and jealousy. As one comedian said, the only time you look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure they have enough. When other people’s achievements and success no longer threaten us, we can develop lasting and peaceful co-existence and harmony. The differences are still there, but it’s not the other person that changes at all; it’s how you look at them. Your dream of peace starts with you, and it’s an important step that bridges the world we live in with the ideal world of tomorrow. If you cannot accept others, it’s because you haven’t yet accepted yourself.
What better blessing could there be than to live in balanced harmony with yourself, to be completely secure and at peace? To wholly embrace your differences with your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your relatives, your neighbors, your community, your colleagues, and ultimately, everyone you meet? And if we infused our notion of peace with any momentum, maybe the whole world could experience it too.
So, of course we ask for peace every day! In every prayer, and every time we greet someone. As the Gemara says, peace is the ultimate container for blessing, and it’s intuitive; we all know it’s true.
We just have to live like it!
TTOW
Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture:
The first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. In the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others.
Helping others is the highest and best expression of what it means to be human.
QOTW
Late bloomers still bloom.