BeMidbar Torah Study, Temple Israel of Alameda Installation Weekend 5783 / 2023

"The real challenge for us is not to determine who wrote the Torah, but rather to determine what we are to do with it. The text is only as good as its interpreters. An obtuse reader can mutilate even the most sacred of texts."

Canon Without Closure: Torah Commentaries by Ismar Schorsch (Aviv Press), p468

"Those who have drawn Me close to them, I will draw close to Me."

Schorsch, p472 quoting Numbers Rabbah 1:12

The Significance of the Wilderness

The wilderness depiction conveys two quite different qualities. On the one hand, the wilderness years constitute a kind of ideal. The people's life is orderly, protected, close to God. It is a period of incubation, of nurturing. All is provided: food, water, direction. The miraculous is the norm. At the same time, though, the wilderness is depicted as terrible. Conditions are bad. The environment is hostile. There is rebellion from within and fighting with peoples whom they encounter on the way. There are power struggles and fear. And this is pictured as having been almost entirely avoidable, a fate that has come upon the people for having rejected the opportunity to enter the land. Numbers thus expresses pervasively a notion that it only begun in Leviticus, namely that closeness to the divine is both glorious and dangerous. This dual picture of the ideal and the awesome sides of the wilderness years is perhaps the most striking and singular aspect of the book of Numbers. Numbers alone among the books of the Hebrew Bible recounts the story of a single generation of the nation, involving the entire nation, in a condition unlike that of any other time. In the earthly events and in the cosmic aspect of both continuous and situational miracles, the wilderness generation is like no other, and the book that tells its story is correspondingly unique.

Commentary on the Torah: With a New English Translation, by Richard Elliot Friedman, p423

On the name of this book:

The fourth book of the Torah, Numbers, opens eleven months after the revelation at Mount Sinai and one month after the completion of the Tabernacle. It resumes the story line interrupted by Leviticus, which is almost entirely devoid of narrative content. What follows is a series of gripping events that punctuate and account for an unexpected forty-year trek through the wilderness, culminating on the steppes of Moab east of the Jordan River just prior to Moses's death. Hence, the Hebrew name of the book Bamidbar, "in the wilderness," comes closer to capturing the sweep of the narrative.

The title "Numbers," which derives from the ancient Greek and Latin translations of the Torah, stresses...a single strand of the book: its repeated censuses, twice of the Israelites (chapters 1 and 26) and twice of the Levites (chapters 3 and 4). Three of these enumerations, in fact, occur in our parashah and constitute the bulk of the preparation taken before leaving the vicinity of Mount Sinai. In addition, the parashah sets forth the deployments of the tribes around the Tabernacle when the camp was at rest, replaces the Israelite first-born with the tribe of Levi, and assigns the Levites the task of guarding, dismantling, and moving the Tabernacle.

Schorsch, p475

Outline of Parashat BeMidbar

1. Names and Numbers

The Israelites in the Wilderness (1:1-54)

• The tribes
• The census
• The Levites

2. The Geometry of the Holy (2:1-34)

• The east
• The south
• The center
• The west
• The north
• Conclusion

3. The Levites (3:1-4:20)

• The election of the priests
• The election of the Levites
• The organization of the Levites
• The price of redemption
• The service of the Levites

Outline created by Rachel Havrelock in her introduction to B'midbar in The Torah: A Women's Commentary (CCAR Press and Women of Reform Judaism), p790

Advice for Leaders

1. "Acquire the habit of contraction in order to rid their minds of the endless barrage of distractions that assault them from all sides."

2. "Organizationally, leaders ought to delegate."

3. "On a psychological note, tzimtzum, is about shrinking the self. Power should not give us the illusion of being omnipotent or infallible, especially as religious leaders. In the ultimate scheme of things, our significance is modest and ephemeral."

Schorsch, p477

Finding Enduring Faith

"Numbers is an unrelievedly dismal book of human failure, a series of narrative fragments that prove beyond a doubt that miracles are not the stuff of enduring faith. In the end, human nature remains unalterable. Though freed, the generation born in slavery never overcomes the psychological defects of its origins and is finally fated to die in the wilderness. Thus, what should have been a journey of a few months extends into a forty-year ordeal."

Schorsch, p480

The Uniqueness of Each Human

We are different because we are unique, we are not unique because we are different. What, then, do we mean by "uniqueness"? An expression of uniqueness is found when we associate people with proper names, rather than reduce them to a series of economic, social, or grammatical functions. Uniqueness, for Levinas, is associated with irreplaceability. Irreplaceability refers to moral responsibility. It signifies the manner in which I become responsible for others. No one can take my place, not even G'd himself, for making me answerable to and for the claims of other people.

Levinas and the Torah: A Phenomenological Approach, by Richard I. Sugarman (Suny Press), p239

Why Only Count Israelite Males Ages Twenty to Sixty?

This census was the second and was taken on the first of Iyar, a year after the Exodus and a month after setting up the Tabernacle. Only Israelite males age twenty to sixty were counted because: (1) they had to make mandatory contributions to the Tabernacle due to their role in the golden calf (women's contributions were quite plentiful on a voluntary basis); (2) knowledge of patrilineal ancestry was emphasized by the Torah to encourage male responsibility to women and children and to outlaw previously legal forms of incest; and (3) the census also served as a count of soldiers for military duty.

In the Image of God: A Feminist Commentary on the Torah, Judith S. Antonelli (A Jacob Aronson Book, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), p332

Awaken The Root

The Torah that lies before us is the garb of Torah. It is by the means of study that we arouse the force that lies within it. That is the real power of Israel: to awaken the root of Torah. For the same is true of the human soul; the nefesh is but a garb of the neshamah that lies within it. And that neshamah, or deeper soul, is a part of God above.

The Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of the Sefat Emet, by Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger and translated by Arthur Green, (Jewish Publication Society), p221

Haftarah, Prophetic Portion

Hosea 2:1-22

The haftarah opens with a dramatic prophecy of renewal and blessing for the people of Israel.

Part I. Revival and Restoration of Israel (Hosea 2:1-3)

Part 2. Arraignment for Apostasy (Hosea 2:4-15)

The Lord calls upon Hosea and his fellow northern Israelites to contend with their mother and urge her to "put away her harlotry from her face." The mother is the embodiment of the nation, which has gone astray after false "lovers" (gods), whereas the children are the brood conceived shamelessly through acts of promiscuity (apostasy).

Part 3. Reconciliation and Renewal (Hosea 2:16-22)

God initiates the renewal by leading the people into the desert and then back to the Land.

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Hosea is the first of the prophets to portray the covenant between God and Israel as a marriage. After him, Jeremiah (2-3) and Ezekiel (16 and 23) make strong uses of the motif--both positively, in terms of Israel's loyalty and devotion; and negatively, in terms of people "whoring" after false gods and political alliances.

The JPS Commentary: Haftarot by Michael Fishbane (The Jewish Publication Society), p210 and 211

Additional Source Sheets on Parashat BeMidbar

Hearing God in the Wilderness of Our Lives, by Rachel Petroff Kessler

In Wilderness Central Synagogue Text Study for Parashat Bemidbar May 19, 2018 / 5 Sivan 5778, by Nicole Auerbach

Creativity & Wilderness Source Sheet, by Jewish Studio Project