TORAH SPARKS
Parashat Shlach (Outside Israel) | Korach (Israel)
June 17, 2023 | 24 Sivan 5783
Torah (Outside Israel): Numbers 13:1-15:41
Triennial: Numbers 13:1-14:7 Haftorah: Joshua 2:1-24
Torah (Israel): Numbers 16:1-18:32 Haftorah: I Samuel 11:14-12:22
Appropriate Challenges
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
The Book of Numbers is about how to structure a nation. We open and close with a census, a numbering and organizing of people. We have ever so many lists of names, of different ways of grouping the Israelites. We ve read extensively of the roles of the Levites in maintaining the cohesiveness of the society.
But starting last week, we began to read about challenges to the structure of the nation. Miriam and Aaron both pushed back against Moses as leader. They point out that God has spoken through them as well, not just through Moses. Miriam had disappeared from the narrative since crossing the Red Sea. She speaks up now in Numbers, demanding more of a leadership role. Her request is denied and she is given skin disease, turning her white like snow. The only other time in the Torah we encounter this description of skin disease as white like snow describes Moses s skin disease. During his first encounter with God at the burning bush, Moses too is given skin disease. There, it is to prove God s power and that Moses has been chosen. In Miriam s case the skin disease proves God s power and that Miriam has not been chosen. She chooses herself, nominates herself to lead a challenge to the existent structure and it does not work.
Next week, we will also read about a failed challenge to the establishment. Korach takes it upon himself to rise up against Moses. Just as Miriam thought that she possessed the same specialness that Moses did, Korach will point out that the entire community is holy. For his efforts, he is killed off, perhaps swallowed by the earth, perhaps burned up in flame. As Moses notes, the death of Korach and his co-conspirators is exceptional, a divine event. Korach leads his fellow Israelites into wrongdoing by questioning the fundamental way that the nation is organized. As a result, he is wiped out.
This week s parashah is wedged in between Miriam s challenge to the authority and Korach s challenge. Ten men will lead us to question not just the ordering of our people but also our national mission. As a result, the entirety of the first generation will be wiped out. They will not reach the promised land; their corpses will come to an end in the wilderness.
Unlike Miriam and Korach, these ten spies were appointed to their roles. By acting as spies, these men do exactly what they were sent to do. They do not question the authority of Moses. However, by providing the report of overwhelming force and emphasizing the Israelites weakness, the spies do something worse. They challenge the authority and ability of God. It is God s strength and God s ability that has led us out of Egypt and sustained us in the wilderness. It is God who promised us the land of Canaan. God and God s promise to us is the linchpin of our society. God is literally dwelling at the center of camp. The whole structure is built around God. Our whole purpose is based on reaching and conquering Canaan. Without that, we have nowhere to go and nothing to do. We may as well drop dead in the desert.
Miriam and Korach are both punished for their challenges to Moses. All of Israel sufferers during those punishments. But it is for the challenge of the ten spies that all the first generation of Israel is condemned to die without reaching Canaan. To challenge Moses is ill-advised. To challenge God is impossible. We have crossed a line for which there is no repentance. In this light, Moses serves as a lightning rod for God, someone to absorb the blows, the challenges, that would otherwise challenge God. Miriam and Korach attack Moses, which allows Moses to keep God safe. The ten spies to otherwise and there is no saving the nation from God s ensuing wrath.
Invisible People
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Haftarah
My son is not one to learn by sitting in class, but he has a knack for finding the people worth learning from. That is how in 7th grade he learned one thing very clearly from his principal: There are no invisible people. So, he would stop to thank the bus driver and the street cleaner and ask the guard how he was doing.
This week s haftarah is about an invisible woman. We may not think so from reading this chapter, but that is exactly what the Tanakh wants to alert us to. A person is only invisible if they are not recognized in our social narrative. If the story would have been written by a historian, the focus could have been on the shrewdness of the spies, or on the effective intelligence services the king of Jericho deployed. Rahab would have been a footnote.
Rahab was a person whose life was directed by necessity. Being defined as a whore is not a compliment in society and is usually reserved for those who have not had other options. We discover that Rahab has a family: parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. But they do not take care of her, just the opposite: she is the one that looks for a way to save their lives in the impending disaster that she believes is coming. This may well have been the regular modus operandi the family relies on Rahab for its survival, economic or otherwise. And while Rahab could have taken the opportunity to break out of this cycle of carrying her family (which is thriving at her expense), we discover that Rahab is a woman with a large heart. She could have saved her own life without going out of the way for those who seem to not find it in them to care for her.
The town s people in Jericho seem to accept her life as a fact, not as a comment on society s failure. When they need her, they know where to find her, the rest of the time she lives in a dwelling that abuts the city wall, a vulnerable location. When the king needs information he finds Rahab and orders her to surrender the people because to spy the whole land they came! (Joshua 2:2). He demands patriotism from a woman whom society did not invest in when she needed it.
The Tanakh turns the story on its head. Rahab is the hero for not doing what is expected of her. She is shrewd and thoughtful, taking the side that seems right to her, not based on what is expected. She proves that she cannot be bought, contrary to what is expected from a woman in her position.
When the spies return to Joshua they do not report about the terrain and the land as the spies in the parashah did. They quote Rahab s words of great faith as the key to conquering the land. To the spies she was not invisible.
The Walkie-Talkie Building
Ilana Kurshan
Adventures in Mishnah with My Kids
Pesachim 7:1-2
After several months of learning Masechet Pesachim, Matan is well-aware that most of the tractate has little to do with Pesach as we observe it today. Five of the ten chapters deal with the Paschal lamb that must be brought as a sacrifice on the fourteenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan. The seventh chapter, which we are about to start learning, begins with a discussion of how the lamb is roasted. Matan, whose favorite food is barbequed meat, tells me that his stomach is already growling when I offer him a taste of the first mishnah
How is the Paschal lamb roasted? The rabbis base their answer to this question on a verse from the Torah that appears in the book of Exodus, just before the Israelites are redeemed from Egypt. Each Israelite household must take a lamb, prepare it for slaughter, and then eat it in a specific manner: Do not eat any of it raw, or cooked in any way with water, but roasted head, legs, and entrails over the fire (12:9). The rabbis interpret this verse very strictly we must make absolutely certain that the Paschal lamb is entirely roasted in fire, and that none of it is cooked in water instead.
To ensure that every part of the lamb is roasted by fire, the rabbis list several rules that pertain to the roasting process. First, the lamb must be roasted in an oven on a wooden spit. The spit may not be made of metal, because then the inside of the animal might be cooked from within by the heat of the metal, rather than by the fire without. Rather, the spit must be made of pomegranate bark, which is the driest type of wood, because then as little moisture as possible will get on the inside of the animal. Second, the head, legs and entrails must be positioned over the fire as well, in accordance with the biblical verse, which the rabbis interpret in two different ways. According to one opinion, the legs and entrails must be stuffed inside the animal so they get roasted along with it; according to another opinion, these parts are hung on the spit and roasted separately. Moreover, the lamb may not be roasted on a grate, because then it would be cooked indirectly by the heat of the grate, rather than directly by the fire. So it s not really a barbeque, but more like a campfire, Matan concludes, and for a moment I imagine the members of each household sitting in a circle to roast marshmallows once they ve eaten all the meat off their pomegranate skewers.
The rabbis further note that if any part of the animal is cooked by something other than the fire, it must be removed. For instance, if any part of the animal touched the clay of the earthenware oven in which it was roasting on the spit, that part of the animal must be pared away. If a drop of gravy dripped onto the bottom of the oven and then splattered back up to touch the animal, that part of the animal must be cut off since it was cooked, at least in part, by the hot splatter. If some of the gravy fell on to some flour that happened to be boiling nearby, that gravy is forbidden to eat because it was cooked by the flour, at least in part. So it s not just that you can t cook it in water, I explain. You can t cook it by anything other than fire. Matan thinks this over. But what about air? he wants to know, If it s a really hot day, then even if you just roast the lamb on a spit, the air could end up cooking it instead of the fire.
I don t know, I respond skeptically. I ve heard of hot air frying, but I can t imagine the air could be hot enough to cook a lamb.
Sure it could, Matan tells me. Don t you know about the Walkie-Talkie building?
I don t, but Matan is eager to fill me in. He tells me that there is a skyscraper in London that is named for its distinctive shape it curves up and out like a radio handset. During the building s construction, which was completed in 2014, an unusual solar glare phenomenon was discovered. For a period of up to two hours a day, the building acts as a concave mirror reflecting any direct sunlight and focusing it on the streets to the south, where temperatures have reached as high as 243 degrees Farenheit. One reporter managed to fry an egg on the street below. So the air can get really hot, Matan is excited tell me. Especially with global warming. If the Beit HaMikdash were built today, you might have a problem.
Later, when Matan is asleep, I google the Walkie Talkie building and discover that Matan knew just what he was talking about. Once again, I think that I m teaching him Mishnah, when in fact he s the one teaching me about the world. The next day, when I ask Matan how he knew about that building in London, he shrugs his shoulders. From a podcast, he tells me, as if that should be obvious. When I was growing up, we didn t have podcasts we listened to the radio instead. I can still hear the announcer s voice on 1010 WINS: You give us 22 minutes, we ll give you the world. In Matan s case it s a little different. You give him a mishnah, he ll give you the world.