TORAH SPARKS
Parashat Matot-Masei
July 15, 2023 | 26 Tammuz 5783
Torah: Numbers 30:2-36:13 Triennial: Numbers 30:2-31:54
Haftorah: Jeremiah 2:4-28, 3:4
Womanhood and Peoplehood
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
This week is not a great week for women. We start with the issue of vows. Men need to keep vows. Women do too, that is, unless their father or their husband annuls their vows for them upon hearing about them. Next, we learn about the vengeance to be wrecked on the Midianites for the incident at Baal Peor.
Each tribe sends troops against the Midianites, and we kill all their men, slaughter their kings, set fire to their towns, and take the women, children, and animals captive. However, this is not quite the vengeance Moses was hoping for. He chastises us for our mercy, for allowing the women and children to live. He says, You have let every female live! Look, these are the ones who led the Israelites by Balaam s word to betray the Lord s trust in the affair of Peor, and there was a scourge against the Lord s community. And now, kill every male among the little ones, and every woman who has known a man in lying with a male, kill. And all the little ones of the women who have not known lying with a male, let live. Moses commands us to massacre all the boys and all the women who have had sex. After all, he blames the women for causing the incident at Baal Peor. The additional massacre of the boys is horrific, although common in the Ancient Near East. After all, the Egyptians did it to us.
What demands more interpretation is why Moses not only allows the virgin women to live but also gives them as captives to the soldiers and to all of Israel. This follows the law in Deuteronomy of marrying captive women. But it is highly problematic in the context of the incident at Baal Peor. After all, the original problem seemed to be the intermarriage! The whole affair at Baal Peor was precipitated by sleeping with foreign women. Now, just as we have cleansed ourselves of the whole affair, we sleep with those same foreign women.
Shockingly, the way to make sense of this seeming contradiction is to refer back to the vows of women at the beginning of the parashah. The vows of married women can be annulled by their husbands, the vows of women still in their fathers houses can be annulled by their fathers. Likewise, it would seem that the very nationhood of women can be annulled by killing their fathers and becoming their husbands.
When we blame the Midianite women for Baal Peor, we are blaming them as representatives of their nation. The problem is that the Israelites, by marrying into the Midianite people, might assimilate into them and lose ourselves. The problem is not with any individual Midianite woman. We are concerned only with establishing kinship ties with other nations. The women become the symbol of all that is wrong with Midian but they also do not have the agency or power to maintain their Midianite-ness in the absence of their men.
The Israelites are slightly different. When we ourselves become captives after the defeat of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, it is largely just our women who are left alive. We imagine ourselves as Lady Jerusalem, the personified female survivor, in the Book of Lamentations. We imagine this woman as both a whore and a survivor of rape, a widow and murderous mother. The biblical writers project onto her the most desperate of female images. And then we embody her. She becomes us, she becomes the symbol of the Israelite people, capable not only of representing our nation, but also of holding God to account.
My God is a Spring, Your God is a River
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Haftarah
Many a prophet has rebuked the people for their lack of loyalty to God. The difference is in the details. Reading this haftarah from Jeremiah we understand that Man is but an imprint of his native landscape (Shaul Tchernichovsky). The imagery for Jeremiah s message is taken from the land that surrounds him. His world stretches from Anatot, just north of Jerusalem, to the big city, the capital, Jerusalem. He lives on the edge of the desert, on the border of the territory of Judah. He grew up in its nature.
To deliver a message about faithfulness to one s own God, Jeremiah defines the local and the foreign by their water sources. To Jeremiah, the native of the arid desert-edge town, the disloyalty of the leaders is illustrated by the water sources they choose. Judah is turning to Egypt to seek support. From a leader s point of view, it is a simple matter of military strength. To Jeremiah it is favoring a foreign culture that reflects the flowing river Shihur the eastern tributary of the Nile.
When Judah adapts to the Mesopotamian empires, Jeremiah cries out, and what are you doing on the road to Assyria to drink water from the river? (Jer. 2:18). The Great River in Tanakh is the Euphrates River, the farthest imaginable border of the land of Israel, and the boundary of the region of the Levant. All that lies beyond that is beyond the pale, strange, foreign. In the days of Jeremiah, the Mesopotamian empires, first Assyria and then Babylon, had been impacting the region for over a century. It was not only a matter of warfare and conquest, but it was also a cultural and cultic export. The people whose formative experience with God was in the desert (as Jeremiah reminds us in the beginning of the haftarah) should not emulate the culture of the land between the rivers.
The ideal water source in Jeremiah s mind is a well or a spring, a small source of flowing water. One that requires work and prayers. No wonder God speaks in those terms: My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns broken cisterns that cannot hold the water. (v.13) The alternative to the living waters are the man-made cisterns containing standing water; when cracked, they lose their precious water, the source of life. Man-made sources of life are not reliable. Jeremiah s image invokes the prophets battles against the local gods; those that are culturally close and present the danger of a fake alternative.
In Jeremiah s mind, a nation s relationship with its God (or god) is a reflection of its native landscape. Loyalty to its land is also loyalty to God. When they seek their fortunes elsewhere, is it surprising that God says in disgust: they have turned their back to Me, and not their face! (v.27).
Holy Cow
Ilana Kurshan
Adventures in Mishnah with My Kids
Parah 1:1-2
A few weeks ago, when we read parashat Chukat, Matan became obsessed with the red heifer featured at the start of the parashah. God commands Moses to take a pristine, unblemished red heifer that has never had to work with a yoke around its neck, and to give to Aaron s son Elazar, the priest. Elazar must slaughter and burn the cow, adding cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson dye into the fire. A man who is ritually pure then comes, gathers up the ashes, and deposits them outside the camp, where they will be used to purify any Israelite who comes in contact with the dead. Given that the Israelites were just told, in last week s parashah, that the entire generation will die out during their desert wanderings, it seems fitting that at the start of this week s parashah, we learn how to purify ourselves from death.
Matan s interest in the red heifer is not so much in the technical details, but in how he can annoy his sisters. The Torah uses the Hebrew word mum to refer to a blemish a red heifer, we are told, may have no mum (Numbers 19:2). Matan finds this hilarious. That Shabbat, he spends all afternoon trying out a new joke on his sisters and, to their dismay, the various friends they invite over. How do you know I m a parah adumah? he asks them, using the Hebrew term for red heifer. Before they can answer, he thrusts his face in front of theirs and screams, Because I have no mooooooooooom. I tell Matan that if he is so fascinated by the red heifer, perhaps we ought to begin learning the tractate of Mishnah devoted to this subject, masechet Parah.
Since then, we have learned the first two chapters of the Mishnah, about what constitutes a red heifer, that is, a red heifer fit for ritual use. The rabbis explain that the cow must be of a very particular age. On the one hand, she may not be so young that she is still a baby cow such an animal may be used in the ceremony performed to expiate for an unsolved murder (see Deuteronomy 21:1-9), but she may not be used to purify from contact with a corpse. On the other hand, she may not be so old that we are concerned that some of her red hair may start to turn black, since a red heifer must be entirely red. According to Rabbi Eliezer, this means the heifer must be between one and two years; the sages instead rule that it s three to four years. Rabbi Meir rules that a red heifer may be as old as five years, but the sages insist that no one in their right mind would let a red heifer grow that old, out of the fear that its hairs would turn black before it could be put to ritual use.
As this Mishnah suggests, a red heifer was an extremely rare phenomenon. The rabbis of the Talmud (Yerushalmi Kiddushin 1:10) tell the story of a non-Jew named Dama ben Netina who was so scrupulous about honoring his parents that he once lost out on a very lucrative business deal because he refused to wake his father, who was sleeping atop the precious stone he wished to sell; as a reward for his righteousness, a red heifer was born into his flock, and he was able to sell it for its weight in gold. The red heifer was so rare in part because it had to adhere to such exacting standards according to most of the sages, it could not have any warts, nor could it have been born by Caesarean section, nor could it have been used to pay a harlot or to buy a dog. What s wrong with buying a dog? Matan interrupts me.
I point him to the verse in Deuteronomy (23:19) that forbids ever bringing as a sacrifice to the Temple any animal that was ever used for such a purpose. The Torah refers to mechir kelev, which literally means dog price. Matan, who has an afterschool job as a dogwalker, assumes he knows what this means, and he s appalled. What? I can t donate the money I earn as a dogwalker to the Beit HaMikdash? Why not? I explain that the rabbis were not so enthusiastic about dogs, to say the least. Ibn Ezra notes that dogs are vulgar, whereas Ramban refers to a custom whereby hunters would make dogs out of wax as a form of idolatry, believing that the wax dogs would help them succeed in the hunt. (See Ramban and Ibn Ezra on Deuteronomy 23:19).
In any case, as I hope Matan understands now, red heifers were extremely rare the Mishnah reports that there were only seven red heifers between the time of Moshe and the time of the Mishnah and even the slightest blemish could disqualify them. That s not a problem today, Matan shrugs. I m sure we could genetically engineer a red heifer in a lab. It s just a shame that now that we finally have the right technology, we know longer have a Beit HaMikdash. I remind him that the rabbis of the Talmud believed that one should always retain that hope that at any day, the Temple might be rebuilt. Holy cow! says Matan with a smile. We may yet see the first genetically engineered red heifer after all.