TORAH SPARKS
Parashat Beha alotcha (Outside Israel) | Shlach (Israel)
June 10, 2023 | 17 Sivan 5783
Torah (Outside Israel): Numbers 8:1-12:16
Triennial: Numbers 8:1-9:14 Haftorah: Zechariah 2:14-4:7
Torah (Israel): Numbers 13:1-15:41 Haftorah: Joshua 2:1-24
Amen to Omen
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
We start complaining in this parashah. We re hungry, manna is no good, and life was better back in Egypt. Hearing our complaints, Moses begins to complain too. How is he supposed to deal with the likes of us? He is not equipped to fulfill our needs, to respond to our complaints. Moses says to God, Why have You done evil to Your servant, and why have I not found favor in Your eyes, to put the burden of all this people upon me? Did I conceive all this people, did I give birth to them, that You should say to me, Bear them in your lap, as the guardian bears the infant, to the land that You swore to their fathers?
Moses does not want to be our mother. He claims he is not our mother, not responsible for making sure we are fed. He explains that even if he now stands as leader of the Israelite people, he has not been around for our entire gestational period. He should not be tasked with acting as our creator, our giver and sustainer of life.
Of course, the one who we should be citing as our mother is God. God is in fact our creator, the one who birthed us into being. Much later, in Parashat Haazinu, Moses will refer to God as the Rock who gave birth to us and the God who writhed in labor with us. God often reminds us that God created us. We read in Isaiah of God speaking to us as God s sons and daughters, drilling into us that God created us and formed us as Israel.
It is absurd to imagine Moses into this role, to recast him as the mother of the Israelite people. He is one of us, he is human too. Clearly, God is the one who has conceived of the idea of the Israelites and brought us into being. So how then are we to understand the role of Moses? If not our mother, what is he?
Moses says in our parashah that God is suggesting he be our guardian, bearing us like an infant. The word for guardian here is , oman. We read it recently in the Book of Ruth, when Naomi takes Ruth s child and, mirroring the language in our parashah, bears him in her lap, becoming his omenet. The women of her town cry out that a son has been born to Naomi. Likewise, Mordechai is described as the omen of Ester because she had neither father nor mother. The word also appears in Isaiah, describing our glorious return from exile, during which foreign kings will serve us as omenim and foreign queens will be our nursemaids. This role of omen cannot be taken lightly. It seems that the omen stands in place of the parents, tending to the child.
To tend to a child is quite an undertaking. The root of omen brings insight into what the tending entails. From the same root as amen, the base meaning of omen is firm, steady, reliable. It is a word used most often to describe God. God is ne eman, faithful, reliable, enduring and we build God a corresponding house ne eman, enduring.
The root is also used to describe the people who define the Israelites, who lead us, who epitomize us. We find the root in reference to Abraham, Moses, and David. Abraham has a heart ne eman so God makes a covenant with him. It is David s quality of being ne eman that ensures his line will also be ne eman, enduring.
Moses is first said to be ne eman in our parashah. God rebukes Aaron and Miriam, explaining to them that Moses has a unique relationship with God. God says that Moses is God s most ne eman in the world. Coming so soon after Moses rejects the role of omen, this confirmation from God is striking. How can Moses cast off the role of omen and yet still be ne eman? Perhaps, as we read before the rebuke, it is Moses s humbleness. Moses has no need to be leader, to be mother, to claim God s role as his own. He gives to God what is God s. When Moses complains, he complains not for his own sake, but in order to better serve others. He is the ultimate oman, always ne eman.
A Mikdash with a Chance of Divine Presence
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Haftarah
Imagine building a beautiful structure for a special tenant only to discover at the inauguration celebration that the tenant does not show up to dwell in that special space. That was probably Moshe s great fear on the day of the inauguration of the Mishkan (Tabernacle).
We may seem far away from the description of that day when Moshe finally put up the Mishkan at the closing of the book of Shemot. After the meticulous execution of the detailed instructions came the grand finale of combining all the parts to create the magnificent whole called the Mishkan. In reality, a book and a half later, we are still on that day.
All the work on the physical structure would have been worthless if God s presence would not have manifested itself in the Mishkan. Seeing the cloud descend over the Mishkan, witnessing Moshe speaking with God (as is described in the closing sentences of Shemot) convinced the people that they had done it right.
The inauguration was a complex ceremony, including many participants. We are finally coming to the end of the process in these parashot in Bemidbar. We ended last week with the representatives of the tribes contributing their share and are opening this parashah with Aaron lighting the Menorah.
The Torah may tell of the first time we inaugurated a dwelling place for God, but not the last. Shlomo (Solomon) goes through a lengthy prayer and celebration as he inaugurates the First Temple (I Kings chapter 8). In the days of the return from Babylon the first version of the Second Temple was being built.
These are the days of Zechariah, the prophet whose words we read in this week s haftarah. We know from the book of Ezra that Zechariah, together with Haggai, was an active advocate for the rebuilding of the Mikdash, which was moving along sluggishly, if at all.
Why were the people not rushing to build? After all, they were given permission by Cyrus to return to Judah to build a house for God. A peek in Haggai and Ezra suggests that the people feared failure.
The reality was harsh. The economic situation for large parts of the people involved was difficult, apparently exasperated by a drought. All this deepened a sense than that unlike the Exodus from Egypt, this return to the land was no time of glory and miracles. This did not match their concept of redemption, and they were hesitant: perhaps they should not be building God s house because God is not there, He is not dwelling among them.
Fear and depression were probably the greatest obstacles to advancing the building. Zechariah in the opening words of this haftarah speaks to these misgivings: Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion! For behold, I am coming, and I will dwell in your midst, says the Lord. (Zec. 2:14) While sharing in the joy of Moshe and the people in the desert in these parashot, we get a reminder that great national moments are not guaranteed, but if we work at it, God might come and dwell in our midst.
The Message of the Inverted Nuns
Joshua Kulp
The Halakhah in the Parashah
Before you go on, please go back and reread the title to this piece, pronouncing the vowel u as if it is the vowel in the word book and not the vowel in bun. Now, having understood that I will be addressing upside down Hebrew letters and not Catholic women who wear habits we can proceed.
Famously, before and after Numbers 10:35-36 there appear signs that look to be inverted nuns. This is alluded to in the tannaitic midrash Sifre Numbers 84 and again in Bavli Shabbat 115b which reads: And when the Ark traveled and Moses proclaimed: Rise up, God, and Your enemies will scatter and those who hate You will flee from before You. The Holy Blessed One made signs in the Torah for this portion, above and below in order to say that this is not its place.. Rabbi says: It is not for that reason. Rather, the signs are there because this portion is considered a book unto itself.
The Talmud itself does not explain what these signs are, only that God made some sort of sign in the Torah, and that the meaning of these signs was interpreted differently by the rabbis. This led to a great dispute among later authorities as to how to write these signs (see Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, p. 40). There is a tradition that goes back to Rav Hai Gaon that these signs are inverted nuns. However, Lieberman cites other traditions as to what these signs were. He identifies the original sign as being an antisigma a sign used by Greek manuscript copyists, but whose precise meaning is lost to us (see the brief discussion in Jacob Milgrom, JPS Numbers, p. 375).
By the time we get to R. Shlomo Luria, the great Polish 16th century scholar known as the Maharshal, there exists a confusing mix of customs as to how and where to write these letters. The Maharshal claims to have found 12 different customs as to where and how these signs are written. And this leads the Maharshal to his quandary according to Jewish law, one extra letter or one missing letter in the Torah disqualifies the entire Torah. Thus, if these are extra nuns and they are not supposed to be in the Torah, then they would disqualify the entire scroll! The Maharshal posits that the source of these signs is not the Talmud, a legitimate source of halakhah, but the Zohar, which is not, in his eyes, a legitimate source of legal authority. This is an incredibly bold move by the Maharshal, for he is saying that all the Torah scrolls used in his generation are invalid. Furthermore, by implication, for generations Jews have been reading from invalid scrolls. The correct way of performing the mitzvah is to enlarge a couple of the nuns that are already in this passage. The Maharshal is indeed one of the boldest figures in the history of halakhah, a sage willing to call it as he sees it, even if this means ruling against known custom. If we extrapolate from here, it really does not matter whether earlier generations knew that these were invalid customs or not they were simply reading from invalid scrolls.
A couple of centuries later, in response to the Maharshal, R. Yehezkel Landau, an 18th century sage known as the Noda B Yehudah, offered a lengthy defense of the practice of writing the inverted nuns, locating the custom in non-Zoharic halakhically authoritative texts. But the most remarkable part of the Noda B Yehudah s teshuvah is the measured pluralism implied in his conclusion. At the very end, he writes that if any Torah scroll that was written from today and onwards without the inverted nuns in the proper place comes to his hands, he will disqualify the entire scroll. Torah scrolls that had been written in the past using the Maharshal s method are not to be disqualified and can even be used ritually in the synagogue (for an interesting story about such a scroll see here). But going forward, the Noda B Yehudah demands that scribes use these inverted nuns and writes them in the location he views as correct.
There is something beyond this particular issue that we can learn from the Noda B Yehudah. What is considered right and wrong in the world changes from generation to generation (if you re a young person reading this, either ask your parents or grandparents or just wait another 50 or so years and then revisit the issue). This is true of halakhah and it is also true of social and moral norms. A person of halakhic or moral authority makes decisions that they believe should be observed going forward. But often such an authority must encounter how to evaluate those who lived earlier, who did not act in accordance with their decision. The Noda B Yehudah is willing to live with this tension without condemning those who lived in the past. He is even willing to forgive its continued existence for a short while longer. The Sifrei Torah that were, in his eyes, written incorrectly, are not to be immediately put in the geniza. They can be used until they die natural deaths by wearing out. These Sifrei Torah were acceptable in their time, by no less of an authority as the Maharshal. But there is such a thing as halakhic progress and going forward, the nuns must be inverted and they must be separate letters. Progress can move us forward without condemning those who lived in the past.