Preface

This volume of Torah, a commentary to Sefer Bamidbar, the fourth of the Five Books of Moses, is based on the Mei Hashiloach.

It is the first of what I hope and pray will be a five volume set.

Izbicy Torah is the most radical approach to Judaism and Torah yet written. The Izbicy Rebbe, Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801-1854) is sometimes referred to as the ‘New Age Rebbe’ because he challenges you to read sacred text as though it were written for no one else but you alone. The Bible is not a narrative or book of laws, nor is it history. If it were it would not be eternal or unique. It is divine because it is describing you. You have permission to keep reading and rereading, interpreting and reinterpreting the Torah until you find yourself in it and it finds itself in you.

Every Sidra is a personal journey.

My thanks go to Dr. Julian Ungar M.D. PhD who made this book possible.

J. Hershy Worch

Safed – Israel, July 2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1. - BAMIDBAR

CHAPTER 2. – NASO

CHAPTER 3. – B’HALOTECHA

CHAPTER 4. – SH’LACH

CHAPTER 5. – KORAH

CHAPTER 6. – CHUKATH

CHAPTER 7. – BALAK

CHAPTER 8. – PINCHAS

CHAPTER 9. – MATOS

CHAPTER 10. – MASEY

CHAPTER 1. - BAMIDBAR

Writing God With Both Hands!

God spoke to Moses in the Sinai Desert, in the Tabernacle, on the first day of the second month in the second year of the Exodus, saying: (Num. 1:1)

There’s a perplexing Midrash on this first verse in the Book of Numbers.

Parable: An Arab prince entered a country, but when the people there saw him they fled. He entered a second country, but the people fled there also. He entered a third place, a desolate and parched city, and when these people saw him they began praising and lauding him. He said ‘This city is better than all those countries. This is where I will build my lodging, this is where I will live.’

This is what happened to God. When God approached the Red Sea it fled, as we read (Ps. 114) ‘The sea looked and fled.’ God revealed Himself on Mount Sinai, whereupon it fled, as we read, (ibid.) ‘The mountains skipped like goats.’ He came to the desolate wilderness and it welcomed Him, as we read, (Is. 42:11) ‘Let the wilderness and its towns raise their voices; let the Kedar settlements rejoice.’ God said, ‘This wilderness is better than all those countries, here is where I will build home.’ As soon as God descended into the wilderness they all began rejoicing that He had come down into it, as we read, (ibid. 35:1-2) ‘The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will bloom profusely and rejoice with rejoicing and shouts of joy.’ (Tanchuma Bamidbar 2)

The Midrash makes no sense. Did God actually want to build His dwelling place inside the Red Sea, on the sea or at the sea? The second country which supposedly fled from His presence is Mount Sinai, but the biblical narrative holds the revelation at Sinai was and remains to this day a very successful appearance. Why did God feel He had to move on from there to the wilderness? What was wrong with Sinai, and how is the wilderness any better?

The rebbe Reb Bunim (Kol Simcha - Bamidbar) explains it thus. God looks for a place to dwell. He tried making His home in the World of Miracles, but it fled. While it was happening, i.e. as we were passing through the Red Sea, we thought we’d never need another miracle to get us high again. We’d be carried on the crest of this wave for eternity. Yet three days later we couldn’t even recall what it felt like to be that thrilled and awed, so high on the sheer marvelous miraculousness of it all. Miracles don’t work beyond the immediate moment, they become memories, nothing more. God doesn’t live in the memory of anything, only in the present moment.

Sinai didn’t work either. We were dying to get there and be there, and the sheer anticipation of it had us shouting ‘Na’aseh V’Nishma - We will do and we will obey!’ But once we’d arrived, and had to deal with it all on a day-to-day basis the thrill wore off pretty fast. As some future climactic event to look forward to, it was great - it was matchless. But God does not live in the future, He either lives in the here and now, or nowhere!

According to the rebbe Reb Bunim the wilderness in the story represents the Torah, and the Zohar agrees with him (Vol. III 117b). The parched and thirsty Torah lets God in and welcomes Him to stay.

When the Torah (Ex. 32:16) tells us about the Tablets of Stone which Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, saying that ‘the writing was the writing of God,’ what it really means is that God inscribed himself into the text of the Torah. The ‘writing of God’ is a process whereby God is written down in words for anyone to read, whenever they want to. The Torah is where He built His palace and makes His home. All miracles in the Torah are in the here and now, as soon as you open the book and start reading, you’re right there in the world of miracles: passing through the Red Sea, standing at Sinai.

The Zohar (Vol. I 17a) says this about God’s way of writing Himself into the Torah:

The description of God dividing between upper and lower waters on the Second Day of Creation is written left-handedly, while generally the story of Creation beginning with the First Day’s narrative is written right-handedly. It is on the Second Day that splitting occurs. Left-handedness writes a split which provokes a reaction from the left side creating friction, opposition, passion and rage. It is out of this rage that all Hell is formed.

It is as though the Zohar were suggesting that God’s handwriting displays different and contradictory personality traits depending on which hand God is writing with. This is a very subtle way of saying there are various possibilities for the expression of divine will, and they are not all compatible with each other. If God writes with both hands and two different pictures of Him develop, if Moses in Deuteronomy^[1], Joshua, Samuel and King David in his Psalms each add their vision of God to Scripture and new paradigms of God emerge, where does the process end?

Well, it doesn’t end - that’s the whole point. The reason God chooses to dwell in the Torah is because the Torah never ends. When Scripture - the Written Torah is closed and completed, when the Prophet Micah has had his last word, then the Oral Torah just begins.

When the Babylonian scholars had finished writing God into the Talmud, then Sa’adiah in Baghdad, Ibn Gabirol in Spain, Rashi in France, Alfasi in Morocco, Maimonides in Egypt and a hundred thousand others began recording their own visions of Him for posterity, and they were no more qualified than you and I to say who God is and how He ought to act. Which, again, is the whole point. As soon as God is forced into an immutable construct, into a closed rule-book containing all the permissible basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methods acceptable to members of the Jewish community - He is no longer there.

Torah is a wilderness; a wild and uncultivated region, inhabited only by wild animals. It is a tract of wasteland, a place where a bewildering mass or collection of things can grow unchecked. Basically what grows there is God.

If you study Torah in order to learn someone else’s God, you will not find Him. God only reveals Himself to you when you add your own Chidush - new and fresh insight about Him to the Torah.

The Piaceszna rebbe, R. Kalonymous Kalmish says something very similar. He said that God only teaches Torah to a person if the Torah being studied is new and fresh, otherwise the person has to revise it on their own. God is only in the novelty:

Whenever we learn something new, and God as the ‘Teacher of Torah to Israel’ is our teacher, then there is a greater revelation of Torah in heaven. Even though the whole Torah belongs to God, even so, a greater revelation of Torah in the upper worlds occurs when God teaches something new to a human.

R. Moses Cordovero (Pardes Rimonim) discusses the difference between a thought that has been articulated and a thought that has not yet been articulated. ‘Once a thought has been made manifest in this world, then in heaven that idea stands revealed in a whole new way.’

Each time a child learns the shapes of the Hebrew letters for the first time, there is fresh revelation in heaven concerning these letters.

This is not the case with adults who are too familiar with the shapes of the letters. When we look at them we are not learning anything new, so we do not have God teaching us anything directly. The only revelation we can inspire in the upper worlds, is in the meaning of the Text of the Torah, in the P’Shat. When the Talmud mentions ‘children’ who explain the mystical meanings in the shapes of the letters, it is actually referring to holy people who approach the text as children. They bring about revelation even in the shape of the letters, and not just in the meaning of the text. They can still learn like children, and so are able to look at the Aleph and Beth and Gimmel and ask; ‘Why is the leg of the Gimmel stretched out towards the Daleth, etc.?’ (Sacred Fire p.p. 184-5)

If you can learn Torah in a childlike way, you don’t even have to learn the text - just by looking at the shapes of the Hebrew letters with fresh eyes you create a new revelation of God in the upper and lower worlds. God has a new face.

When R. Shimon bar Yochai went to observe youths in the house of study, he used to say, ‘I’m going to look at the Face of God,’^[2] because anyone learning something new about God is revealing a unique and hitherto concealed aspect of the divine: an entirely new and infinite God.

The consequences of this insight are very far-reaching when you think about it. The Talmudic dictum ‘Torah is not in Heaven!’^[3] means that God is not in Heaven. He’s in the Torah, and the Torah is in our hands - God is in our hands. Whatever we make of Him, that is what He is and has to be.

When God wrote into His Torah (Ex. 23:2) ‘It is up to the majority to decide,’ He gave the majority permission to decide both who is God and what is Torah. So, for example, the seemingly endless debate about the ‘authenticity’ of the Zohar is senseless and foolish. The Zohar is Torah because we who learn it say so, not because this 2nd century rabbi wrote it himself, or that 13th century one did so pseudo-epigraphically. The Zohar is real Torah because we who study it value it as such, and the God of the Zohar is our God because we decided that’s who we want Him to be. And if you ask by what right do we elevate R. Shimon bar Yochai to occupy the position of ‘Man’ in the verse, ‘ God said, “Let us make man!”’ (Zohar Vol. I 22a) He had R. Shimon in mind? You may as well ask by what right does the Babylonian Talmud elevate R. Akiba to the position described in the following story:

When Moses ascended to the heavens, he saw God sitting and tying crowns to the letters. Moses asked, ‘Who is forcing Your hand?’

God replied, ‘A man who will be born in the future, after many generations. His name will be Akiba b. Josef, and he will derive heaps of laws and allusions from every letter and point.’

‘Master of the Universe, show him to me,’ Moses begged.

God said, ‘Turn around.’

Moses turned [and finding himself in R. Akiba's academy] went and sat in the eighth row among students in R. Akiba’s class. On realizing that he had no idea what was being said, Moses became uneasy. Only when a student challenged R. Akiba about a certain matter saying, ‘How did you derive this teaching?’ and Akiba replied, ‘It's a Rule we have from Moses at Sinai,’ Moses’ mind was put at ease.

Moses turned to God, ‘If You have someone like this, why give the Torah through me?’

‘Be silent!’ answered God. ‘This is how it arose for Me in the Thought.’

Moses continued, ‘Master of the Universe! You’ve shown me his teaching, now show me his reward.’

‘Turn around,’ said God. Moses turned and saw R. Akiba’s flesh was being weighed out for sale, in the marketplace.

‘Master of the Universe!’ Moses cried. ‘This is Torah, and this its reward?’

‘Be silent!’ answered God. ‘This is how it arose for Me in the Thought.’ (Menachot 29b)

The Talmud assumes R. Akiba arose in God’s Thought before any thought of Moses, and certainly before the sentence ‘Let us make man!’ was said about R. Shimon. No one challenges the credibility of the Talmud story from a theological standpoint, no matter how many classical paradoxes it provokes.

If you want to know the secrets of the Kabbalah, the mysteries of the Zohar and its ancient Jewish wisdom handed down from teacher to disciple through the ages, it is this: the words you are reading here on this page. God put Himself into our hands, trusting Himself to our creativity and our words. The Torah we write, learn and speak - that is the Face of God, His divine personality and attitude. The Master of all masters of this mystery was none other than R. Israel the Ba’al Shem Tov, who single-handedly smashed the barriers preventing us from imagining God in our image. The Ba’al Shem gave us permission and indeed encouraged us to be One with the God of our own understanding, rather than to sit at the feet of teachers trying to convey their God to us.

Try it!

*********

CHAPTER 2. – NASO

Is risk-taking Jewish? Is not risk-taking?

God spoke to Moses saying, ‘Also take a census of Gershon’s descendents by families...’ (Num. 4:21-22)

Why was Moses told ‘also’ to count the Gershonites? Might we have excluded the family of Gershon, if the the Torah had not explicitly commanded us to count them as well?

‘Indeed,’ says the Izbicy rebbe. ‘If the Torah hadn’t endorsed them by telling us that they are also included in the census, I might have thought that the Gershon way is not a valid Jewish way of serving God.’^[4]

The Tribe of Levi comprises three families. None of them are by nature risk takers, but the Gershon family are fearfully cautious - to the point where one might rightfully challenge their commitment to God.

What does risk taking have to do with one’s commitment to God?

R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812) wrote many books on a wide variety of subjects. Some of them were published and have become classics of Hasidic literature, while others were purposely suppressed by the author himself for reasons he kept private. Two such manuscripts had been bound side-by-side into a single volume at the rabbi’s behest and occupied a place of provocative curiosity in his library. Hasidim would gingerly remove this volume from the bookshelf, just to hold it in their hands and feel the weight of its thwarted potential and mysterious holiness. For on the front cover in the bold and unmistakable hand of the rebbe himself was the warning, ‘Whosoever dares open the cover to glance at these pages will lose his place in the World-to-Come - signed, Shneur Zalman.’

The book’s two spines only added to its mystique. It spoke volumes without ever having its words read. The mere shape of it and the feel of its vellum cover were enough to inspire awe in the Hasidim. They would kiss it reverently and return it to its place. The rebbe obviously knew what he was doing. The manuscript was not for everyone’s eyes to peruse, they would respect it all the more.

Disaster struck: during the Napoleonic Wars the rebbe’s house and library were destroyed in a bombardment. Looking through the wreckage of his library and its precious collection of holy books, searching for some unburned texts, the rebbe turned to his son, Dovber.

‘D’you know, if you could remind me of even one teaching out of the book with the two spines, it would revive my whole spirit. Losing my library this way has been so traumatic that I cannot even remember a word of what I wrote in those two manuscripts.’

‘I’m sorry I cannot help you,’ replied his son. ‘I never dared look beyond the covers of the book. None of us did.’

‘Why not?’ inquired the old rabbi. ‘Didn’t you want to know what was written therein?’

‘Naturally I was curious. But I honored your wishes, and heeded the stern warnings you wrote on the cover.’

Rabbi Shneur Zalman interrogated his son for some time, hoping all the while that Dovber would admit to having delved into the book at some juncture. When it became quite clear that Dovber was not prevaricating, that he had never seen the contents of the book, Shneur Zalman became incensed.

‘What sort of a Hasid are you?’ he demanded. ‘What sort of Jew isn’t prepared to risk his place in the World-to-Come just to catch a glimpse of some new way of worshiping God? Why, you might have discovered a whole new path to walk on your spiritual journey!’

My impression on reading that story, is that Shneur Zalman’s greatest disappointment of all was the discovery that his son was not prepared to take a major risk to uncover a new sacred mystery, to unveil a new Divine Face.

Every time we discover something new in the world or inside ourselves, a Face of God is revealed where it never existed before. Because God is only revealed when we learn something fresh and for the first time. So where does our spiritual timidity come from, and what causes us to cleave to the same old same old instead of discovering new ways to express ourselves and connect to God?

An answer can be found back in the dawn of Jewish history, in the story of Shechem and Dinah (Gen. Cap. 34). Shechem was holding Dinah captive in his home, when Simeon and Levi broke in to free her. They killed Shechem and all the men in the city who’d been recovering from their mass circumcision, but Dinah refused to leave. ‘I would be alone,’ she said. ‘No one will want me after being with Shechem.’

Levi had demurred, because he had too many qualms and scruples about marrying his sister. Had Simeon not been there to promise to marry her, Levi might have been forced by his misgivings to abandon their sister in the city forever. Simeon swore that he would marry her, and so she left the city with him^[5].

Simeon said, ‘What! Should I accuse myself of incestuous inclinations, God forbid? Of course I’ll marry you.’

Levi’s choices are dictated by his personality, his spiritual gestalt. He is a channel and conduit for SHEFA - divine superabundance. In a sense, Levi is a polished article, a perfectly finished product of Jacob’s parenting. Levi’s grandchildren, Miriam, Aaron and Moses become talented leaders and priests because they are simple expressions of his personality. They don’t need refining or assaying in some fiery crucible, as other Jewish leaders have required to become worthy. Levi’s role among the Twelve Tribes is already decided and perfected in childhood.

Simeon’s is not. Faced with Dinah’s ultimatum, he gives himself the benefit of the doubt and assumes his motives are clear and pure. Thus he triggers the Tribe of Simeon’s historical narrative around matters of sexuality.

Simeon gambles, Levi never does. While the Tribe of Levi may currently occupy a higher status than that of Simeon, it still remains to be seen what will become of Simeon’s gamble - will he win in the end? If his gamble pays off, then Simeon will achieve a much higher level than Levi the non-gambler. The reason being, if you are not prepared to risk something precious upon the result of a venture with an uncertain outcome, you can’t win any spiritual dividends. You cannot amass any profit or advantage if you keep your capital and your spiritual kernel intact. Without first being planted somewhere and left to rot or germinate, it won’t grow and fruit - nothing does.

Being committed to God does not always mean looking to protect your place in the World-to-Come. There’s more to being Jewish than taking care of the distant future, no matter how important one’s future place in the Garden of Eden. If my relationship with God is fixated on ensuring myself a good and comfortable place in the World-to-Come, it is not God I hold in greatest esteem - it’s me.

Isaac loved Esau, preferring him to Jacob, not because Esau was the better man but because he was a gambler and a risk-taker. Jacob secluded himself inside his tent, refusing to risk spoiling his holiness by interacting with the polluted world. Isaac figured that while Esau’s behavior was provocative and troubling, there was at least some possibility of it working itself out for the best. Perhaps some new form of worshiping God might grow from it, which would mean Esau is ultimately greater than Jacob, who risked nothing. It was only on discovering that Jacob was the biggest risk-taker of all, that Isaac acknowledged Jacob’s right to the blessings: Jacob pulled off a daring and audacious gamble to cheat Esau out of the blessings by impersonating him. Jacob risked being cursed by his father instead of blessed. Isaac would never have directed all his love at Esau if had known all along that when the moment came to risk everything on a single throw of the dice, Jacob would not hesitate to gamble.

Abraham took a big risk when, on hearing the news that his nephew Lot had been taken hostage, he chased after the miscreants and waged war against them. He wondered whether he was doing the right thing, putting himself in danger to save of Lot, a wicked man who preferred life as a Sodomite citizen to a nomad existence in Canaan. Abraham’s gamble paid off in the end, because the Messiah springs from that very wickedness, through Ruth the Moabite to whom Lot gave life.

We took a very big risk when we came to Aaron and demanded that he fashion us a god to walk in front of us. But it paid off in the end and we got what we wanted - God in the Tabernacle.

Mordechai took a huge risk, provoking Haman’s Jew-hatred and endangering the entire Jewish nation, just for the sake of his personal beliefs. As did the Maccabees when they took up arms against the Selucid Greeks. R. Johanan ben Zakai took a tremendous risk in persuading the Sanhedrin to replace animal sacrifice with prayer, setting the foundations of Rabbinicism and modern Judaism. R. Judah the Prince took a risk when he codified the Mishna, putting on paper what had been by law and precedent a purely Oral Torah. He has been vindicated by history. We are so sure he did the right thing, that we have rationalized his breaking the law as being ‘necessary at the time’, which is just another way of saying after the fact, ‘you cannot argue with success.’ R. Judah gambled and won - but he might have lost. Jewish history is replete with spectacular losers such as Bar Kochba and R. Akiba in his revolt against the Romans. The Karaites lost, as did the Sabbateans, and of course perhaps the most catastrophic gamble of all, the gradual adoption of institutionalized rabbinic pacifism, that spiritual path of not-making-waves or learning the arts of war which resulted in the annihilation of European Jewry.

Zionism arose in late nineteenth-century Europe, influenced, some say, by the nationalist ferment sweeping that continent. The overwhelming consensus among Orthodox Jews was (and in some cases remains) that Zionism is incompatible with authentic Judaism, and is comparable to the Israelite worship of the Golden Calf. They claim it is not a spiritual path, and does not lead to the worship or glory of God, and that the Jewish people follow its siren call at their peril, to be wrecked on the jagged rocks of history.

Now history hasn’t had the last word yet, but I’d hazard the guess that Zionism is going to prove a winner. I’d gamble on it.

Who in the middle of the 18th century would have guessed that Beshtian Hasidism would take the Orthodox Jewish world by storm and become the dominant paradigm by the 21st century? Nobody, that’s who. Most expected it to shatter itself in its fervor and passion against the impregnable bastions of rabbinic privilege. As little as twenty years ago Carlebach was merely a person, a man, a name. Today it’s a way of davening - worshiping! All over the world there are Carlebach Shuls and Minyanim. Shlomo Carlebach encountered massive, coordinated opposition from institutions and leaders, objecting to his innovations and his risk taking. Again, history has not had the last word, but he single-handedly changed the flavor and the very taste of Judaism in our mouths.

So why are we generally so timid in our spirituality, frightened of exploring new paths to God? That part of us which is Levi insists on clarity and freedom from ambiguity. We are risk-averse, preferring the easier option, the old way of doing things. The trouble is that even according to Levi’s way of thinking and doing things, Gershon is a bit extreme. When Gershon encounters a fork in the path and needs to make a choice, or state his preferred alternative, he chooses not to choose. He simply sits at the fork in the road and does nothing, immobilized by his desire to live in a risk-free world. Now I ask you, what sort of commitment to God can you have if you are obsessed with keeping all your pages clean, your tickets unused and your mileage at zero?

Comes the Torah and tells us that even this is an authentic path to God. They also deserve to be counted among their brothers. Fear and paralysis are also a legitimate response to God.

********

CHAPTER 3. – B’HALOTECHA

Sinning L’Shem Shomayim – in heaven’s name?

‘Remember what God did to Miriam, on the way out of Egypt.’ (Deut. 24:9) What God did was to punish Miriam with leprosy after she and Aaron spoke slanderously against Moses, as we read in this week’s Sidra:

Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite. Then they said, ‘Does God speak exclusively to Moses? Doesn’t He also speak to us?’ God heard this. Moses, however, was a very humble man, more so than any man on the face of the earth. (Numbers 12:1-3)

Now I ask you, why on earth would Miriam say anything even semi-not-nice about Moses? We’re not discussing a mean-spirited or spiteful old woman whom one might easily dismiss as some Torah archetypal slanderer or gossiper. We’re talking about Miriam the Prophetess, elder sister to Aaron and Moses: a woman whose kindness, greatness and piety were legend in her own lifetime. What might have possessed her to do such a foolish or wicked thing?

In the Book of Ecclesiastes (10:1) King Solomon says, ‘Dead flies make a perfumer's oil stink, weightier than wisdom and honor is a little foolishness.’

Solomon’s meaning appears clear enough. No matter how exalted your reputation might be, when you do something stupid you spoil everyone’s opinion of you; for even a little folly outweighs a lot of wisdom and honor.

It’s a good reading of the Hebrew, but not quite accurate. The word YAKAR here translated as ‘weightier’ really means precious. What the verse actually says is this: ‘more precious than wisdom and honor is a little foolishness.’

The Izbicy rebbe says this idea applies everywhere in life; we all need to be aware that sometimes it’s more important to be wrong than right.[6] Saving face and keeping one’s shining reputation from harm is not the most important object in life – doing the will of God is.

This, according to Izbicy, is one of the ways in which the Jew stands out from the gentiles. Imagine God saying to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘Hey, Hugh, I need a favor!’

Naturally the Archbishop is going to say, ‘Yes, sure. Whatever You want, Lord. Only speak Your mission for me and I will carry it out faithfully.’

Then it turns out, the thing God wants Hugh to do is very nasty, disgusting and hurtful; something really bad.

‘Thy will be done, of course. But tell me, Lord, please,’ asks the bishop. ‘What will happen to me after I carry out my mission and do this thing?’

‘Why, I’ll punish you, of course, for committing such a crime.’

‘Ha ha, naturally, naturally, of course; but then when it’s all over, everyone will know that I was really doing Your Divine Will, yes? It’ll become apparent in the end that I was only doing what You commanded, right?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that. You don’t get to be the hero of the narrative – there’s no plucky little archbishop bearing the burden of God’s ineffable plans, nobly maintaining a stiff upper lip and keeping his silence in the face of the world’s approbation while bravely carrying divine secrets, and all that sort of stuff. No, you get to be the villain. You’re the baddy, simple as that.’

‘For how long, O Lord? How long will my name be smirched?’

‘For all eternity. And just to make sure it stays that way, I’m going to write it into Scripture for good people to remember, encouraging them to meditate on the manner of your punishment and ignominy.’

‘Lord, do I have a choice in this matter?’

‘Yes, Hugh, there’s always a choice.’

‘Might I ask, Lord, that someone else be chosen for this sacred mission?’

It is precisely on this point that the essence of a Jew pivots, says the Izbicy. We say ‘Yes’ to God, no matter what the mission. We don’t ask why or wherefore. We don’t demand recognition, nor do we expect the laws of nature to be rewritten in our favor, or the rules of consequences to be bent on our behalf. We offer ourselves, saying, ‘HINENI – Here I am.’ It was for this reason alone that we were chosen; because we Jews are worthy instruments through which the divine plan will be wrought to perfection. We provide grist for the mill - dramatis personae. Whatever character the plot calls for at any moment, we are ready to act that part.

With this in mind, let us look at the opening of this week’s Sidra.

God spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to Aaron and tell him: ‘When you light the lamps, the seven lamps shall shine upon the face of the menorah.’ (Num. 8:12)

Rashi explains the verse to mean that the six wicks in the six cups on the arms of the menorah must point inward, towards the center column where the seventh wick burned.

Now, if this is all a metaphor suggesting, as the Mishna says: ‘Let all your actions be L’Shem Shomayim - in heaven’s name[7],’ it makes sense that the wicks in the cups on the ‘arms’ of the menorah should point toward the center column whose wick points upward toward heaven which represents L’Shem Shomayim. Likewise our physical actions need to be consciously directed toward heaven, we cannot just assume they point heavenward of their own accord. The question is this: why does the verse say seven lamps, when the seventh, central, upward pointing lamp is already directed toward heaven? Why isn’t it sufficient for the verse to tell us that six lamps should point inwards to shine upon the seventh, central lamp?

The answer is this: it’s not enough for the kavvana – intention to be L’Shem Shomayim – in heaven’s name. That only means you don’t want to do anything wrong; you’re being careful and purposeful, but you are still focused on yourself and your own perception of what should be done. You’re doing the right thing as you see it, but it may have nothing to do with the Will of God. What’s demanded is that the L’Shem Shomayim also be L’Shem Shomayim.

In the liturgy for Shabbat and the Festivals we pray, ‘Purify our hearts to worship You in truth,’ because worship and service are not sufficient, if it isn’t worship in truth it isn’t worship of God. True worship means being available to God the way Aaron and Miriam are at the end of this Sidra. They are ready to have bad things written about them, to have a sin recorded against them to allow the greatness of Moses to be seen and heard.

How do Miriam and Aaron know what God wants of them? That’s the big mystery.

We have learned elsewhere how pleasure and delight are the highest forms of good; this is a basic tenet of Judaism. ‘There is no higher good than pleasure,’ (Sefer Yetzira Cap. II Mishna 4); ours is not an aesthetic religion, and the Torah frowns on self-denial of pleasure and delight. But there is a significant argument between Jews and gentiles over the roots of pleasure.

C.S. Lewis published a short novel during WWII. It comprises a series of letters written to a young devil by his uncle, an old devil by the name of Screwtape. The following is a quote:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures; all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter IX.)

Lewis does not account for the pleasure in Malice. If all pleasures are essentially good and God-given, where do we get the thrill and delight of speaking Lashon Hara – Gossip and Slander?

The Midrash (Sifrei) describes what happened;

Miriam happened to be standing next to Moses’ wife, Tziporah, when news came that Eldad and Medad had begun prophesying in the camp.

‘I feel sorry for their wives,’ said Tziporah. ‘Not being able to have physical relations with their husbands anymore, now that they’ve become prophets.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Miriam.

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ answered Tziporah. ‘Prophets not being allowed to have normal marital relations –like Moses and I, since he became a prophet.’

Miriam and Aaron discussed it. ‘Does God speak exclusively to Moses? Doesn’t He also speak to us?’

Aaron and Miriam were prophets, but they had normal married lives. They couldn’t understand what was so special about Moses, necessitating a physical separation from Tziporah. ‘Aren’t we also prophets like him?’ hey wondered out loud.

‘No,’ said God. ‘You aren’t like Moses. No one is or ever will be.’

When Moses spoke his prophecy it was as though he wasn’t even there; the SHECHINA - Divine Presence spoke directly out of Moses’ throat,[8] as though he were merely the vessel for the sound.

What sets humans apart from animals is that God breathed His breath into us; in doing so He made us speaking souls.[9] Constructing words and speech from letters, syllables, phrases and sentences should have remained the divine prerogative. This is the stuff of Creation; the building blocks of the universe; the very ingredients of energy as described in Sefer Yetzira. But God breathed all this into us, making us uniquely capable of building and destroying worlds of our own, with our words and speech.

But Moses’ prophecy was not his own. He built no worlds with his speech, nor destroyed any. They were not his words, it was not his breath. The SHECHINA spoke directly out of Moses’ throat. Throughout the Torah there are hints at Moses’ greatness, but nowhere is it stated outright until we come to this Sidra. Here God tells us explicitly:

‘With him I speak mouth to mouth, in vision and not in allegory. He sees the true picture of God. How can you not be afraid to speak against my servant Moses?’ (Numbers 12:8)

How did Aaron and Miriam know to speak bad about Moses? Even if they willingly allowed themselves to be used as foils in this narrative, as butts into which God cast His darts of anger – how did they know what was expected of them?

There is a pleasure higher than intimacy and mating. It is the pleasure of Oneness. It stands infinitely higher than anything physical. In Hebrew it is called YECHIDA. Moses is the only one who ever experienced it: while remaining alive and human, he stopped speaking his own breath and words. He became a vessel for God’s breath and words. Who can even begin to imagine the pleasure of YECHIDA? Prophecy at Moses’ level moves beyond the highest World of Words into God’s private domain where all words are just One word, and all breath is just that One expiration.

When Tziporah intimated that she no longer had physical contact with her husband, Miriam and Aaron both had a sudden tinge, an inkling or notion of what was going on. Where previously they hadn’t even known that YECHIDA exists, they became aware of that pleasure which exists beyond the physical.

Which human pleasure is not a real physical pleasure, but a thrill and delight all the same? It is the perverted joy, the inside-out reverse of YECHIDA: the assassination of the ‘other’ through breath and words – slander and gossip.

Aaron and Miriam went with their intuition. They heard no instruction to go and sin by speaking Lashon Hara. It was their gut instinct, and when a person is following their gut instinct they are capable of carrying out God’s will far better than when they make a conscious decision, as will be discussed in the Sidra of Korah.

Aaron and Miriam are Jews who don’t mind being vanquished by God. They care nothing for their reputation when God needs a villain to revile. This is the meaning of the verse with which the Sidra opens: ‘When you light the lamps, the seven lamps shall shine upon the face of the menorah.’ The wick in the middle lamp, the very spine of the menorah, isn’t directed toward heaven simply because it points upwards. L’Shem Shomayim also has to be L’Shem Shomayim.

Any Kavvana – intention to do something in heaven’s name first requires being available to God for His purposes; and who can fathom God’s purpose?

Lest someone interpret this to mean that any sin is permitted if you feel in your guts that you need to do it, the Izbicy rebbe pointed out that the verse in Ecclesiastes is quite specific: ‘more precious than wisdom and honor is a little foolishness,’ something little; a tiny amount of imprudence – not some gross offense.

********

CHAPTER 4. – SH’LACH

How could we have sunk so low as to reject God’s Promised Land?

Few groups in the Bible begin a project so full of promise and optimism, only to disintegrate so swiftly into shame and disgrace, as the ‘spies’ in this week’s Sidra (Numbers Cap. 13). My aim is not to rationalize or justify the sins of our ancestors as recorded in the Book of Numbers, especially not those of this ill-fated expedition to reconnoiter the Land of Canaan. A sin is a sin, a blunder remains a blunder; calumny, lies and betrayals leave a stench long after they are gone. And yet, the profuse detail with which the Torah embellishes every stage of the narrative invites, nay, begs us to confront our own prejudices; to wrestle with the text. Surely it cannot be taken at face value?

We are taught to express unquestioning faith in the Torah and in its interpreters and commentators, to accept their reading of the text at face value - and they have nothing nice to say about the spies. On the other hand, we are constantly warned against assuming we understand the motives of those exalted people described in these texts, our ancient ancestors. What ought we to do? Should we regard the spying episode as a total failure, and are we commanded to see ourselves as failures for having been a part of that generation, in spirit?

I think not. Every noble act we ascribe to our heroic predecessors was a risky endeavor at the time; each success was once a dubious gamble. Furthermore, many historical events were considered failures in the short term, yet with the passage of centuries and on reflection, they have come to be seen in a more positive light.

The worst thing ever said about us as a nation was said by God to Moses at the affair of the Golden Calf. It is recorded in the Book of Exodus (Ex. 32:9): ‘God said to Moses, “I have seen the people, and behold, they are a stiff-necked people.”’ We took God’s insult and made it into our greatest virtue and asset, thereby proving that it was never expressed as an insult, though it may have read like that at the time. We’re stiff-necked, yeah – Great! See what we’ve achieved with it in thirty five centuries? Just look at us!

In the previous week’s Sidra (BeHa’alotcha) we examined the case of Aaron and Miriam who spoke against Moses. We saw how their sin was not so much a conscious decision to err, but more a question of allowing themselves to follow a baser instinct, chasing a strange and disembodied pleasure. We also saw how their sin, although recorded as a transgression, was L’Shem Shomayim – in heaven’s name in the truest sense.

This week’s story is much worse. The spies were not acting out some visceral and unnamed longing; they thought in advance about what they were going to say and do. They planned it deliberately – it wasn’t spontaneous. How can such a vile deed work itself out for good even in the long run? How can it become something positive? Can a sin done with malice-aforethought possibly redeem itself?

The narrative would seem to indicate that such a thing is not possible. The spies died horrible and gruesome deaths, while everyone else was condemned to a delayed but equally certain demise. All the promises God made to us in Egypt - to bring us forth and deliver us all into the land He had promised our forefathers, to give us as an inheritance - became null and void. We were all punished during the following forty years, as God told us, ‘In this wilderness your carcasses will fall - every one of you twenty years old or more, who was counted in the census and who has complained against Me.’ (Num. 14:29)

Since all but two of the men in that generation (namely, Joshua and Caleb) died there in the wilderness, we must assume that all the rest of us complained and were duly penalized. When the biblical narrative causes such Yi’ush – desolation and despair in us who merely read about it, can we even imagine the feelings of the protagonists, the Israelites in the wilderness upon realizing what a shambles they had made of their hopes, and how far beyond repair they had reduced everything?

I am reminded of a famous conversation between the two Hasidic masters, the brothers Reb Zusya and Reb Elimelech. They argued for some time over the following: one brother asked, ‘We were all there inside Adam. All the souls who would be born until the end of time were combined and pooled within Adam’s soul. How then did we allow him to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? How could we have sat by letting him destroy everything, without interfering to save him, us and the entire world?’

‘Had we intervened,’ replied the other brother, ‘Adam would never have been able to get over his certainty that ‘if-only’ he had eaten of that tree he would have become a god. I; if only we had not prevented him he might have become a titan. He would have blamed us for keeping him down from fulfilling his potential; he would have pondered the ‘what-ifs’ for all eternity.’

We are taught that we all stood at Sinai, even those who are born today. It thus stands to reason that when the spies brought back their wicked report, we all complained against God. How come none of us did what Zusya and Elimelech thought of doing - standing up and shouting, ‘Hey! I want to go into the Land of Canaan, now, without delay!’

To think that I was there and said nothing is too shameful to bear, and it doesn’t feel like me. It’s hard to imagine myself so dumb, accepting or stifled. It’s out of character. Surely something else must have been going on, for me to have fallen in with the group-think to such repulsive levels of self-pity, despair and disloyalty. In order to explain events we need to look at the textual continuity of the Sidra awith the following chapters.

Immediately after the story of the spies, we are given the chapter of the NESACHIM – Libations. These are offerings of wine which were poured on the base of the sacrificial altar in the Temple at the same time as the offering itself was burned on the pyre. There has to be a very good reason these two chapters are juxtaposed side by side: together, they form a subtext which can help us explain those aspects of the spy story we find so puzzling.

The Midrash says the following:

This is how R. Tanchum b. Abba (in the name of Hanina, father of R. Acha) unwrapped the chapter of Libations. He said, ‘This is why R. Hanina opened with the quote from Ecclesiastes (9:7) ‘Go your way - eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already accepted your works,’ because he was connecting the Libations with the story of the AKEDA – Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22). When God said, ‘Go your way, etc.’ He was actually talking to Abraham.

God commanded him to sacrifice his only son, and Abraham rose early in the morning, taking Isaac with alacrity to offer him up on Mount Moriah at God’s bidding. When God subsequently told him, ‘Do not raise your hand to the lad,’ Abraham said, ‘Master of the World, was it for nothing You told me to offer up my child, my only one, the one I love?’

God explained to him that it was not for nothing. In fact, the reason for the AKEDA was to make the whole world aware of Abraham’s greatness, that it was not just his son that Abraham was offering at the AKEDA, it was his own life and heart and soul that he stood ready to sacrifice.

Abraham said, ‘Master of the World, it’s impossible for me to descend from this place without some sort of sacrifice.’ God responded, ‘Your sacrifice has been waiting since the Six Days of Creation.’ Abraham opened his eyes and saw the ram. For, as our sages have taught, Abraham’s ram was created at twilight on the Sixth Day of Creation. Abraham took it and offered it up as a burnt offering, as the text tells us ‘in place of his son’. Now since the verse tells us that Abraham took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering, was it really necessary to remind us it was in place of his son?

Abraham said, ‘Master of the World, behold I slaughter this ram before You, let it be as though my son is slaughtered. See this blood I sprinkle [let it be] as though it were Isaac’s blood I sprinkle for You. This skin I flay from the ram, see it as Isaac’s skin flayed for You. This meat I burn, regard it as my son’s ashes heaped up on the altar.’

God replied, ‘I swear it was really your son, whom you offered up first. This ram is merely in place of him.’

Abraham said, ‘Master of the World, I am not moving from here until You promise to me that You will never, ever test me again. For had I not listened to You I would have lost everything I worked so hard for in life.’

According to R. Hanina, God said, ‘I swear, it is true, had you not listened the way you did, you would indeed have lost everything you worked so hard for all your life.’ At that time, God swore an oath to Abraham that He would never again test him, saying to Abraham, ‘Go your way - eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already accepted your works,’ (Eccl. 9:7).

It is no coincidence, says the Izbicy rebbe, that this Midrashic reading of the AKEDA story is situated here and not in Genesis, where it rightfully belongs. The chapter concerning Libations is very different from every other aspect of Temple sacrifice. Generally speaking, Libations were wine offerings accompanying a main sacrifice. Peace or thanksgiving offerings brought by individuals, or communal sacrifices paid for with public funds, sin offerings and burnt offerings, all required Libations of wine. Libations could also be brought as stand-alone offerings by individuals who were so inclined. Libations differ from other sacrifices in this: only a Jew may bring a Libation stand-alone offering. Gentiles are welcome to bring peace-offerings accompanied by Libations, but may not offer a Libation stand-alone.

The reason, explains the Izbicy, is that no gentile will allow him or herself to be vanquished by God, the way a Jew will do. As we discussed in last week’s Sidra, a Jew’s very essence pivots around this availability to God. We say ‘Yes’ to God, whatever the mission. We don’t ask why or wherefore. We don’t demand recognition, nor do we expect the laws of nature to be rewritten in our favor or the rules of consequences to be bent on our behalf. We simple offer ourselves saying, ‘HINENI – Here I am.’

After the story of the spies, after we had been condemned to die in the wilderness without ever entering the Promised Land, we were given the chapter of Libations to restore our soul. The chapter can hardly be mentioned in rabbinic literature without someone prefacing it with the verse from Ecclesiastes, ‘Go your way - eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart,’ because God wants us to cheer up. And not merely cheer up, but to be merry! Why? ‘For God has already accepted your works.’ This is another one of those incidents when we did the will of God by sinning to the core of our souls, with malice aforethought and the intent to defy God. In giving us the commandment to bring Libations with all our sacrifices and especially with the caveat that only a Jew may offer an unaccompanied Libation, God is hinting to us not to take this whole episode to heart. God’s delight can be our delight - His merriment, ours.

The Midrash is not out of context, when it that places Abraham’s demand (that God swear an oath to him not to test him again) here at the story of the spies. The sages are teaching us another great mystery. We, the Jewish People refused to move from that place until God swore to us He would never again have us commit another collective sin like this one. He would not demand it, or engineer it, or even let it happen.

These last thirty-five hundred years or so have demonstrated that while we may sin individually, in groups or communities, the Jewish People as a single entity have never rejected God or His commandments. We have never turned our backs on God the way we did that night in the wilderness.

And to tell the truth, it would have been very embarrassing for God, if we had turned up on the doorstep at the Land of Canaan, expecting to be allowed in. After all, we were a generation early having been redeemed from Egypt before the appointed time. God had not been able to let things slide another minute, for we had been in danger of disintegration. So God found Himself with a nation on His hands in the wilderness, and nowhere to take them because as He had promised Abraham (Gen. 15:16), ‘the fourth generation will return here – because the sin of the Emorites will not have run its course until then.’ We of the Exodus were only the third generation.

It was just another example of the Jewish People - us, you and I being available to God, to be the villains of any narrative if that is what advances God’s plan. And though our hangover the following morning was cosmic, although we felt we had revealed ourselves corrupt to the core of our very souls, contemptible and unworthy of redemption, nevertheless we saved the day for God, and that’s what counts.

********

CHAPTER 5. – KORAH

Getting Rid Of Korah Once and For All!

The story of Korah first appears in Numbers 16, where we read how his rebellion against Moses ended when the earth swallowed him, his family and all his followers, in the second year after the Exodus.

The Midrash (Gen. Rabba 19:2) places Korah early in the story of Genesis; in the Garden of Eden alongside the wily and seditious Serpent, the wicked and manipulative Haman, and curiously, Pharaoh’s hapless baker.

In the Zohar, a running commentary to the Pentateuch, Korah appears even earlier. According to the Zohar (Vol. I 17a), on the Second Day of Creation when God says, ‘Let there be firmament in the water…’, Korah had already rebelled, refuting and contradicting Creation before it was half finished i.e. even before the Serpent, the Garden of Eden or even the possibility of Good and Evil existed.

When I look speculatively at a rabbi, a master, especially one who is said to follow in the ways of the Baal Shem Tov, wondering ‘Is he the rabbi for me?’, I ask myself this question; would he have made the Golden Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai while Moses was away, or not?

Aaron did, but Korah would not have.

Before Moses went up the mountain for forty days and forty nights he told the elders, ‘Wait here for us until we return to you. See, Aaron and Hur are with you; whoever has a dispute, let him come to them.’ (Ex. 24:14) It didn’t take long for things to go awry, because: ‘When the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, they assembled about Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”’ (ibid. 32:1)

Aaron did as he was asked, but Korah would not have done so. Later, while Israel tried its hardest to atone and make amends for worshiping the Golden Calf, Korah looked on sadly and pityingly, for he knew in his heart that if Moses had only told everyone to refer their questions to him, the sin of the Golden Calf would never have been committed. To be honest, all Israel knew it too. Korah understood that he was a natural leader and the moral authority who would have stood in the breach and fought to the death to prevent the calamity of the Golden Calf, had he only been tasked with preventing it. No idolatry would have happened on Korah’s watch while Moses was away on the mountain.

Aaron, according to Korah, wasn’t a leader - he was a follower,[10] and what use is a follower in a crisis when only a leader with guts and smarts can stand between order and chaos?

There’s a tradition that in the messianic era Korah will take his rightful place as the High Priest instead of Aaron. The Tribe of Levi will supplant the family of Aaron the Cohen as hereditary priests. Some attribute this idea to the ARI (Isaac Luria 1534-1572), father of modern kabbalah[11]. I suspect they have misinterpreted the ARI.

I think the future-to-come referred to by the ARI, when Levites will take the place of the Cohens is happening right now. The ARI’s prediction is a gloomy presentiment about the our time, not some bright future messianic era. Korah has already taken over spiritual leadership of the Jewish People.

To understand the extent of the prevailing perversion of history, one must first comprehend Korah’s fundamental argument. He says, ‘HESED, Loving-kindness, Giving and Compassion are all very nice and virtuous when carefully confined within the boundaries of decency set by discipline and the ordering of priorities. Obedience to the Law must come first and last. HESED/Giving must be firmly wrapped in a rigid framework of GEVURAH/Withholding, so as to maintain the proper hierarchies of an ordered universe.’

Well, isn’t Korah right? Who could possibly argue with him? Through Korah’s eyes, it is incomprehensible that Aaron should succeed to the Cohen-Priesthood after fashioning the idolatrous Golden Calf with his very hands, while he, the saintly Korah who would gladly have died to prevent it, should be relegated to a footnote in history! Aaron makes the Golden Calf and Moses lays down his life for him. Korah summons all the true Sons of Levi to lead them in a war against idolatry and Moses thinks up some unprecedented and horrible death for him?

Ask yourself this question: which Jewish leader of your acquaintance would have stepped into Aaron’s place and manufactured the Golden Calf? Open any Jewish newspaper or website and Korah jumps out at you from the front page – he’s all we seem to have nowadays.

Without the Zohar’s explanation the whole narrative is utterly inexplicable.

Korah represents the ordering of forces, the arrangement, organization and tidiness within the universal system. Aaron represents chaos - and chaos prevails. Looking at the way God runs this world, His very considered opinion seems to be that ‘GEVURAH/Withholding is all very nice and virtuous when its obedience to the Law, its priorities and hierarchies of order and decency are wrapped in a very free-flowing framework of compassionate judgment, within an open structure of unspecified authority, amid random acts of undeserved kindness and unconditional love.’ The left hand/Gevurah, must be wrapped inside the right hand/Hesed and not the other way around, lest it constrict the universe and prevent chaos.

To answer the original question ‘Why was Korah so wrong?’ Korah was never wrong. He was always, in Moses’ era as he is in ours, 100% right - just totally irrelevant. He was completely at odds with God’s desires and out of sync with the universe. Because Korah’s rectitude and probity are so impeccable, there is nothing you can say or do to make him and his congregations deviate from their commitment to impose strict order, discipline and compliance. Their response to adversity and resistance is always to Double Down.

Doubling Down means strengthening one’s commitment to a particular strategy or course of action, typically one that is potentially risky.

The Mishna (Avot 5:17) describes the quarrel Korah started with Moses as ‘Not a Machloket L’Shem Shomayim – not a quarrel for heavens’ sake’. Though used ubiquitously, the phrase ‘for heavens’ sake’ is never adequately explained in rabbinic literature and remains obscure to this day. The above mentioned Zohar attempts to fix that oversight by connecting Korah’s rebellion over Aaron’s appointment to his repudiation of God’s act of Creation on the Second Day.

The first day of Creation has its divisions and separations: God divides light from dark, calling one day and the other night. Korah does not oppose that division. It is only on the second day that, according to the Zohar, Korah’s personality begins to create mischief. The Torah tells us: ‘God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And it was evening and it was morning, the second day.’ (Gen 1:6-8) To which the Zohar comments, ‘The description of God dividing between upper and lower waters is written left-handedly, while the story of Creation and the first day’s narrative is written right-handedly[12]. And though the first day describes a division of light from dark, there is no splitting. It is on the second day that splitting occurs. Left-handedness writes a split which provokes a reaction from the left side, creating friction, opposition, passion and rage. It is out of this rage that all Hell is formed.

‘Moses saw that the Third Day of Creation creates the necessary compromise to balance left and right. The left was absorbed into the right in the upper waters above Heaven, while rage and hell descended into the waters below Heaven. Thus when Korah the Left, raged in opposition to Aaron the Right, Moses attempted to create balance in the same manner as Creation did on the third day. But Korah resisted by trying to change the very name of Heaven. He wanted to disengage the left from its safe place in the upper waters, wrapped within the gentle right. Instead, he wanted to raise his rage to the upper waters, dragging Hell upwards with him to vanquish the right and absorb it within himself. Moses could not allow that to happen. Korah was denying all of Creation and showing no respect or consideration for the Divine Presence, he was reversing the course of history. This provoked Moses’ anger, which in addition to Korah’s anger, tipped the balance. Korah was consumed by his own rage and plunged, still alive, into Hell.’

From this Zohar, it would seem that acting L’Shem Shomayim (or heavens’ sake) assumes that the left allowed to act unsupervised is malignant, and that one must only do things which emphasize and strengthen the dominion of right over left, preventing rage from rising and taking over. This means keeping the left very firmly secured and contained within the benign right. ‘For heaven’s sake’ really means ‘for heaven’s name’ because the left is always trying to change the name of the game, change the name of Heaven to Hell.

***********

Hillel says, ‘Be a student of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving people and attracting them to Torah’ (Mishna – Avoth 1:12). It is no coincidence that Hillel is mentioned in the Mishna, quoted earlier, as an example of someone whose quarrels were indeed ‘for the sake of heaven’. He is famous for having Aaron’s characteristic compassion, cheerfulness and patience, so Hillel’s recommendation that everyone adopt Aaron’s peace-loving behaviors is perfectly understandable. But a closer look at the text doesn’t support such a simple reading. Hillel did not say, ‘be like Aaron,’ he said, ‘be a students of Aaron.’

History does not record Aaron having any students. His brother Moses was our teacher, and remains to this day, Moshe Rabeinu – Moses our Teacher. What’s wrong with being one of the students of Moses - loving peace and pursuing peace, loving people and attracting them to Torah? And since we’re examining this premise, why not also ask where it is actually written or intimated in the biblical narrative, either in Egypt or after the Exodus, that Aaron possesses these peaceful, people-loving traits? How did such an assessment of Aaron’s character come to be assumed?

Perhaps Hillel is hinting at a pivotal moment in the narrative where, had he been there to guide us, he would have pointed us in a completely different direction.

Immediately following the Ten Commandments, we read: ‘Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the horn and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off, and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die”’ (Ex. 20:16-17). We could not stand the terrifying sound of God’s voice speaking directly to us, so we asked Moses to do the listening for us. But the result was that God withdrew onto the mountain and Moses had to go up to listen for the word. We were suddenly bereft of the presence of God.

In the Mishna, Hillel tells us that had he been there at the time, he would have urgently signaled us not to make that demand of Moses. Hillel would have advised, ‘Listen! this is an opportunity to avoid a future filled with mistakes, grief and anguish. Let’s ask Aaron to be our teacher. He does things differently.’ But Hillel was not there, so Moses became our teacher/interlocutor, and forty days later we came to Aaron begging him to ‘make us a god who walks in front of us…’ By then the damage was done.

We were not suited to the style of Judaism we had just brought about by our own request. We had appointed a chief-prophet who went up to heaven to bring down not the Divine Presence, but the Law - the Word of God. We may have needed a teacher, but what we really wanted was a priest, someone who could invoke the divine while still among us, teaching and showing us how to worship Him, rather than someone who went up a mountain to encounter God on his own and to bring us His word. We wanted to feel God’s presence and see Providence, rather than be taught His word. The Torah tells us what happened: ‘When the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, they assembled about Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”’

It was a terrible sin, for which we have never fully been forgiven. Nor do we seem to have forgiven ourselves for worshiping the Golden Calf, and yet God acquiesced without demur to our request for a different sort of Judaism. ‘Let them make me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them,’ God said to Moses (Ex. 25:8), granting us a sacred location on earth, a dwelling place within a constructed building where He promised to join us. Then, agreeing to our request for Aaron to be the priest in place of Moses, God told Moses, ‘And you, bring near to you Aaron your brother, and his sons with him, from among the people of Israel, to serve me as priests—Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, Aaron’s sons,’ (ibid. 28:1). Had we not sinned with the Golden Calf, none of this would have happened (although we might have avoided the blunder if we had been able to take Hillel’s advice and become Aaron’s students at the start, before Moses went up the mountain).

It’s no wonder Korah’s blood boiled at the spectacle of Aaron, glorious and resplendent in his priestly vestments, occupying the position for which he, Korah was most naturally suited. It galled him beyond bitterness - it was so unfair.

Of course we have not yet addressed the basic question of why Aaron not only went unpunished, but was actually rewarded for his part in the sin of the Golden Calf.

**************

We keep on coming back to the events of the Second Day of Creation, because that is where the key lies.

What does it mean when the verse tells us that ‘God made the firmament, and divided the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament’? What is a firmament? What is it made of and what does its separation of the waters represent? Taking our cue from the Zohar we can dispense altogether with the necessity of reconciling the verse with any scientific understanding of cosmology, whether the firmament is a great solid dome covering the flat, waterborne earth as the ancients thought, or some expanse of space/time in harmony with modern cosmological ideas. We can simply adopt the Zohar’s view that the firmament is a split, a cleft separating right from left like the two hemispheres of the human brain. A human has only one brain and one mind, even when the two sides of the brain are at odds with one another, even when a person feels they are in two minds about something. The two sides share tasks and information without being identical, although one side usually dominates the other. A consequence of this broken symmetry is apparent everywhere, for no matter where we look in the world or through history, the overwhelming majority of people are left-brained and right-handed. In the Genesis story, the split creates an upper and lower region; right and left don’t exist yet. By Korah’s time it has evolved into a right/left split.

Korah is a Levi, and Levites are not natural risk takers. Of the Twelve Tribes, Levi is most rigid in his outlook; he is most certain that what he’s doing is the right action and proper thing to do. He longs for clarity, for life without grey areas, a life of stark contrasts between good and evil. Levi does not want to begin anything where the outcome is doubtful, or to commit any act requiring subsequent qualification.[13] The Tribe of Levi prefers the safe path. They want a world where the light reflects the Will of God which is good, while the Dark is always bad and forbidden. Levi takes it a step further; trying to maintain a clear and absolute distinction between good and bad, he attempts to divest the act of sinning from all pleasure, taste and joy. Levi wants to distinguish clearly between the beautiful and the ugly, to leave no connection or confusion between what has grace and what has ugliness. He can separate between Good and Evil Desire, ensuring that only good is satisfying or pleasurable, and only evil is unpleasant or painful.

If all mundane and physical pleasure were removed from the worship of God, from learning Torah and fulfilling the Commandments (e.g. if it became impossible to feel proud of one’s virtuous accomplishments, if one could not enjoy the esthetic beauty in the music of synagogue liturgy or the sight of Chanukah lights, or the taste of Matza, or dancing at a wedding, etc.) Levi would feel vindicated. To him that would be like taking out insurance against sin. We would have to see it as the exact opposite. We would say, ‘Cursed be the man that makes a graven or molten image, an abomination to God, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and sets it up in secret’ (Deut. 27:15). Korah the Levite is just as capable and inclined to worship the Golden Calf as the rest of us. His idol, though, is hidden in his heart.

When physical pleasures are all sinful, and spiritual or cerebral pleasures are all disconnected from the flesh and its five senses, when every virtue is stripped and purged of selfish ego indulgence and no trace of good remains inside the evildoer or deed, then God’s left hand will have triumphed. Korah will be high priest and we, his flock, will resemble one massive golden bullock skipping about like a calf from the stall. When our women are covered from head to toe in black polyester, when their voices, pictures and laughter banned from public view via the print media and every forum of mass communication, when Halacha Police measure the correct length or tightness of their skirts, we will have become Muslim Jews. Indeed, we have become so in many places throughout the world today.

Korah is so certain that his Levite perspective is the only possible true one, and that he will be vindicated by history and ultimate triumphant,[14] that he keeps on Doubling Down. I am not implying that he is incorrect or ill-advised, one cannot show that Korah is wrong. That’s the whole point, for when all is said and done, he is simply insisting that the letter of the law be upheld, that the tradition be honored allowing nothing new or deviant to infect his followers, avoiding anything experimental or previously untried. Korah is always sure about this point – he knows how to recognize idolatry and how to prevent it spreading among Jews. His duty is always clear.

The Torah tells us how Moses gambled his life and reputation in the struggle with Korah over Aaron’s appointment to the high priesthood. ‘Then Moses said, "This is how you will know that God has sent me to do all these things and that it was not my idea: If these men die a natural death and suffer the fate of all mankind, then God has not sent me. But if God brings about something totally new, and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them, with everything that belongs to them, and they go down alive into the realm of the dead, then you will know that these men have treated God with contempt."As soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their households, and all those associated with Korah, together with their possessions. They went down alive into the realm of the dead, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community.’ (Num. 16:28-33)

When Aaron is High Priest things are different. Often, in our hedonistic pursuits, we blunder and deviate from the true path. In the doctrine of Hedonism, pleasure or happiness is the highest good, and in Aaron’s world hedonism is enshrined in Law. ‘There is no higher good than pleasure,’ (Sefer Yetzira Cap. II Mishna 4). We repent our misdeeds and sins, then move on as swiftly as we can. Occasionally we explore new paths and discover fresh forms of worship, developing technologies and skills undreamt of by our ancestors. And all the while, what does Levi do? Why, he makes music, plays musical instruments and sings to heaven, for that is a proper occupation for the Levite. It is his vocation and calling, it is what makes him happy and gives him pleasure.

*************

In the abstract, we can understand the events of the Second Day of Creation as the splitting of higher from lower, the making of hierarchies which then produced dominant and submissive functions, and this spilt later becomes the polarity of right and left throughout nature.

There is another, concrete way of understanding the split between the upper and lower waters. Since thirst is our first physical desire and primary craving, water will forever remain the symbol of our desires. The splitting of upper and lower waters represents the lifelong human struggle between instinctual and generally selfish desires such as greed, gluttony and lust representing the water below the heavens, and rational, generally elevated desires such as seeking God, pursuing the truth and desiring happiness for others represented by water above the heaven.

Understand this split has been a contentious issue since ancient times. The Midrash (Genesis Rabba 4:6) describes one rabbi’s difficulty with this concept. ‘It is written, “God made the firmament,” (Gen. 1:7) this is one of the verses with which Ben Zoma shook the world. “What do you mean, ‘God made’?” Ben Zoma demanded to know. “The text already tells us that God said, ‘Let there be firmament.’ Wasn’t God’s command sufficient? Is it not written, ‘At God’s word the heavens were made and in the breath of His mouth all their hosts?’” (Ps. 33:6).’

Ben Zoma’s thundering question is directed at the Torah’s need to tell us that God ‘made it’ so. The standard Genesis description of creation has God saying ‘Let there be so-and-so,’ and the verse telling us that ‘it was so.’ But here the verse doesn’t say, ‘God said “Let there be a Firmament,” and it was so.’ Instead, the verse says ‘God made the Firmament,’ suggesting that the firmament needed some adjustment after it was spoken into creation. ‘If God adjusted it,’ Ben Zoma complains, ‘why is there still a split between my Good Desire and my Evil Desire?’ Ben Zoma was never able to reconcile the gap between who he thought he was supposed to be and who he actually was. It drove him mad. His cravings were insatiable.

His colleagues wondered what happened to Ben Zoma after his attempt to negotiate Paradise failed, as we read in the Talmud, ‘Our sages taught: Four entered paradise, Ben Azai, Ben Zoma, Acher and R. Akiba. R. Akiba told them, “When you reach the place of pure marble stones, do not say, ‘Water, Water,’ for it is written, ‘Whoever tells lies, cannot stand in My sight.’” (Ps. 101:7) Ben Azai glanced and died. It was said, the verse (ibid. 116:15), ‘Precious in the eyes of God the death of His saints,’ applies to Ben Azai. Ben Zoma glanced and was injured. The verse (Prov. 28:16), ‘You found honey, eat cautiously, lest you eat to satiation and vomit,’ applies to Ben Zoma. Acher uprooted the plantings, and R. Akiba came out in peace.’ (Hagiga 14b)

In Paradise, Ben Zoma encountered his own insatiability to the nth degree, he found Ur-Honey; lapping from the infinite source of irrational and instinctual desire, he drove himself insane with the unfathomable sweetness of it.

‘They asked Ben Zoma, “What is the law; is it permissible to castrate a dog?” and he answered, “No”. Then they asked him, “May a high-priest marry a virgin who’d become pregnant?” and he answered, “Yes”.’ (ibid.) His friends were perplexed. They couldn’t understand Ben Zoma’s madness. At first they tried understanding the damage to his mind as a consequence of some prior flaw in his psyche. Perhaps he was too grandiose in his self-estimation? so they asked him whether it is permissible to castrate a dog, but he gave them the correct answer; every creature deserves respect, even a dog. They wondered whether his problem was low self-esteem? so they asked him about the high-priest marrying the pregnant virgin, but he gave them the right answer; no creature deserves that level of respect, not even the high-priest.

‘Well then, what is his problem?’ they wondered. R. Joshua b. Hanania put his finger on it, as the Talmud describes in this anecdote: ‘R. Joshua b. Hanania was standing on the steps of the Temple Mount. Ben Zoma saw but did not acknowledge him. R. Joshua said, ‘Whence and whither Ben Zoma?’

‘I was peering into the gap between the upper and lower waters,’ answered Ben Zoma. ‘And there is no more than three finger-breadths between them.’

‘Ben Zoma is still out of it,’ R. Joshua said to his disciples. (ibid. 15a)

Ben Zoma’s mistake was in perceiving such a wide gap between the waters above and the waters below, because at the source they are one and the same. He understood that a person has two kinds of desire: the first is instinctual and comes with birth, while the second is rational and evolves with a person’s emotional and intellectual maturity.[15] His mistake was in thinking that they proceed from different sources, that the desires which spring from our instincts are not equal to or as deserving of respect and celebration as those desires chosen after careful and rational weighing of circumstances and ethics. He couldn’t grasp that we are entirely a product of our nature, even the parts of us we think of as the fruits of maturity, evolution and personal growth. In the Nature versus Nurture debate, even nurture is a product of nature.

Channeling Korah, Ben Zoma is convinced that rational choices are always the preferred option because only the careful rational mind can make a flawless selections and decisions devoid of selfish and self-serving desires. A thoughtful human being is capable of nobility in the purest sense. What good is human instinct in comparison? Instincts are useful for the preservation of the species, but little else. Aren’t we always commanded to hold our instincts in check, to maintain control over all those parts of our body that desire to act of their own accord, in their own interest?

Instincts lead to chaos and must be tightly governed. Thus Ben Zoma ignores the advice of his teacher, R. Akiba, and calls twice ‘Water, water’, when only one type of water exists, All desires flow from the same wellspring; there is no space between upper and lower waters, and no real split.

The problem with Ben Zoma’s perception of his own good and evil inclination, is identical to Korah’s problem. It leaves no room for mistakes and chaos, no place for innovation, no space where the unplanned, unscheduled and unconventional are allowed to happen. Ben Zoma thinks all his own instincts as contemptible, and so leaves no room for God to work through him. The fact remains that the highest good does not come about through the highest rational human act. For when all is said and done, a human is merely human, and even the highest achievements of human rationale can never be greater than the person who thought them. Instincts, animal as well as human are divine. They are the wisdom God planted inside our bodies and minds, in every cell and fiber of our being, in every limb and thought. The highest good will always remain God’s good.

Aaron could see what Korah was incapable of admitting. We in our insistence, in our blind and stupid demand for a Golden Calf, we Children of Israel were expressing an instinct, which itself expressed the Will of God written in all our genes. It is up to God, not Korah, to judge between a successful and a failed design, a winning or losing gamble. When we step out of our own way and allow God to work through the instincts and urges He wrote into the fabric of our body, we become capable of unimagined greatness.

Korah left to his own devices goes mad, as does Ben Zoma. They are on the outside, opposed to God’s Will, which, as always, will be end up being done, because the plan is both subtle and inexorable. We don’t get to where God needs us to go by only being good, we get there by making lots of mistakes despite meaning well; and by blundering. God’s plan includes self-correcting mechanisms for us (in the shape of Aaron and the priesthood, and even self correcting mechanisms to fix the priesthood when it loses touch), it’s the divine plan and all the angles are covered. You needn’t be anxious about messing up or spoiling God’s plan, it will happen regardless of your input. Stop worrying about ruining everything with your ignorance, stupidity and ineptitude - you cannot begin to fathom the meaning of it all until you’ve ruined everything you’ve touched[16]. You’ll keep doing it all wrong until you do it right, that’s the plan. King Solomon said, ‘Blessed is the one who is always fearful,’ (Prov. 28:14) while Reb Nachman of Breslov argued that ‘the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing, the chief thing is not to be afraid at all.’ (Likutei Mehoran - Batra 48)

We don’t need Korah, King Solomon, Ben Zoma or the chief rabbinate to police us and prevent us from sinning. We need Aaron to help us make our dreams of God come true!

*********

CHAPTER 6. – CHUKATH

The Mystery of Faith

According to tradition essence of the mysterious Red Heifer (Num. 19) can be summed up in one phrase: ‘It cleans the soiled, while soiling the clean.’

Studying the chapter concerning the Red Heifer is difficult without understanding the Hebrew concepts of TUMA and TAHARA. Unfortunately there are no English translations of either word. The King James Version of the Bible treats TUMA and TAHARA as uncleanness and cleanness respectively. However, there is no known measure of dirt, pollution, or smell associated with TUMA, so the KJV translation is inaccurate. Nor does any detectable level of hygiene, spotlessness or wholesomeness exist for the state of TAHARA. Others translate the two words as ‘impurity’ and ‘purity’, while some add the word ‘ritually’ in an attempt to paint them with meaning or context. Neither the corpse, the murder weapon, nor the person in a tent with a corpse or weapon are ‘ritually impure’ – they are simply TUMA, as is the tent.

Basically the Red Heifer ritual goes like this: first we find a completely red heifer, one that does not have two non-red hairs on its entire body, from head to toe. We slaughter it and burn it on a huge pyre. When the stomach bursts open from the heat, we throw in some cedar wood, hyssop and a skein of red dyed wool, and then, once it has all burned down to ashes, the ashes are gathered for safe-keeping. When someone or something comes in contact with a human corpse they become TUMA, and that TUMA can only be removed by first waiting three days and then traveling to wherever the red-heifer’s ashes are kept. There, someone takes some of the ash, mixes it with spring water and dipping a sprig of hyssop into the mixture, sprinkles it onto the TUMA person, vessel or tent. This ritual is performed again on the seventh day, whereupon TUMA is considered to have been removed. All that remains is for the person, vessel or tent to be immersed in a Mikve and to wait for nightfall, when all becomes Kosher again and not the slightest residue of TUMA remains. At that time the person or object(s) is said to be in a state of TAHARA.

The paradox is this: Anyone who touches the ashes, gathers, carries or sprinkles them becomes TUMA and cannot enter the Temple precinct until they have immersed in a Mikve. Some become so TUMA they even make their own clothing TUMA, and have to immerse everything they wore in the Mikve as well. Hence the phrase ‘cleans the soiled, while soiling the clean.’

Let us set aside the fact that TUMA and TAHARA have no practical application in this day and age, since we live in the absence of the Holy Temple and its precincts, and the ash of the red-heifer is not available for us to be sprinkled with.

The Torah is eternal! Everything in it applies to everyone, all the time - or else none of it does.

According to the Izbicy rebbe, death as a metaphor applies to anything for which we have ceased praying and hoping. We don’t pray for someone who has died to recover their health - it’s pointless. The same applies to a thousand things in our past. We did them and they are done. Some things are undoable, and some cannot be undone. Anything for which we no longer carry any hope in our heart, is considered dead to us.

But what if it were possible to change the past? What if the present is nothing but an illusion?

Everyone knows the story of Joseph and his brothers, of how they kidnapped and sold him into slavery in Egypt. Joseph spent years in prison before eventually becoming viceroy, second in power only to Pharaoh after he interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams, predicting seven years of glut followed by seven of famine. We know how his brothers eventually came down to Egypt from Canaan to purchase food for their families, and that fateful morning when they stood in front of Joseph, unaware of his identity and terrified that he would take Benjamin the youngest brother as his slave. If ever a biblical family slogged its way to the highest possible level of anguish, bitterness, pain and terror, this is the family and this its apogee.

Twenty two years, earlier in a fit of cruelty and dispassionate condemnation, Joseph’s brothers decided he was not really fit to live. They believed he was a sociopath trying to force a wedge between them and their father Jacob, and they thought his attempts to split the family warranted a death sentence.

Judah, an older brother, intervened and persuaded them to commute this death sentence; so they sold Joseph to some passing traders as a slave. Joseph descended into Egypt. His brothers stripped Joseph of the beautiful coat Jacob had given him, and after dipping it in kid’s blood, brought it to their father as evidence of Joseph’s violent death. Jacob was inconsolable and subsequently mourned Joseph for the next twenty two years. Judah never forgave himself for being the cause of Jacob’s ruin and Joseph’s perdition.

Now, after many years have passed, the brothers are trying to convince the Egyptian viceroy that they are not spies come from Canaan to look for the vulnerabilities of Egypt. He had demanded they bring Benjamin the youngest brother down with them to prove their innocence. Judah persuaded their father to trust Benjamin’s safety to him, and the brothers made their way back to Egypt. Joseph pretended to be satisfied, but had his agents plant evidence of a theft in Benjamin’s kit, and had soldiers drag them all back from their hotel to stand before the viceroy to face his wrath and judgment.

Let us try to imagine, if we can, their feelings at that moment. Jacob told them in no uncertain terms that he would die of heartbreak if they failed to bring Benjamin safely. However they look at their situation, they seem to have brought the family to ruins. Judah blames himself the most, but they all accept their shared role in the savage tragedy, and realize they are being punished for the unforgivable sin of fratricide. As men of conscience with a sense of destiny they writhe in the excruciating pain of guilt and remorse. Not only is their personal situation bleak in the extreme, but the future of the Jewish People hangs in the balance. Examined in that light, it could be said that their lives were all a waste, a shameful calamity, that they should never have been born. So great was the sin, that not even their deaths could atone or rectify the damage they had done to Jacob, Joseph and the world. They may even have thought that God would need to destroy the world and start over from scratch.

Suddenly Joseph peels the mask from his face and reveals himself to them. Instantly, their situation changes from being a dire emergency to a celebration of divine providence and reconciliation.

What changed?

Nothing had factually changed, except their perceptions of the situation they were in. They had been in an illusion of danger and pain, and suddenly, in a split second, it was no more than a horrible nightmare from which they’d awakened to safety and relief.

It is said that whoever controls the narrative controls the universe. The ritual of the Red Heifer presents us with a clear narrative: we start with a healthy, young and perfectly red cow, one that has never been yoked or worked. We reduce it to ashes and mix the ashes with pure and unadulterated water. What could be more dead and irreducible than the clinker and slag of the Red Heifer?

Taste it on the tip of your tongue and what do you get? The taste of minerals, dust, ashes and clear water – dead!

In the Midrash we read, ‘God said to Moses, “This is the statute of the Torah. Let them bring you a perfectly Red Heifer… Why to you? Because you are different. To you I reveal the TAAM - Reason behind the Red Heifer, while for everyone else it remains a statute.”’

The Hebrew word for ‘reason’ is TAAM. But the word TAAM has two other meanings: Taste and Musical Notes.

When you bite into an apple, you hear the crisp crunching sounds of teeth cutting through skin. Suddenly your nose is filled with the fragrance of the apple, and your mouth with the feeling of its juices flooding over your tongue and its tangy sweetness overwhelming every taste-bud. The apple is full of life and tastes alive; eating a healthy apple is practically a whole body experience!

Leave the apple a few weeks and it turns to brown mush. Now biting into it is just dull and sour. Leave it another few months and the taste of the apple is completely dead, it has turned to dust.

But what if that were an illusion? What if there’s a part of us that can still taste the life force in the dusty remains of an apple, and in the gritty ashes of a Red Heifer?

What are we made of? We are many billions of atoms of dust, the clinker and slag of long dead, exploded stars. Every atom inside us dances to God’s tune, the TAAM of the universe. Anyone who resonates to Life can taste life in every atom.

The reason we cannot taste life in stardust of which we are made and in the dust and ashes of the burned red heifer is because our tastes are discordant, our reasoning is bitter and our music tasteless rhythms full of sadness and despair. Once a person has had the polluting and destructive taste of idolatry in his mouth, nothing tastes fully alive anymore. Moses, who wasn’t even in this world when we worshipped the Golden Calf, never had his taste for Life corrupted or adulterated by idolatry. He could still taste all the life in the ashes of the Red Heifer; he heard the music of its redness and understood the reason for it.

Inside every Jew there remains a portion of Moses, unsullied and untouched by idolatry and death. We call that part of us Chokhma – Wisdom. ‘God said to Moses, “Let them bring you.”’ We need to bring our consciousness to that part of us which is Moses and can taste the life even in the ashes of the dead.

The narrative of the Red Heifer is a parable wrapped in a metaphor inside an allegory, which, if we take it to its logical conclusion, leads us into an ineluctable paradox – Death is just another illusion. But if death is nothing but an illusion what is the meaning of TUMA and TAHARA and why do we need the Red Heifer to cleanse and remove any TUMA?

In the Torah this chapter dealing with the Red Heifer comes immediately before the death of Miriam, and is followed a short time later by that of Aaron, and some months after that by the death of Moses himself; it happens at the end of their forty year wandering through the wilderness. In actual fact, the chapter of the Red Heifer was taught to the Israelites the second week after the Exodus from Egypt, even before their arrival at Mount Sinai, and its placement here is no coincidence.

What does it mean to be touched by death – to touch Death? It means when something happens to shake our faith in God. When we look inside ourselves and find we are feeling resentment at God for something He did or failed to do.

The greatest possible source of resentment at God comes from looking at one’s self and seeing someone irredeemable and incurable. Resentment and anger at God lead to fear. Fear and faith cannot co-exist. Only self acceptance and love allow faith to blossom.

Miriam, Aaron and Moses each had unique gifts. Together they had the ability to release us from our self-imposed internal exile, to move us beyond the rejection of Self, to achieve prophecy. The chief prerequisite of prophecy, the one component it cannot do without, is joy. In the presence of Miriam we became thirsty for God. In the presence of Aaron we began to comprehend the depths of our own motives. In the presence of Moses each of us understood why we count to the Jewish People, why the Nation cannot do without our unique talents and gifts. With their deaths, we were once again susceptible to depression and self-rejection, becoming vulnerable to our doubts, fears, resentments and rage at God.

So we are given the Statute of the Red Heifer, the ashes of cow, cedar-wood, hyssop and red wool as a permanent reminder that joy never dies. We are untouched by evil or death, and are filled with divine wisdom, and have been governed since the beginning by nothing and no one, but God.

Now this idea, that we are untouched by evil, folly or anything other than divine guidance and providence can lead to some very strange notions. It could even be read as a blanket license to do whatever we want.

That’s why the Red Heifer is said to clean the soiled while soiling the clean. If you don’t need to be reminded of the fact that death is an illusion, that you are untouched by evil, that your every act is divinely inspired, then forget about it and get on with your life!

But if you are feeling a touch of despair, this knowledge might just restore your faith and save your life.

********

CHAPTER 7. – BALAK

God does not have a Dark Side - and Balaam is it.

‘There is no sorcery in Jacob, no divination in Israel. Now Jacob and Israel will be told what things God has done!’ (Num. 23:23)

The Izbicy explains, sometimes we use force to make a thing happen because we want it so much. Even if we are not the one who should be deciding and decreeing, even when we are not the person empowered to do so, we fixate and obsess until nothing stands between us and the object of our passion. We are ready to do whatever it takes, spend however much energy or treasure, take however much risk, to achieve the goal.

Such is the nature of sorcery: where a certain line is crossed from resolve and purposefulness into the practice of magic and the application of force. Magic applies first to the practitioner, changing them into someone stubborn and undeviating, incapable of being moved or deterred – only afterwards is it applied to achieving the goal. Attempting sorcery when you are weak is very dangerous.

Divination is quite the opposite. Sometimes we desire a certain outcome so much that the power of our desire creates a spreading field, a vortex of longing that sucks other people and things into its flux - yet the diviner does not achieve his ends by the application of force.

Some people refuse to take an ethical or principled stand; they adopt a neutral pose on every issue. They observe unfolding events as nothing more or less than an invitation to make a profit or gain an advantage, and take a side when they are sure who the victors and winners will be. They call this ‘going with flow’. When such people are in doubt about a move they look for omens, signs and portents - some indication that minimizes risk. They plumb the deepest most powerful currents to make sure they know which direction to take, ensuring they are never in opposition to the flow of events. They are very careful not to apply force to shape events or determine outcomes by their own choices.

Even when the choice is clearly between right and wrong, they profess neutrality. ‘It’s the wrong time to insist,’ they declare. ‘This is not the place to fight,’ they rationalize. Though they have sufficient power, knowledge or motive to make a difference, they demur until their own success is assured, and only then make a move. The diviner always looks at the situation before examining himself, and it is the situation which will dictate the action rather than his desire or principle.

Practicing divination when you should be taking action is contemptible.

Both sorcery and divination have their place depending on the situation and the person. As a rule, when Jacob and Israel are juxtaposed in a single verse in Scripture, Jacob refers to the weaker and Israel to the more powerful individual. So the verse quoted above makes sense - Jacob the weak doesn’t practice sorcery, while Israel the powerful does not rely on divination.

Balaam was the most powerful diviner and soothsayer the world has ever seen. He could feel the deepest currents of the cosmos. It is said he could even scry that single switching instant in every twenty-four hour period when God is angry, frustrated and disappointed at His People – the Jews. Balaam’s crafty intention was to insert a swift, sharp curse into that singular moment in order to destroy the Israelites. Balaam was the ultimate opportunist.

We would know nothing of this whole episode if God had not revealed it to Moses as a chapter written into the Torah. The story tells us what Balak, King of Moab thought, how terrified he was of the Jewish People and how much treasure he was prepared to expend to ensure their perdition. So he sent for Balaam to come and curse the Israelites. On the road Balaam’s long-suffering ass miraculously began to speak, and rebuking him for his cruelty. Balak and Balaam sought a vantage point from which they could look out over the Israelite camp to practice their sorcery and divination against us. Ultimately, God swapped the words in Balaam’s mouth, turning every curse into blessing.

The question is this: why does the Torah dedicate an entire Sidra to the story? Why is it so important for us to know what nefarious schemes Balak and Balaam tried to pull off?

If we examine the end of the above verse, in which Balaam praised us for not practicing sorcery and divination, we read: ‘Now Jacob and Israel will be told what things God has done.’ This Sidra isn’t really about Balaam, it’s about God and what He does.

What precisely does God do when He isn’t interacting directly with us?

In trying to answer such a question we are faced not only with our lack of knowledge, but with the difficulty of deciding what the words and the question mean. When we ask what does God do, what do the words ‘God do’ actually signify? Is God an active being, does He do things?

In the Creation story of Genesis, we read how God ‘did’ everything in six days, and that on the seventh day He rested. Did it rain on the seventh day? Did the sun shine and the grass grow? In what way was God resting?

As Jews we have been thinking about this question for thousands of years – literally, thousands of years. We realized long ago that it’s almost impossible to talk about God without sounding ignorant or silly, and that we might spend eternity just arguing about what words and phrases are acceptable to talk about God. But we want so much to share our ideas of God with one another that we have had to agree on certain things just to get the conversation going.

It all boils down to words. We discuss God using words, and our descriptions of God are just words; in fact, the God of our Jewish understanding is nothing but words. Judaism is obsessively careful to think of God as a word, which is an abstract concept and not an object. As a result, we have a word (comprising four Hebrew letters YHV”H) that we think of as God. What this mean. is that over thousands of years Jews have trained themselves to think of God as a word and not an image of a thing.

Gentiles refer to us as the People of the Book, but they are wrong; their thinking is shaped by their common love of images. They think in pictures, so they sum us up with the representation of a thing – a Book. We are, more precisely, the People of the Word. Consult a dictionary and you will find the noun WORD has a most complicated definition.

To Jews, God is a word. It thus stands to reason, that every created thing is also a word. The universe is a word, which explains why it was spoken into being. Even those parts of the world that were not spoken into existence, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,’ (Gen. 1:1, before the verses telling us what God said,) are also God’s speech[17], because God’s acts are God’s speech.

The Sidra of Balak teaches us what God says when not speaking to us; when talking to Himself.

The psalmist says, ‘I will listen for what God the LORD says; for when He speaks it is of peace to His people, His godly ones.’ (Ps. 85:9)

We know what God says when He speaks to us, and it is only to be expected that a prophet hears God saying good things about His People. However, the Izbicy explains how in this psalm, the psalmist describes how he listened to God talking to Himself: he listened and overheard God talking, and it was all about peace for His People.

Just what kind of listening is required to hear God speaking to Himself?

Seeing has an advantage over listening, as a person may see many things happening at once, while it is impossible to pay attention to two voices at the same time. Listening has an advantage over seeing, in that you can hear what is going on deep inside something while you can only see what’s happening on the surface.

In order to hear God talking, you have to be moving and paying attention with your entire body; your arms and legs have to be just as focused on listening as your ears.

Balaam was such an excellent listener he could hear that split second during which God stops speaking good about us[18].

How did Balaam become such a good listener?

Earlier we explained that Balaam was the great master of divination, and we saw how the diviner works by avoiding direct confrontation or proactive risk taking. The great sorcerer in this story it is Balak, the Moabite king hiring Balaam to curse Israel.

‘Balaam said to God, “Balak son of Tzipor, King of Moab, has sent for me.”’ (Num. 22:10) But Balaam was lying. It was he who moved Balak to send for him, by the sheer potency of his longing. Balaam had been waiting all his life for someone to utilize his services to curse the Jews. But Balaam’s waiting was not passive and inactive. Desire as hungry, primal and deep as Balaam’s to hurt us, is not simply a negative emotion. It actually creates ripples which move outward at the speed of Creation, connecting with anything in the universe willing to engage it and to forward its aims. Balaam, rutting in his stable and waiting for someone to engage his divinatory abilities, is just as powerful as Balak, the mighty sorcerer attempting to force his will on nature and bend the whole world to his bidding.

Balaam’s desire is cosmic, drawing Balak into his ambit like the Earth pulls on the Moon. We can observe the Moon and Earth interacting just by looking at the way the tides rise and fall in seas and oceans. What we don’t notice when looking at the tides, is the pull of the Sun, because it’s too strong to be noticeable. The Sun’s gravitational pull goes right through the Earth as though it were not there, while the moon’s pull only affects that side of the Earth it shines upon.

Balak and Balaam interact without realizing they are mere pawns in God’s game. They resemble the Earth and Moon pulling on one another, unconscious of being in an inescapable orbit around the Sun.

In his own small way Balaam mirrors God’s desire for the Jewish People, except Balaam’s desire is to see us cursed, shriveling and diminishing not flourishing and expanding. Balaam’s desire is to gobble up the Jewish People, to absorb all our power and goodness, to empower himself by soaking up all our divine energy, by attracting all the goodness and holiness God is pouring and has been emptying into us since before Creation began.

You see what it is; in order to hear what God says when He’s talking to Himself you have to connect to the Original Thought which arose before God desired the Creation of the World. That original thought was of us, of you and me, of Israel. There God speaks only of peace for His People and for his godly ones. The Hebrew word for ‘godly ones’ is HASIDAV – God’s Hasidim, and the individual who comes to mind when we think of God’s godly ones, is King David.

There is nothing David can do which will interfere with God’s plan that was hatched before Creation, because all God did then was to speak peace to us. And if you learn to listen as carefully as Balaam did in his hatred and David did in his love, you will hear nothing but God speaking good things unto His people.

This entire Sidra comes inform us of God’s love for us which began with the Original Thought, the very one that sparked Creation. We are always there. Balaam is an afterthought, an artifact whose purpose and significance is to demonstrate his own purposelessness and insignificance. Balaam gives us an inkling of the greater picture, of the cosmic forces being worked by the fingers of God, of the blessings God pours into us all the time, for all time.

********

CHAPTER 8. – PINCHAS

Hitting the Reset Button!

Throughout the Book of Numbers we have seen, in one Sidra after another, how all the sins of the Children of Israel were congruent with a divine master-plan; how they had to happen in order to advance God’s purpose, and how easily they can be reinterpreted and seen in a benign light when we are so inclined. In previous Sidras we also looked at the need to balance our own risk-taking with caution, to distinguish among sins of omission and sins of commission, even to acquiesce to outright rebellion in order to be available to God. It might be thought then, that this Sidra dealing with the sin of Zimri and Kozbi (Num. 25) needs to be explained along the same lines, but it is precisely in the opposite direction that the Torah wants us to look.

The Sidra of Pinhas does not come to rationalize Zimri’s public licentiousness as having hidden merit, or the Tribe of Simeon’s idolatrous surrender to Ba’al Peor as being obedience to the will of God. Zimri and the Tribe of Simeon are working through their own destinies, as has been discussed in various places (Num. Naso, Gen. Vayishlach). Everything having to do with the Tribe of Simeon is a mystery. In fact the very first time the Hebrew word SOD - Mystery appears in the Torah, it alludes to Simeon. When Jacob blessed his children before his death, he could not find it in his heart to bless Simeon or Levi. Instead of blessing them, he said:

Simeon and Levi are brothers - their swords are weapons of violence. O my soul, come not into their SOD - Mystery. Let my honor not be included in their assembly. For in their anger they slew a man, in their self-will they eradicated a prince. Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel. I will disperse them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.’ (Gen. 49:5-7)

These verses are explained in the Midrash.

Jacob looked into the future, when he foresaw Zimri, Prince of the Tribe of Simeon, standing up to have sex in public with Kozbi the Midianite woman, Jacob exclaimed: ‘O my soul, come not into their SOD - Mystery!’…

…‘I will disperse them.’ This refers to the death of 24,000 men of the Tribe of Simeon, who died at the orgy of Zimri and Kozbi the Midianite woman. Their widows were dispersed among the other Twelve Tribes. (Gen. Rabba 99:6, 98:5)

The way history is interpreted through the lens of Lurianic Kabbalah, Zimri and Kozbi are Gilgulim - Reincarnations of Shechem and Dinah, whom we encountered earlier (Num. Naso, Gen. Vayishlach), and again in the personalities of the 2^nd century scholar Rabbi Akiba and his spouse, the former wife of the Roman Governor of Palestine, Turnus-Rufus.

The 24,000 students of R. Akiba who died between Passover and Shavuot during the Bar Kochba revolt, are the reincarnations of the 24,000 men of the Tribe of Simeon who died at Baal Peor, mentioned in the Sidra of Pinhas.

In last week’s Sidra we read about Balaam, whose divinatory skills were so powerful and sensitive he could sense, calculate and even take advantage of that briefest split second of God’s angry at us. Balaam’s plan was to curse the Jewish People in that very fleeting moment, but on that day God withheld His anger altogether. For once in the history of the world there was no switching of polarities, no flickering on-off reversal of alternatives; instead there was unrestricted Hesed – Loving over a 48 hour period.

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 48b) says that Cain must have married his sister even though incestuous relationships are forbidden; explaining that this was in order to fulfill to verse, ‘I said, “The world will be built on Hesed – Love…”’ (Ps. 89:3) because the incestuous relationship between a brother and sister is specifically named Hesed in the verse, ‘If a man takes his sister, his father's daughter, or his mother's daughter, and sees her nakedness, and she sees his nakedness; it is a HESED - shameful thing; and they shall be cut off [put to death] in the sight of the children of their people: he has uncovered his sister's nakedness; he shall bear his iniquity.’ (Lev 20:17)

On the day that Balaam came to curse the Israelites, God did not allow the usual momentary Gevurah – Withholding to balance Hesed - Love. It was a period of pure and untrammeled Hesed – Love without any boundaries, limitations or restrictions. Such Hesed is no longer allowed to exist, for while it may have been appropriate at the beginning of the world, in the Garden of Eden, it can no longer be allowed to obtain.

Zimri, prince of the Tribe of Simeon, was so attuned to the universe he immediately felt the absence of Gevurah. Unaware of Balaam and Balak’s machinations, Zimri interpreted the uninterrupted Hesed as the dawn of a new regime. He assumed that old laws and restrictions no longer applied - HESED in the truest sense of the word, unbridled sexuality and uninhibited license now reigned. He knew that the woman Kozbi was his soul-mate, ordained from the Six Days of Creation. He recognized her. All these components combined in his mind bringing him to the conclusion that it was time to take her, in public, while Moses and the elders of Israel stood around crying, incapable of gathering their intellectual and spiritual faculties sufficiently to mount a defense of the status quo ante.

Then appears an unlikely hero: Pinhas, son of Elazar, son of Aaron the High Priest. Standing up and taking a spear in his hand, he kills both Zimri and Kozbi with a single, fatal thrust.

The law states unequivocally that a Cohen - priest who kills someone, even accidentally, must forego his priesthood and is disqualified from ever serving in the Temple. In this case, Pinhas who had for technical reasons hitherto been ineligible as a Cohen, suddenly received God’s blessing of eternal priesthood! Contrary to everything we previously understood about the function of the priesthood, Aaron and his role, Pinhas did not achieve his full potential until he killed Zimri.

At some point we have to ask ourselves, why are we making excuses for our choices and actions? In every sin and mistake that we have discussed so far in the Book of Numbers, there has been some explanation for why it had to happen. Either the individual or group was obeying some divinely inspired instinctive urge, or else they had a sophisticated and compelling intellectual motive to justify their deed.

Zimri has all sorts of reasons for doing what he’s doing. He can rationalize taking a Midianite woman simply by challenging Moses to explain, ‘Who permitted you to marry Ziporah, daughter of Jethro the Midianite?’

Where does it stop? How far can we take theological justification to interpret the Bible stories or our own actions, turning lapses into virtues and gross offenses into niceties?

Well, only until we encounter Pinhas.

The English language does not have a word for someone like Pinhas. The closest common noun is Zealot, a word coined in the 14^th century to describe members of a radical and militant 1st century Jewish sect who fiercely resisted Roman rule and vigorously fought all efforts of the Romans and their supporters to heathenize Jews in Palestine. Pinhas had appeared more than a thousand years earlier, doing what he did for God and thus earning himself God’s eternal gratitude.

In the Second Commandment (Ex. 20:5) God refers to Himself as EL KANA, translated across the board as a ‘Jealous God’. Here in the Sidra God uses the word KANA four times in describing Pinhas’ act of killing. Most translations read thus: ‘Pinhas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy.’

Neither jealousy nor zeal adequately describes Pinhas’ particular mirroring of God. Neither word conveys the true meaning of KANA. But if we cannot understand the original description, when God referred to Himself as EL KANA, how can hope to understand Pinhas’ version of it?

Pinhas did not have an emotional reaction to Zimri and Kozbi, or even a visceral reaction; he had what someone cleverly named an ‘amygdalic reaction’. The amgydala is what generates the 'fight or flight' response in us. Such reactions are usually intensely and massively emotional, and they happen so fast that it takes the rational mind some time to catch up and process what the next appropriate and mindful step should be. When people saw Pinhas in action they were convinced that he was acting from deeply angry or vengeful place in himself, and after the incident they accused him of having acted out of rage or even lust.

God in His speech to Moses is very clear that neither rage nor lust triggered Pinhas’ response; whatever EL KANA is, that’s what Pinhas had inside himself, and that was what he was channeling.

The text does not give us many clues to Pinhas’ state of mind, but according to the Izbicy rebbe the following verse applies here, ‘When Israel was a child, I loved him…’ (Hos 11:1). Pinhas in this story is totally childlike, devoid of subtlety or sophistication.

So much is happening behind the scenes that even Moses is disinclined to enter the fray. Zimri has marshaled all the legal arguments in his favor, and furthermore, those with eyes to see are well aware that Kozbi has been Zimri’s soul-mate since the Six Days of Creation. This is the unfolding of the Tribe of Simeon’s destiny working itself out going back to the time he rescued his sister Dinah in Shechem. Those with the vision to see across time and space, sense that the soul of the greatest of the intellectual giants – that of Rabbi Akiba is struggling with the ‘Halacha’ that will shape our attitudes and definitions concerning the issue of public sexuality and future acceptable norms of Jewish behavior. Pinhas knows nothing of this ‘big-picture’ stuff because none of the background to the drama is revealed to him. He is naïve.

The Holy Yid, (Yaakov Yitzchak Rabinowicz, Przysucha, Poland, 1766–1813) explained how he remained baffled by Jewish attitudes to sex, ‘It is so holy, such a sacred act, I don’t understand why we don’t do it in the synagogue where we don our Tefillin, shake Lulav or dance with the Torah?’

To us the answer to that question is obvious. Once in every five hundred years or so, there appear among us couples as pure and childlike as the Holy Yid and his wife, people who truly cannot understand the hang-ups that we adults have around sex because they have no concupiscence or prurience in them. Such were Zimri and Kozbi. They are the exceptions.

In the end it comes down to this: as we have previously discussed in every twenty-four hour period there is a reset, an on-off HESED/GEVURAH switch. It has to be so, or else Hesed - Love, which has no boundaries, would spill over to engulf the world in chaos and confusion. Without Gevurah - Withholding there can be no law, no boundaries and no joy. On that fateful day God did not reset the universe with a momentary flash of Gevurah so as not to give Balaam the opportunity to curse us, which led to Zimri’s assumptions and action.

As a consequence of Zimri’s act, the entire universe tipped dangerously out of balance, teetering on edge, until Pinhas came along and singlehandedly flipped the reset switch. His was an act of cosmic Gevurah - Judgment done without the slightest hint of ‘Judgment’ in the sense of forming an opinion and coming to a conclusion. Pinhas exercised no faculties, made no critical distinctions and reached no verdict or pronouncement. He simply acted like a circuit breaker sensing a dangerous condition and switching everything off and on again, so restoring the world’s equilibrium.

In last week’s Sidra we read how Balaam praised the Jews, saying, ‘There is no sorcery in Jacob, no divination in Israel.’ It was explained to mean that both sorcery and divination have their place depending on the situation and person. In this story, both Zimri and Pinhas sense a paradigm shift in the cosmic balance of Hesed and Gevurah, but while Zimri takes advantage of it the way a diviner might do, riding on the crest of the wave, Pinhas steps into the breach to counter its effects, the way a sorcerer must do, by force of will and act of Love.

********

CHAPTER 9. – MATOS

The Death of Illusion

‘God spoke to Moses, saying, “Wreak vengeance for the Children of Israel against the Midianites, after which you will be gathered to your people.”’ (Num. 31:1-2)

The Izbicy explains that the death of Moses naturally follows the obliteration of the Midianites, because they are extreme and polar opposites. With the Midianites gone, the need for Moses is also gone.

As has been discussed earlier, Moses is the Chokhma - Wisdom inside very Jew, wisdom we cannot do without as long as the nation of Midian exists (see Ex. Tetzave). The four Hebrew letters of the word MIDIAN can be rearranged to spell DIMIAN – Illusion. If we were not under continuous attack by the illusion-spinning and narrative-twisting spider of Midian, we wouldn’t need to live in gloomy Chokhma – Wisdom consciousness all the time.

How does Illusion differ from Delusion?

Illusion becomes possible when my perception is somehow misled. I watch a conjurer on the stage, and I think perhaps he has found a way to defy gravity because the trick he performs looks that way. But then I remind myself that I am watching a show, it is a program of entertainment, and so I walk away shaking my head and wondering how the illusion was achieved. If I learn how the trick is done, the spell of illusion is broken completely.

Delusion is when I walk away convinced that what I watched was not an illusion, I ignore the fact that the magician was performing stage tricks, I rationalize my belief saying that he must have found a way to negate the laws of gravity. Even if someone shows me how the trick was performed, I persist in my belief – that is delusion.

The line between illusion and delusion is blurred when Midian grows ascendant. This is what plays out in the story outlined in this week’s Sidra.

Moses spoke to the people, saying, ‘Arm some of your men to go to war against Midian so that God’s vengeance can be carried to them. Send into battle a thousand men from each of the tribes of Israel.’

So twelve thousand men armed for battle, a thousand from each tribe, were selected from the clans of Israel. Moses sent them into battle, a thousand from each tribe, along with Pinhas son of Elazar, the priest, who took with him articles from the sanctuary and the trumpets for signaling.

They fought against Midian, as God had commanded Moses, and killed every man. Among their victims were the five kings of Midian: Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur and Reba. They also killed Balaam son of Beor by the sword.

The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Elazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho.

Moses, Elazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. Moses was angry with the officers of the army - the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds - who returned from the battle.

‘Why have you kept all the women alive?’ Moses demanded. ‘These were the very ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to God in the Peor incident, thus bringing a plague on God’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but keep alive for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. (Ibid. 3-18)

Here Moses showed Pinhas what he had been fighting when he had struck Zimri down (see Num. Pinhas). Moses explained to Pinhas that he had fallen into the same mistake as Zimri and the rest of the Tribe of Simeon. Zimri and the Simeonites had all seen something special and holy in the Midianite women (see Num. Pinhas). Zimri saw in Kozbi what Moses had seen in Tziporah, who was also a Midianite woman. Kozbi had been a reincarnation of Jacob’s daughter Dinah, and Zimri had been an incarnation of Shechem, so they were destined for each other as soul-mates. But Pinhas had seen through the illusion surrounding the coupling pair, to perceive the will of God: that this is not what God wants us to be doing in this world, because this is neither the time nor place for such conduct.

When Pinhas actually came face to face with Midianite women, he sensed immediately that they are connected to us on some profound level. The reason he rescued them from death was that he was sure their holiness, grace and allure was convertible, so to speak, adaptable to ours and to us. The only difference between Zimri and Pinhas was that Pinhas had not yet acted out on his convictions.

Even Jacob had looked on Shechem with favor (see Sidra Vayishlach), because he could see the reincarnated souls entangled and enmeshed with each other, with the spark of R. Akiba shining the brightest of all.

When it comes to matters of sexuality, a couple may be perfect for one another, ideally matched and suited. They may be desperately in love in the most romantic way, and yet the union is not right. It may be forbidden, unsanctioned and opposed, or not, as the case may be, but if it is not the will of God it will not go forward. Nothing good will come of attempts to make it happen. And this is true of all relationships. Sexuality puts the issue into high relief because it means relating to another person intimately, but all our relationships, in the sense of our connections, associations, and involvements are fraught.

It takes a certain ruthless Chokhma – Wisdom in us to see beyond the glamour, attraction and allure of our illusion/delusion patterns. We spend huge amounts of time and energy keeping ourselves in the almost permanent Moses-consciousness necessary to combat Midian-unconsciousness. It is spiritually exhausting. We are not free to be simply absorbed in appreciation of the will of God; instead we must constantly fight our own perceptions that obscure the will of God.

It would be much healthier and more pleasant if we did not have to be on guard, watching ourselves so closely all the time; if we could just enjoy ourselves effortlessly in rapport with our surroundings, grooving to the will of God.

Moses’ anger and frustration at Pinhas led him into error, as anger is wont to do. He was so absorbed in shouting at Pinhas and the returning warriors, instructing them in the proper conduct of after-battle purification rituals, that Moses completely forgot to teach the laws of Kashering Vessels, as we read in the text.

‘Anyone who has killed someone or touched a corpse must stay outside the camp seven days. On the third and seventh days you must purify yourselves and your captives [with the ashes of the Red Heifer]. In this way, purify every garment as well as everything made of leather, goat or wood.’

Then Elazar the priest said to the soldiers who came to battle, ‘This is what is required by the law that God gave Moses: gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin, lead and anything else that can withstand fire must be purged through fire. But it must also be purified with the water of cleansing [ashes of the Red Heifer]. And whatever cannot withstand fire must be put through water. On the seventh day immerse your clothes and yourselves in the mikveh. Then you may come into the camp.’

We are told that Elazar addressed his lesson to the ‘soldiers who came to battle’, yet wouldn’t it have been more grammatically correct for the verse to state, ‘to the soldiers who came from battle’?

Pinhas is often referred to in rabbinic literature as a ‘Propitiator, son of a Propitiator[19].’ (Lev. Rabba 33:4) Now it’s easy to see how Pinhas might be seen as a propitiator, since God said, ‘Pinhas the son of Elazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back My wrath from the people of Israel’ (Num. 25:11). But it’s not that easy to find a circumstance that would warrant his father, Elazar, being referred to by the same complimentary title.

The Izbicy says that it is here at this incident, that Elazar earned the title of Propitiator. The text stated: ‘Then Elazar the priest said to the soldiers who came to battle,’ because the warriors were offended by Moses’ words of chastisement, they were about to confront Moses for shouting at them, to justify themselves to him, explaining their innocent mistake. Elazar quickly headed them off, telling them that any argument with Moses at this point would bring down untold calamity on all of us. For up until this point Moses had been a living, growing person just like anyone else, capable of change and adjustment, but now that the war with Midian was over, Moses’ life was also over. The slightest insult or provocation to Moses would be disastrous because Moses was no longer able to process.

Elazar began to teach the laws of Kashering Vessels. The first law he taught is that a rusty metal implement cannot be made Kosher until all the rust has been scraped off right down to the bare metal. The second law he taught, is that metal is not impermeable or impervious to contamination. It absorbs whatever materials are used with it. So, if metal has been used to cook non-kosher foodstuff, it is permeated with those foods, and such a vessel has to be purged by heating in fire or through boiling in water to remove the accretion of ISSUR – Prohibition.

As soon as Elazar began teaching these laws, the warriors realized that though they might have been innocent of the charges Moses had rebuked them with when he compared them to Zimri and the Simeonites, yet there was some implication of truth, for while they may not have acted sinfully, they were not innocent in their thoughts. The Laws of Kashering Vessels requires removing rust and purging the accreted non-kosher matter. Rust and accretion are metaphors hinting at lust and rage.

Lust coats us with an ugly, coarse layer preventing us from experiencing the world at first hand; instead we perceive the world through a coarse shell of burnt and oxidized material. Lust both encrusts us so that others cannot see us properly, and prevents us from appreciating things naturally, through our senses.

Rage fills and blocks our pores, making us other than we want to be. Whatever we touch and do is contaminated by deep and violent feelings. Anger, fury, frenzy and wrath change the composition of our blood in profound ways. Hidden anger causes depression and neurosis, outward symptoms of deep malaise. When we are angry we act without awareness.

As the text describes:

And the generals of the army, the captains of thousands, and the captains of hundreds, approached Moses. They said to Moses, ‘We have taken a census of the warriors under our command, and not one of us is missing. We want to bring an offering to God. Every man who found any gold, ankle-chains, bracelets, signet-rings, ear-rings, or body ornament, wants to make atonement for our souls before God.’ (Ibid. 48-50)

The Talmud amplifies the subtext.

And the generals of the army …approached Moses, saying, ‘We want to bring an offering to God, … to make atonement for our souls before God.’ R. Eleazar said: ‘The AGIL were not ear-rings, they were brassieres cast in the shape of female breasts; the KUMAZ were not simply body-ornaments, they were cast in the shape of a vagina.’

Moses was angry with the officers of the army - the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds - who returned from the battle. R. Nahman said in Rabbah b. Abbuha's name: ‘Moses said to Israel: “Is it perhaps that you have returned to your original sin, [of Zimri]?”

“We have taken a census of the warriors under our command, and not one of us is missing. Had we sinned, God would not have done this miracle for us,” they replied.

“If so,” Moses queried, “why are you bringing an atonement offering?”

“Though we escaped sin,’ said they, “we did not escape thinking about sin.” (Shabbat 64a)

*********

CHAPTER 10. – MASEY

The Final Chapter

The closing of the Book of Numbers may also be considered as the closing of the Torah, as the final book is a restatement of previous content. In rabbinic literature the fifth book is known as Mishneh Torah – The Repeated Torah (hence the Greek word, Deuteronomy).

Reading the final paragraphs of this final document we expect something immediately relevant. Instead we find closure of an unfortunate incident concerning the man who singlehandedly prevented the coming of the Messiah.

The daughters of Zelophehad did as God commanded Moses. Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Noah all married cousins on their father’s side. They married into the clans of Manasseh son of Joseph. Thus, their inheritance of land remained within their ancestral tribe.

These are the commands and regulations that God gave the people of Israel through Moses while they were camped on the plains of Moab beside the Jordan River across from Jericho. (Num. 36:10:13)

Zelophehad desecrated the second Shabbat after the Exodus. The first Shabbat was meticulously celebrated and observed by the entire Jewish nation. When you consider that we had never known the laws of Shabbat, and had not previously practiced it, and yet the Torah attests to the fact that no one breached any of its laws, it must surely have been by some miracle of Divine Providence. ‘And the people kept the Sabbath on the seventh day.’ (Ex. 16:30) If the Torah says so then it was so.

And had we only been able to maintain the practice one more Shabbat, the Messiah would have come, as the Talmud states, ‘If only they kept two Sabbaths properly Israel would be redeemed immediately.’ (Shabbat 114b)

What happened was that a man named Zelophehad willfully desecrated the Sabbath as is described in the Torah:

One day while the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they discovered a man gathering wood on the Sabbath day. The people who found him doing this took him before Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the community. They held him in custody because they did not know what to do with him. Then God said to Moses, “The man must be put to death! The whole community must stone him outside the camp.” So the whole community took the man outside the camp and stoned him to death, just as God had commanded Moses. (Num. 15:32-36)

Later, his daughters came to claim their father’s inheritance in the Land of Canaan, as described in the text:

One day a petition was presented by the daughters of Zelophehad - Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. Their father, Zelophehad, was a descendant of Hepher son of Gilead, son of Makir, son of Manasseh, son of Joseph. These women stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the tribal leaders, and the entire community at the entrance of the Tabernacle. ‘Our father died in the wilderness,’ they said. ‘He was not among Korah’s followers, who rebelled against God; he died because of his own sin. But he had no sons. Why should the name of our father disappear from his tribe just because he had no sons? Give us property along with the rest of our relatives.’

So Moses brought their case before God. And God replied to Moses, ‘The claim of the daughters of Zelophehad is legitimate. You must give them a grant of land along with their father’s relatives. Assign them the property that would have been given to their father.’ (Ibid 27:1-7)

The Midrash explains the background to this affair. When the Daughters of Zelophehad approached their local chieftains submitting a petition to be granted land their father would have inherited, the chieftains were in a quandary and did not know how to rule. The chieftains of tens referred it up the line to the chieftains of hundreds, who also refused to rule. They took it up with the chieftains of thousands who brought it before Moses. (Num. Rabbah 21:13)

The Izbicy rebbe explains why they were unable or unwilling to rule on the question. They were afraid to rule on the petition for fear of offending Moses. Zelophehad may have had personal reasons for doing what he did, but it was not only a sin against God and the Torah, it was a direct insult to Moses. Zelophehad was punished for publically desecrating the Sabbath, now Moses and the Sabbath are connected, so doing damage to one of them hurts the other. According to tradition, Sabbath was a gift we received in the merit of Moses. In the light of what we have learned so far concerning Moses in each of us, that the Chokhma – Wisdom inside every Jew is a portion of Moses that has extended and proliferated to reach everyone, then the damage Zelophehad did was done to all of us.

Had Zelophehad not done damage to the Sabbath the way he did, our observing that second Sabbath would have opened it up for us to look at it in new ways; we would have been able to see the connection between the Sabbath and Moses in us. That is the meaning of the redemption mentioned in the Talmud quoted above: ‘If only they kept two Sabbaths properly Israel would be redeemed immediately.’ The secret of Shabbat is that it is beyond time as we currently know and experience it. Shabbat is part of the ‘World to Come’, and to really know Shabbat is to be in a state of perfection and contentment.

This world is nothing like the world to come. In the world to come there is no eating, drinking, procreation or commerce; there is neither jealousy nor hatred and resentment. Instead the righteous sit with crowns on their heads enjoying Ziv HaShechina - Divine Radiance. As it is written, ‘They looked at God and ate and drank.’ (Talmud Shabbat 17a)

What does it mean to enjoy Divine Radiance?

The greatest bliss and pleasure it is possible to experience is to be able to listen to God studying the Torah. To know what chapter or subject or verse God is learning at any given moment is to enjoy Ziv HaShechina – Divine Radiance. Why this is so, and what this metaphor means has been explained at some length in Sidra Balak. It has to do with the simple fact that our entire understating of God and who God is boils down to words. God is a Word and so is all Creation. We are words – God’s words. To be tuned in, so to speak, to the words God is speaking in the moment is to become one with God.

Now to see how this is connected to the Sabbath we have to connect to the Moses inside ourselves.

In the liturgy of our daily prayers, the silent Amidah meditation has a distinct form. It begins and ends with three standard blessings that do not change regardless of the occasion, time or event. The morning, afternoon and evening rituals are identical in respect of those three blessings, whether during the weekdays, Sabbaths, Festivals or High Holidays.

After those first three blessings are stated, the Amidah continues with a series of meditations which may differ, depending on the occasion. Weekdays follow one format; their fourth blessing begins, ‘You grace man with knowledge.’

The New Moon liturgy begins, ‘You formed Your world.’

Festival and High Holiday liturgy begins, ‘You chose us from among all nations.’

Friday night begins, ‘You sanctified the seventh day.’

Saturday afternoon begins, ‘You are One.’

Every fourth blessing opens with an address to God. We say ‘You’ to God and talk about His works or His love for us.

It is the liturgy of Sabbath morning which is the anomaly. On Sabbath morning the fourth blessing begins:

‘Moses rejoices with the gift of his portion,

You called him Your trusted servant.

You crowned his head with total glory

when he stood before You on Mount Sinai.

He brought the two Tablets of Stone down with him,

on which the observance of Shabbat is inscribed

and so it is written in Your Torah.’

It isn’t about God, really; it’s a paean in praise of Moses, and thus completely at odds with the spirit of the Amidah service, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

The poem brings together a number of important elements, but let us begin with the end first. Moses brought down two tablets on which the observance of Shabbat is inscribed. The inscription quoted in the liturgy comes from the Book of Exodus (31:16-17):

The Children of Israel will observe the Sabbath, celebrating it for the generations to come as a lasting covenant. It will be a sign between me and the Israelites forever, for in six days God made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed.

The very next verses describe the sin of the Golden Calf:

When God finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God. When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ (Ibid. 18, 32:1)

When God was inscribing the verses of the Sabbath into the Tablets of Stone we were demanding of Aaron that he make us an idol; ‘gods who will walk before us’. When we understand the profound connection between these two events we begin to comprehend what it means to enjoy Ziv HaShechina – Divine Radiance. To be listening to God learning Torah, to know which verse, chapter or Sugya – Subject He is discussing is to be there, living in moment, right in that verse or chapter or Sugya. When we experienced the moment of God learning Shabbat with Moses, we were there in the Great Shabbat in the World to Come where there are no restrictions because there are no necessities. In a universe of Shabbat where there is no eating and drinking because we are looking at God, there are no laws of Shabbat against cooking or making fire. In a universe of Divine Radiance where at every moment God writes and carves Himself into our hearts, into every individual separately, over and over again - there is no need for Moses to go up a mountain and bring down a Torah for us as a group - everyone already has their own Torah.

In the poem Moses is referred to as God’s trusted servant because God trusted him to smash the Tablets of Stone when that was what the moment called for. Because Moses knows what we can only hope to know. Moses always knows exactly what God is learning at any given moment, that’s why the poem begins, ‘Moses rejoices with the gift,’ because Moses knows that neither Zelophehad with his desecration of that second crucial Shabbat, nor the Jews with their worship of the Golden Calf and his smashing the Tablets of Stone, have seriously ruined or even slightly damaged anything.

When the Daughters of Zelophehad petitioned their chieftains, who brought the petition to Moses, who brought it to God, the real question was: how much damage has our father done to the Sabbath which is Moses’ portion?

Think of how many Jews and gentiles, over thousands of years, would have celebrated and honored the Sabbath had they only know how precious it is? Millions perhaps billions of men women and children would have been ‘turned-on’ to the Sabbath if only Zelophehad had not ruined everything.

Moses didn’t even know if he was allowed to forgive the offence until God told him not to worry. It would all be fixed without even a scar to show where the wound had been. Zelophehad did not lose his portion in the Promised Land, and his daughters could inherit him.

Now we come to the final chapter in this last book of the Torah:

The family heads of the clan of Gilead son of Makir, the son of Manasseh, who were from the clans of the descendants of Joseph, came and spoke before Moses and the leaders, the heads of the Israelite families. They said, ‘When God commanded my lord to give the land as an inheritance to the Israelites by lot, He ordered you to give the inheritance of our brother Zelophehad to his daughters. Now suppose they marry men from other Israelite tribes; then their inheritance will be taken from our ancestral inheritance and added to that of the tribe they marry into. And so part of the inheritance allotted to us will be taken away.’ (Num. 36:1-3)

Now you might think that the Tribe of Menasseh was being petty in bringing the matter of Zelophehad’s inheritance to Moses, speculating about what might happen if Zelophehad’s daughters married men from other tribes. What difference does it make whose name is on the original title to a couple of fields and vineyards? Why get so hung up about it?

But as we have seen, Zelophehad was intimately connected to Shabbat and the World to Come, where there are no restrictions. His portion of the Promised Land is also connected to that very same Shabbat, because the Land of Israel is a mirror of the World to Come. In the World to Come there are no sloppy boundaries, no laissez-faire approach to matters, no come-as-you-please, do-what-you-feel-like attitude. Everything is measured down to the nth degree, and people will get burned just from approaching someone else’s boundaries too closely.

The family of Menasseh knew precisely the importance attached to property in the Holy Land.

And so the Book of Numbers ends with the story of a law applicable only to that one generation of Jews who entered and took possession of the land, and to one group of five women: Zelophehad’s daughters. To remind us, says the Izbicy, that it’s not enough to take the Torah as it is given to all of Israel; you have to take it as it was given to you alone. Every word, story and ordinance has its own particular relevance to you. The Torah applies to everyone, to all of us as a group, we are all equally obliged to it. But it is not enough to receive the communal Torah. Each of the five Daughters of Zelophehad has her own Torah, and so do you.

*********

© 2014 All Rights Reserved to the Author j.h.worch@att.net

*****

In Memoriam

my holy son-in-law

Joel Brach

of blessed memory

Sivan 5774

ת.נ.צ.ב.ה.

---

[1] שיטה מקובצת מסכת ברכות דף כא: אפילו מאן דלא דריש סמוכין בכל התורה כולה במשנה תורה דריש. טעמא משום דמשנה תורה דברי משה הן. ואף על פי שכולן נאמרו מפי הגבורה מכל מקום כיון שכבר נאמרו תחלה בסדור אחר ועכשיו חוזר ואומר בסדור אחר ודאי כשסומך הדברים זה לזה לדרשא נסמכו כיון שאינם סדורין בסידור ראשון:

[2] מדרש הנעלם פרשת לך לך מאמר ב' וישמע אברם כי נשבה אחיו: דא"ר יצחק, המלמד תורה לתינוקות, דירתו עם השכינה. והיינו דא"ר שמעון, כד הוה אתי למחמי עולימייא בבי רב, הוה אמר, אזלנא למחמי אפי שכינתא.

[3] תלמוד בבלי מסכת בבא מציעא דף נט: אמר להם אם הלכה כמותי מן השמים יוכיחו יצאתה בת קול ואמרה מה לכם אצל רבי אליעזר שהלכה כמותו בכל מקום עמד רבי יהושע על רגליו ואמר לא בשמים היא. מאי לא בשמים היא אמר רבי ירמיה שכבר נתנה תורה מהר סיני אין אנו משגיחין בבת קול שכבר כתבת בהר סיני בתורה אחרי רבים להטות.

[4] Mei Hashiloach - Naso [2]

[5] בראשית רבה פ' י"א: א"ר הונא אמרה ואני אנה הוליך את חרפתי עד שנשבע לה שמעון שהוא נוטלה

[6] Mei Hashiloach Vol. I BeHa’alotcha

[7] Mishna Avot 2:12

[8] Zohar Vol. III 232a

[9] Onkelos, Genesis 2:7

[10] The Klausenberger Rebbe (1905-1994) had this to say, ‘My father (R. Tzvi Hirsh Halberstam of Rudnik 1851-1918) narrated the following which was told to him by my grandfather, (R. Yekusiel Yehuda Teitelbaum of Sighet 1808–1883), the Yetev Lev, who heard it from the mouth of his holy grandfather, R. Moshe Teitelbaum of Ujhely (1759–1841), the Yismach Moshe.

"In a previous Gilgul - incarnation," the Yismach Moshe explained. "I was a part of that generation which experienced the Exodus from Egypt. I still recall the time I spent in Egypt and the face of my tormentor, the overseer who ordered my tasks. If I saw him today I would still be able to pick him out from among a hundred gentiles. I remember exactly what my house in Egypt looked like and can recall every detail of the furniture, where each and every pot and pan had its place."

"That means you still remember standing at Sinai, witnessing the Revelation," said his grandson, the Yetev Lev.

"Naturally," he answered. "Of course I remember receiving the Torah at Sinai, as though it happened yesterday."

"Do you remember the dispute with Korah?"

"Yes."

"What was really going on during that dispute, what was the general consensus?"

"There were three groups. First was the group backing Moses, 'Moses is true and his Torah is true,' they said. The second group backed Korah, while the third group stood on the side, not mixing into the dispute."

"Which group did you belong to?" asked his grandson.

"I didn't get involved in the dispute," answered the older man.

The Yetev Lev was astonished, asking, "How could you let such a thing happen. You heard them saying terrible things about Moses our Teacher and you just stood by, saying nothing?"

The Yismach Moshe replied, "You're still too young for me to be able to explain it so you can understand."’

*********

The Seer of Lublin (c. 1745 – 1815) used to refer to him as ‘my holy ancestor, Korah’.

[11]Loosely translated it reads, ‘…Cain had to be the firstborn of [of Adam and Eve] due to the mystery hidden in the verse, ‘A woman of valor is her husband’s crown’ (Prov. 12:4). GEVURAH-Withholding is feminine (i.e. Cain), while HESED-Giving is masculine (i.e. Abel). Now, in the future-to-come all the offspring of Cain will be Cohen – Priests while the offspring of Abel who are currently the Cohens will become the Levites, because everything which is currently Levitical emanating from the GEVURAH-Withholding side, such as Korah the Levi, will be taken by the offspring of Cain. They will have the Cohen-Priesthood since it really belongs to the firstborns…’ (Shaar HaGilgulim - Hakdama 35)

[12] As though the Zohar were suggesting that God’s handwriting displays different and contradictory personality traits depending on which hand God is writing with. If, as tradition has it, the Written Torah is God writing Himself, then two-handed writing must reveal two selves. A very subtle way of saying there are various possibilities for the expression of divine will, and not all of them are compatible with each other. In humans the difference between hands becomes very obvious in the handwriting, as each hand is controlled by a different side of the split human brain, wherein each struggles for dominance. In God there is no brain, no split and no opposite sides. But by introducing the idea that God has left-hand writing and right-hand writing the Zohar is making space to introduce an arena of conflict and the need for a dominant paradigm within the Sephirotic Tree of Life. Thus the Second Day of Creation provides the first intimation of the possibilities of balance and imbalance in the Divine Narrative.

[13] The Tribe of Levi always guards itself against overstepping the boundaries of Torah law. The truth is that all laws of the Torah are clothed in garments so that everyone can grasp and observe and obey them. But there are times when God wants to vanquish the person, as is written, ‘So that Your words may be seen to be right, and You may be clear when You are judging.’ (Ps. 51:6) The Tribe of Levi, however, must not worship the Golden Calf, for them to do so will mean doing damage to the very source of their Life-Force, damage they will never be able to repair. The sin of the Golden Calf sprang from the desire to grasp the Light of God before the time was right. (Mei Hashiloach Vol. II Ki Tavo)

[14] We read in the Midrash, ‘Korah was such a brilliant man, what possessed him to do such a stupid thing? He was deceived by his own vision, seeing, prophetically, that a chain of greatness would be coming out of him, (4,000 Levite musicians of the First Temple era led by the Sons of Korah).’ (Num. Rabba 18:8)

[15] Mei Hashiloach Vol. I Emor

[16] Gittin 43a

[17] Talmud, Rosh Hashana 32a

[18] According to the Talmud the precise value is 1/141.357 of a second, or 1/508888 of an hour (Berachoth 7a)

[19] Lit. He who turns back anger, son of he who turns back anger.