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Found on the way to looking up something else, an interesting sermon: what God made us good at. Food for thought.

A common answer is that God doesn't need the mishkan; the people do. This is a people living in a world of physical gods and their accoutrements, and they need something physical with which to interact with God. We are not so different today; we still build grandiose places of worship that we think worthy of a transcendant God. Perhaps we need that (though plenty of basement and camp minyanim testify otherwise), or perhaps we think that we owe God our best when it comes to physical spaces.

I think there are two reasons that the torah specifies the mishkan in such detail. First, it takes the decision away from the people: instead of arguing endlessly over the design, or fretting that they aren't doing enough, the people are told "build this exactly". Would that our own building committees had such clear direction. :-)

The other reason, I think, is to limit the scope of the effort. Left to our own devices, many of us will keep tinkering with something in pursuit of perfection, which never comes. If we'll do it for our work, our crafts, and our hobbies, how much moreso would we do it for God? And if we, with the benefit of 3300 years of history since Sinai, will do it with God, how much moreso would the founders of the religion fret over the details?

The danger of this is that it is too easy to end up so focused on the task at hand that you miss the larger picture. Judaism isn't about the physical space, then or now -- it's about relating to God and each other. Without the limits of a closed design, would the people have been able to move on from planning and building to actually worshipping and serving God -- the purpose for which the mishkan was built? When we get wrapped up in the details of our worship spaces, or any of the other issues that go into bringing a community together to serve God, do we risk missing the larger point?

My regular Shabbat minyan meets in a basement. People dress casually, and there are no elevated places in the room, or microphones, or other barriers between the leaders and the other congregants. I appreciate the beauty of our sanctuary and our chapel, but it is on Shabbat mornings in the basement that I most feel a part of a community that reaches out to God.

While the talmud specifies that capital cases must follow a specific judicial process, the torah itself (in this passage) seems to say that the victim's next of kin (the "go'el", which means "redeemer" -- he redeems the blood-debt) "shall" carry out the death sentence wherever he meets the intentional killer, even in a city of refuge. This raises all sorts of questions that I hope we'll return to at next week's torah study.

First, I assume the rabbis reinterpreted this away from the plain meaning of the text, as they did with the rebellious son. I wonder what process they followed -- other text citations that seem to contradict this, perhaps?

Second, one has to wonder about security in the cities of refuge if people who flee there aren't actually safe. It appears that accidental killers are safe there and intentional killers aren't, but when the kinsman shows up at the gate, who validates his claim that he's after an intentional killer if there's no trial?

Third, I can't help but wonder about that "shall". Biblical Hebrew, according to the book I'm learning from, does not distinguish among the various senses of future tense -- "he will X", "he might X", even "he is Xing" (present tense) are all constructed the same way, and you figure it out from context. (Does Biblical Hebrew really lack the subtle shades of meaning we're used to in English? That seems over-simplistic.) Is the text using "shall" to mean "the go'el is to do this", or is it more predictive ("the go'el is going to do this")? Every translation is a commentary; I need to look at the Hebrew in context here, though I suspect I'm not sufficiently fluent and I'll have to ask my rabbi for help.

The accidental killer stays in the city of refuge until the (then-current) high priest dies -- sort of like a statute of limitations, but less predictable. I had wondered about this -- why does this make sense? Someone this morning pointed out an interesting interpretation (I think Rabbi Gunther Plaut's, but I might be wrong). The torah tells us elsewhere (Mishpatim and Noach at least, off the top of my head) that life must be paid with life, but in the case of an accidental killing you don't want to punish the person who did it -- so instead the high priest's death can "cover" these people too. I'm not sure I buy that -- it opens the door to expiation by proxy in a dangerous way -- but it's an interesting idea. And (I add) in a way the high priest is the people's representative before God; he's ultimately accountable for the sacrificial system that maintains the people's relationship with God. Another commentary likened it to the amnesty period that sometimes comes with a change of king, which sits a little easier but isn't wholly satisfying either.

The Levites, who don't get land, are given cities (from the other tribes' allotments), including these cities of refuge. We usually think of the Levites as being responsible for the people's relationship with God, but in the case of the cities of refuge they're responsible, in part, for people's relationships with each other too.

There are some big questions here. After finally giving Avraham and Sarah the son they'd longed for, how could God want Avraham to ritually sacrifice him? And how could Avraham quietly go along with this? What kind of a test is this, anyway?

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1) What's the least-interesting section of the Torah to you, the one that would be most improved if you read it in the original Klingon. ( Read more... )

2) Nature or nurture? ( Read more... )

3) Have you ever worn SCA garb as your street clothes (i.e, not on the way too/from an event, just because you felt like it). ( Read more... )

4) You have been granted a wish to meet one of the great Jewish sages (and commensurate ability to understand and be understood). Who do you meet and why? ( Read more... )

5) Some say the world will end in fire, others say in ice. Which do you choose? ( Read more... )

Later, in the talmud, the rabbis will interpret capital punishment in such a way that it's nearly impossible to actually execute someone. (Rabbi Akiva said that a court that executes one person in 70 years is a bloodthirsty court.) Tractate Sanhedrin gives the following conditions that must apply before a capital case can proceed: there must be two eye-witnesses (circumstantial evidence doesn't count); they must warn the person that he is about to commit a capital offense; he must acknowledge this and state he intends to do it anyway; they must see him do it very soon thereafter. (There are other requirements about the composition of the court, the questioning of witnesses, and the implementation of the sentence, too.)

If I understand the process correctly, the rabbinic and midrashic process is such that because this is the law and this person was actually executed, then all of that must have happened even though the torah doesn't tell us about it. (That's ok; there's lots of stuff the written torah doesn't tell us directly.) So if that's the case, and if this isn't just a parable inserted into the torah, then how could there be any question? Why did the men not know how to proceed, and why did Moshe have to turn to God for a judgement?

That wasn't actually my question on reading this. The question back-formed when I noticed a detail.

A small thing in the Hebrew caught my eye. Where it says that the people who found the man brought him to Moshe and Aharon, the verb is "karov" (or maybe slightly different vowels, but that's the word). This word means "bring" as used here, but it also means "draw near". There is a movement in Orthodox Judaism today called "kiruv", which is all about bringing non-observant Jews closer to Judaism. This is what the Lubavichers are doing when they approach people on the street during Sukkot and ask if they've shaken the lulav today, or when they hand out Chanukah kits in December, and so on. But the real work of the kiruv movement, as I understand it, runs deeper: invite people to spend a Shabbat (or several) with you and they may see the beauty of Shabbat and work harder to achieve it themselves next time. Or something like that.

So in modern Hebrew, at least, there is a sense of "outreach" in this word, of helping the person become closer to God in the only ways available to us now that we don't have the temple. Remember the temple offerings? The word for that is "korban". Same word, and that's biblical Hebrew. So I think this is a legitimate connection in the text.

I had always read this story with the witnesses as accusers or police or something of that sort. But maybe that's not it at all. Per rabbinic process they already knew the rules, but maybe their appeal to Moshe and Aharon was one of kiruv, not judgement. Maybe they were saying something akin to "this person is obviously misguided; please help him".

If so, doesn't that make the decree even harsher? Whence repentance in all of this? But we aren't told anything about the man; had he repented (he had the opportunity to do so) the decree may have been averted. Maybe that's why Moshe and Aharon didn't act immediately but waited for judgement from God -- even though the man had (presumably) already acknowledged warnings from the witnesses, they wanted to give him one last chance.

I have no idea if this is a legitimate interpretation, and I'm not advocating it so much as noting the possibility, but there it is.

The story comes right after a passage telling us "one law for everyone" and right before the commandment to wear tzitzit as a reminder of the mitzvot (this is the second paragraph after the Sh'ma in the service). In the next chapter, Korach and his band will lead a fateful rebellion against the authority of Moshe and Aharon.

What's Sh'lach L'cha? This is the part of Numbers where the Israelites, a year or so out of Egypt, are getting ready to enter the promised land. So they send twelve spies (one from each tribe) to spy out the land first, but ten of the spies come back with a bad report ("we're doomed!", roughly) and convince the people that they can't take this land. No one wants to listen to the other two (who are more positive) or to Moshe and Aharon. As a consequence of this lack of faith, God decrees that this generation (except for those two spies) will die in the wilderness and it will be their children who will go into the land.

(Aside: the text says only Calev and Yoshua, but we haven't yet had the incident where Moshe is denied entry. Of course God knows this already at the time of the spies, but Moshe doesn't. Are Moshe and Aharon implicitly included among those who are told they'll get to go in at the time of the spies? But Aharon dies beforehand too, and he didn't do anything to obviously bring that on. Hmm.)

But that's not what I wanted to talk about here. The group has spent a lot of time talking about how the generation that had been slaves wasn't ready for this transition. (So nu, why should we be any different than the rabbis? :-) ) You've got a people who -- even though they witnessed miracles in the exodus, at Sinai, and in the desert -- have only known slavery until recently. They may be physically free now, but they still think like slaves. Slaves are used to being beaten down, so when they hear that the occupants of the land are strong, they don't say "God is on our side; let's go" but rather "we can't do that!". The people aren't ready to follow God into battle.

There's a detail I just noticed on this reading. When the people rebel and refuse to go into the land, they don't say "we'll find another land". Rather they say "better that we go back to Egypt" (to be slaves again). So not only do they not believe in God's ability to deliver them into this land (which, given the slave mentality, isn't too surprising to me), but they also don't even believe in the promise of a land. They are ready to chuck the whole enterprise because the first land they considered requires effort. It's not a rejection of the land; it's a rejection of living anywhere as a free people.

Random note: I had an aside to my aside, but I couldn't make it flow smoothly. If you've ever wondered why the talmud rambles the way it does, it's because of stuff like that. :-)

(Apropos of nothing, the first time I chanted torah it was from Sh'lach L'cha.)