Category Archives: PARSHA

Shelach – The Importance of Feeling Unthreatened

The idea that the prohibition against lashon hora, “speech of evil,” includes speaking negatively about a thing, not just a person, is surprising.

But the sin of the meraglim, the scouts who were sent by Moshe Rabbeinu to spy out the land of Cna’an, who returned with a demoralizing report, is characterized as precisely that: slander of the Holy Land. The Torah describes the scouts’ sin as spreading dibah (Bamidbar 13:32), which Onkelos renders “shum bish,” or “a bad name.”

And Rabbi Elazar ben Parta, in the Talmud, uses the scout narrative to emphasize the gravity of lashon hora in its more common usage:

“If one who defames the wood and rocks of Eretz Yisrael received so severe a punishment, then with regard to one who defames another person, all the more so will he be punished severely.” (Arachin, 15a)

Several of the meraglim’s names include words meaning animals. Might something about lashon hora be implied by that?

The most basic instinct of any animal is self-preservation. (Human beings are the only creatures that can choose, and have chosen, to die willingly for a higher cause.)

And the prime engine of self-preservation is fear. Which is what the meraglim felt, and instilled in the people, by describing the inhabitants of the land as, well, fearsome.

Perhaps lashon hora, too, has at its roots a misguided sense of self-preservation. Slandering another is often the result of feeling a threat – if not against one’s life, then in some less violent, more subtle way.

Which raises the possibility that cultivating one’s self-worth – immunizing oneself, so to speak, against feeling intimidated by others or seeing them as competitors – might be a worthy strategy for undermining the human tendency toward negative speech.

Woe Isn’t Us

The reflexive form of the word k’mis’onenim (“The people were mis’onenim [complaining] bitterly before Hashem” – Bamidbar 11:1) indicates that our ancestors were self-focused in their grumbling. They were mourning themselves, sorrowful (as per the Ramban, who cites the phrase ben oni, Beraishis 35:18) over their lot.

Entering the desolateness of the desert, they felt pangs of worry or fear.

But, aside from the construct of the word, there is its prefix, the k’, which indicates “like” or “as.”

Rav Chaim Vital understands that qualifier as conveying the fact that the complaint was not verbalized, but rather (perhaps this, too, indicated by the reflexive) internal, silent.

Another possibility occurs. Namely, that complaining, mourning, feeling sorry for one’s lot, as easy and common as it may be, is in conflict with the essence of a Jew.

Our purpose in life is to serve Hashem, and doing so goes hand in hand with simcha, joy – the opposite of aninus. As in Mizmor LeSoda that we recite daily, we are to “Worship Hashem in happiness; come into His presence with joy.” (Tehillim 100:2)

So to call Jews mis’onenim isn’t an option. If we feel sorry for ourselves and bemoan our lots, it is born of something extraneous to our essence. We can be K’mis’onenim” – like complainers. But the Jew in his essence is a makir tov, a discerner of blessings, an acceptor of his lot with joy, a bearer of a korban Todah.

Naso – No Small Wonder

A bracha we make several times daily has an etymological connection to the nazir, the laws for whom are included in the parshah. It lies in a word in the second pasuk of that section, the word used, uniquely here, to mean “pronounce” or “articulate.”

“When a man or woman shall pronounce (yafli) a special vow of a nazir to separate themselves to Hashem…” (Bamidbar 6:3).

The word is yafli; and the bracha, Asher Yatzar, which is made after the elimination of bodily waste and which ends umafli la’asos, literally, “Who causes wonders to do,” but is usually translated “and acts wondrously” or “performs wonders.”

The word hafla’ah is hard to crack. While peleh, its root, clearly means “wonder,” in one place (Makos 13b), it is interpreted to mean “flogging.”

The Zohar (3:126a) seems to take it to mean something similar to the word nazir itself – “to separate.” Chizkuni notes that it can mean two seeming opposites: “taking apart” and “building.”

The Gemara (Nazir 34a) quotes Rabi Tarfon as rendering it as “specifying.”

It isn’t impossible to connect the various meanings with “articulate,” since speaking a sentence means stringing different words (like a series of lashings) together, building a thought (and, with words like “but” or “however,” dismantling the previously expressed thought). “Articulate” itself is from a Latin root meaning “separate.” And speaking, of course, is itself a wonder, exclusive to the human realm. Flogging is a series of individual, distinct strikes.

But what of mafli in Asher Yatzar?

What occurs is that the wonder of digestion is much more than the simple separation of nutrients from waste. It involves a staggering amount of retrieving myriad substances – elements, minerals, chemicals, vitamins – from what we ingest and specifying them, i.e. directing them to where they are needed for their disparate purposes to benefit our bodies, thereby allowing our lives to proceed. Our food is “taken apart,” that is to say “broken down,” so that each component of our food can be utilized to “build” in its specific realm, to keep us alive.

Wonderful indeed.

© Rabbi Avi Shafran 2022

Bamidbar – The Child Makes the Parent

The reference in the parshah (Bamidbar, 3:4) to the fact of Nadav and Avihu’s childlessness can be read as a simple explanation for why further generations of their lines are absent from the Torah’s text. But Abba Ḥanan, in the name of Rabbi Eliezer, sees it as telegraphing much more, that “A man who does not engage in procreation is liable to death” (Yevamos 64a).

There are various reasons given for the meaning of the “strange fire” that those two of Aharon’s sons brought on the altar in the desert: That they didn’t accord their father due respect (Yalkut Shimoni, 524:5); that they had decided a law themselves in the presence of their teacher (Rashi, Vayikra, 10:2); that they had drunk wine before entering the Mishkan (ibid); that they spoke uncouthly between themselves about the eventual deaths of Moshe and Aharon (Sanhedrin, 52a).

The implication of the Gemara in Yevamos, though, is that, had they married and had children, they would not have perished.

Intriguing is the Chasam Sofer’s suggestion in explanation of that fact. He writes that a person doesn’t fully relate to how he should conduct himself vis-à-vis his superiors until he has children. Then, he feels what lack of proper honor, which a child naturally exhibits, is like, and recognizes the imperative of such honor.

Had they had children, in other words, Nadav and Avihu would have been prevented from showing a lack of proper honor to Moshe and Aharon (and the Mishkan).

(Interestingly, our parshah also notes how even people who are biologically unable to have children can, in effect have them – by undertaking their tutelage. “Whoever teaches the Torah to the son of his fellow man is considered as if he had begotten him” (Rashi, Bamidbar 3:1, quoting Sanhedrin 19b).

And so, in addition to all the other reasons for seeing children as blessings – that having them is a mitzvah, that they hasten Mashiach, that they provide genealogical continuity, that they offer many joys, that they can eventually care for their elders, we might add one more:

That, even as we help them grow, they do the same for us.

Bechukosai – To Know What We Don’t

It would be silly to claim a “favorite” Rashi, but one comment made in rare places, including in this week’s parshah, by the author of perfectly succinct yet brilliant glosses to not only Tanach but the entire Talmud Bavli deserves special mention – and consideration.

Noting the ungrammatical use of the word “erkecha,” where “erech” would seem to be the logical form, Rashi (Vayikra 27:3) informs the reader that he “doesn’t know” the reason for the structure of the word.

“I don’t know” is a phrase as well-deserved as it is rare these days, when self-assuredness seems all too often to stand in for self-respect, when opinions are routinely proffered as unassailable fact, when people are permitted – even expected – to state without doubt what they cannot possibly know to be true (and, in some cases, like in contemporary politics, what clearly isn’t).

There is, of course, nothing wrong with opinions (for some of us, our stock in trade), but Rashi’s modest example is one we would be wise to more often emulate. As the Gemara puts it: “Teach your tongue to say ‘I do not know’” (Berachos, 4a).

Some of us “know,” for example, that one political party is better for the country; others, that that the other one is; some “know” that stricter limits on abortion are proper; others “know” that they are a danger. Some “know” that the p’sukim of ma’aseh beraishis mean one thing. Others, that they mean something else. We think a whole lot of things, but know a good many less.

To be sure, there are verities. That we humans possess a spark of the Divinity that created us, for instance. That we have free will. That life is precious. That our actions have consequences.

For Jews, there are – or should be – other certainties, among them that we have been divinely chosen to set an example for the wider world, that our carefully-preserved history includes at its apogee Hashem’s bequeathal of His Torah to us (which we will soon be celebrating again), that our mission and our peoplehood are sacred.

But there are many smaller things, no end of them in fact, that we do not know, at least not with the certainty of those essential convictions. And so, as we consider political or social or personal issues, even if we think we have a pretty good idea of just what’s what, it’s always a good idea to pause to remember what Rashi knew, and admitted he didn’t.

Behar – Don’t Serve Servants

“They are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt” (Vayikra 25:55).

Although the Talmud’s comment on the phrase “They are My servants” – “but not the servants of servants” (Bava Kamma 116b) – has a technical, halachic meaning, it also hints at a broader one.

In other words, not only does it say that a Jew cannot own another Jew, it also signals that Jews are not to indenture themselves to causes other than the Jewish mandate. Not to a political party, social cause or personality. A Jew’s exclusive ultimate role is to be a servant of Hashem.

Because the freedom we were divinely granted from Egyptian bondage was not what many consider “freedom” – libertinism, the loss of all fetters. It was a passage from being “servants to servants” – to Egyptians and Egyptian mores – to becoming servants of Hashem. As Moshe, in Hashem’s name, ordered Pharaoh: “Let my people go so that they may serve Me” (Shemos 9:1).

The Hebrew word for freedom, cherus, the Mishna (Avos, 6:2) notes, can be vowelled to render charus, “etched,” as the Aseres Hadibros were on the luchos. “The only free person,” the Mishna concludes, “is the one immersed in Torah.”

True freedom doesn’t mean being retired and moneyed, lying on a beach with sunshine on one’s face and a cold beer within reach, without a care or beckoning task.

In the words of Iyov, “Man is born to toil” (5:7). True freedom, counterintuitively, comes from hard work. Applying ourselves to a higher purpose liberates us from the limitations of our inner Egypts, and is what can bring true meaning to our lives.

Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote:

“I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free.

“But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it, and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.”

A timely metaphor, as we progress from Pesach, the holiday of our release from bondage, to Shavuos, the day we entered servitude to the Divine. And when, like on Pesach, we will sing the words of Hallel.

Emor – Crime and Punishment

The first of the Torah’s two cases of imprisonment– that of the mekalel, the blasphemer, is in the parshah (Vayikra, 24:12). The second is in parshas Shelach (Bamidbar 15:34), regarding the mekoshesh eitzim, the Shabbos wood-gatherer.

It is noteworthy that in both cases, the imprisonment of the violator is not a punishment but rather a temporary restraint until a Divine verdict is obtained.

Longtime societal norms become parts of our default assumptions, and so, the contention that sentencing a criminal to jail is an appropriate punishment for a serious crime is seldom questioned.

In the Torah, though, it isn’t. Punitive prescriptions for intentional crimes take the form either of monetary compensation or of corporal punishment – flogging or execution.

American prisons are not only overpopulated (upward of 2 million people), overcrowded, expensive and rife with violence and abuse but also serve as fertile environments for some criminals to hone their skills and “network” with one another.

An idea that seems impolite to raise but is worth considering all the same is whether corporal punishment might serve as a more effective response and deterrent to crime than incarceration.

Flogging wouldn’t likely fly these days. But carefully regulated but painful experiences, like, for instance, tasing (which is currently acceptable for disabling threats), perhaps combined with requiring post-punishment location anklets, might be an option to consider.

Under current norms, purposely inflicting pain is labeled torture and considered contemptable. But long-term imprisonment is torturous and contemptable in its own right.

As in so many other realms, here, too, the Torah might be an illuminative guide to larger society.

Kedoshim – Skin in a Zero-Sum Game

Although, in the end, all tattooing is forbidden by halachah, one opinion in the Mishna (Rabi Shimon ben Yehudah in Rabi Shimon’s name) sees the prohibition as referring specifically to tattooing the name of an idolatry. The pasuk can be read as hinting to that approach: “And a tattoo you shall not place upon yourselves – I am Hashem” (Vayikra, 19:28) – as if to say “Nothing else is.” The contest, so to speak, is zero-sum.

And the Rambam, in fact, places the prohibition in his “Laws of Idolatry.”

So it would seem reasonable, if seeking some message in the tattoo prohibition, to imagine that it might be a negation of designating something, anything, other than Hashem as an ultimate object of dedication.

And, in fact, tattooing is, at least in many cultures, not a mere “decorative” practice but rather a demonstration of devotion – whether to “Mom,” “Jane,” “Jim” or “Semper Fi.”

Or to any less-than-holy ideal, no matter how worthy. What to an idolater is his deity’s name or symbol is, to a contemporary potential tattoo-ee, any of the broad assortment of “isms” – socialism, capitalism, Zionism, environmentalism… that are popular at any given time. Rav Elchonon Wasserman indeed referred to isms as the idolatries of the current historical era.

And so, what the Torah is forbidding may be understood as inscribing one’s utter dedication to any such concept. In fact, the Hebrew for “upon yourselves” can be read just as easily as “in yourselves”; and Rav Hirsch contrasts the use of that word with the “in your flesh” language used regarding making mourning-cuts.

Political isms are still popular these days, but the most widespread ism of the nonce, I suspect, is the one beginning with the word “material.” Not easily depicted in a tattoo, perhaps, but it’s a most consuming (pun intended) idolatry all the same.

Acharei Mos – “No. You Do ME”

“Propriety” was apparently a theme of the Sadducees, or Tziddukim, one of the camps of Jews during the Second Temple period that rejected the the Torah’s “Oral Law,” the key to understanding the true meaning of the Written one. The former, of course, reveals things like that “An eye for an eye” means monetary compensation, and that “totafos” means what we call tefillin.

And so, the Tziddukim rejected the Oral Law’s direction that “Sabbath” in the phrase “from the day after the Sabbath,” directing the beginning of the Omer-counting period, means the first day of Pesach. They felt, they explained, that having two days in a row of rest and festivity – Shabbos and Shavuos, the fiftieth day of the count – would be a nice and proper thing.

And they advocated, too, a change in the Yom Kippur service described in the parsha, at the very crescendo of the day, when the Kohein Gadol entered the Kodesh Hakadashim. The Oral Law prescribes that the incense offered there be lit only after the Kohen Gadol entered the room. The Tziddukim contended that it be lit beforehand. While they offered Written Law support for their position, their true motivation, the Talmud explains, was the “propriety” of doing things differently.

“Does one bring raw food to a mortal king,” they argued, “and only then cook it before him? No! One brings it in hot and steaming!”

The placing of mortal etiquette – “what seems most appropriate” – above the received truths of the mesorah is the antithesis of Torah, whose foundation is not “you do you” but “you do Me.”

Our very peoplehood was forged by our forebears’ unanimous, unifying declaration at Sinai: “Naaseh v’nishma” — “We will do and we will hear!” – “We will accept the Torah’s laws,” in other words, even amid a lack of ‘hearing,’ or understanding, even if we think we have a better idea.”

“Naaseh v’nishma” stands in stark contrast to society’s fixation on not only having things but having them “our way,” and to Jewish groups that want to bring Torah “in line” with contemporary sensibilities.

But from Avraham Avinu’s “ten trials” to 21st century America, Judaism has never been about comfort, enjoyment or personal fulfillment (though, to be sure, the latter emerges from a holiness-centered life). It has been about Torah and mitzvos – about accepting them not only when they sit well with us but even – in fact, especially – when they don’t.

With apologies to JFK speechwriter Ted Sorenson (Jewish mother’s maiden name: Annis Chaikin), Judaism is not about what we’d like Hakadosh Baruch Hu to do for us, but rather about what we are privileged to do for Him.

Metzora – Not Just the Kitchen Sink

I once witnessed an amusing exchange between a mother and her four- or five-year-old daughter. The former, trying to do some cooking with the child underfoot, told the little person, “You need to leave my kitchen now.” Which elicited the indignant, forceful response: “It’s my kitchen too!”

But, of course, it wasn’t either of the disputants’ kitchen, at least not ultimately.

Addressing the man whose house has exhibited a nega, the Torah refers to him (Vayikra 14:35)as asher lo habayis, which, rendered literally, means “[the one] that there is to him the house.”

“Is to him.” Chazal attribute nega’im to various sins, the appearance of the nega being a signal for the need to do better. And the nega’im that appear on the walls of a house signal tzarus ayin, literally “narrow-eyedness,” or, better, stinginess. (See Arachin 16a and Maharsha there.)

Thus, the man is commanded to remove all the furniture and utensils from the house before it is pronounced tamei – letting all see things he has that he may have been asked to lend but claimed he didn’t have.

And that, explains the Kli Yakar, is reiterated by the words that translate as “that is to him.” The phrase reflects the mindset of a tzar ayin, a miser, that what he has is really his. Which is not true, since all we have is only temporarily in our control, on loan, so to speak, from Hashem.

Everything we think we have isn’t really ours at all.

Everything, down to the kitchen sink. For that matter, to the kitchen itself.