Parashat Bemidbar
By Rabbi Isaac Mann
I often wondered when I was in a doctor’s examining room and he had to see my private parts that he told me to undress in private and only then would he come back in to examine me. Wasn’t he going to look at those erogenous zones anyway? If he was going to see me in my birthday suit in any case, why did I have to shed my clothes when he wasn’t looking? Was he some kind of fetishist or did he get sexual pleasure from watching someone disrobe – and thus, as an honorable man, told me to do so in private?
Actually, the doctor, perhaps unknowingly, was in sync with a very interesting Torah teaching that springs forth from a passage at the very end of the parashah of Bemidbar (Numbers 4:17-20), this week’s Torah reading.
In this passage God tells Moshe and Aaron Read More >