Parashat Bemidbar 5784
Anyone who has spent several days in the desert knows the nighttime there—the human need to stay close to the nearby camp.
3
06, 2024
16
05, 2023
Parashat Bemidbar 5783
“The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God”
In case we missed it, we begin this book of the Torah with a reminder: we’re BaMidbar—in the desert.
Still.
But why? What are the Israelites still doing in the desert? After one year and one month, couldn’t they make it through the desert any faster? It really shouldn’t take more than a few weeks to get from Egypt to Israel, even you are traveling on foot with hundreds of thousands of people and a lot of livestock.
But not to worry; at the beginning of Parashat BeMidbar, we seem to be at an inflection point. The Israelites must surely be thinking that their travels are coming to an end. As they ceremoniously take stock of the able-bodied men from among their tribes who will form an army to battle any peoples who might try to stop them (Numbers 1:1-4), Read More >
3
06, 2022
Parashat Bemidbar 5782
Click HERE for an audio recording of this D’var Torah
The Torah is for Everyone
A D’var Torah for Parashat Bemidbar
By Rabbi Marc Rudolph (’04)
Before the Sinai Desert was returned to Egypt in the Peace Treaty of 1978, it was possible to take a bus directly from Tel Aviv to the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, Sharm el Sheik. I boarded that bus alone on my Spring Break of 1973 when I spent a year in Israel. I intended to camp out on the beach and snorkel on the reefs of the Red Sea off Sharm El Sheik. There were only a few of us on that bus, including a Bedouin man. We traveled for hours through seemingly interminable and vast expanses of wilderness. When we think of “wilderness” in North America, we imagine tracts of virgin forests with wild rivers flowing through them untouched by human hands. We think of nature “untamed” by humankind. Read More >
14
05, 2021
Parashat Bemidbar 5781
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22
05, 2020
Parashat Bemidbar 5780
Twelve Tribes Meditation for Parashat Bemidbar
A D’var Torah for Parashat Bemidbar
By Rabbi Jill Hammer
Parashat Bemidbar describes how the twelve tribes encamp around the Tabernacle and the priests: three tribes on each side, with the Levites at the center. This sacred geometry is reminiscent of the months of the year and also of the four directions and seasons—twelve is three times four, a combination of two powerful numbers. One way to take in the Torah of Parashat Bemidbar is to explore the encampment of the twelve tribes through meditation.
Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, is a Jewish mystical work written between the 6th and 9th century CE. Sefer Yetzirah describes how God uses the Hebrew letters to create the world. Twelve of the letters are associated with twelve human faculties, and also with the twelve months. Later Jewish sources associate each month and faculty with a tribe as well. In one version of the correspondences, offered by translator Aryeh Read More >
6
06, 2019
Parashat Bemidbar 5779
The “New” Tribes of Israel
A D’var Torah for Parashat Bemidbar
By Rabbi Irwin Huberman (’10)
Over the centuries, there has been much debate and speculation regarding the fate of the twelve tribes of Israel.
In recent years, with the advent of such genealogy programs as Ancestry.com and 23andMe, there has been considerable interest within the Jewish world and beyond in tracing our roots and countries of origin.
Yet, in spite of this new technology, few of us, with the exception of the Kohanim and Levi’im, know which tribe we descend from.
But, can we truly say, in 2019, that the idea of tribalism within Judaism is passé? Perhaps not.
In Biblical times, each Israelite knew where they came from. Each tribe has its own banner. Each tribe had its own personality. In the closing portion of the Book of Genesis, in his last days, Jacob gathers his twelve sons, and gives each tribe its own blessing according to that personality. Read More >
17
05, 2018
Bemidbar 5778
Seeing Those We Overlook
A D’var Torah for Bemidbar
by Rabbi Heidi Hoover (’11)
When we study our Torah portions, we often notice what’s missing, what’s not said. What happens during the three days between the time God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and the time Abraham and Isaac arrive at the mountain where the sacrifice is to take place? What happens to Jonah while he is in the belly of the fish?
This week’s Torah portion, Bemidbar, the first parashah of the book of Numbers, is all about counting people. That’s where the name of the book in English, Numbers, comes from. (In Hebrew, Bemidbar means “in the wilderness.”) All the men from every tribe except Levi are counted, and in a separate count, the men from Levi are counted. A glaring absence in this Torah portion, something that we notice is missing, is any mention of women. Women are not in our Torah portion Read More >
24
05, 2017
Parashat Bemidbar
Parashat Bemidbar: Tribalism or Multitribalism?
Rabbi Jill Hammer
The first parashah in the Book of Numbers (or in Hebrew Bemidbar) makes a significant point of listing the census numbers of each tribe (adult males able to go to war) as well as the leaders of each tribe (hence the moniker Book of Numbers). The parashah goes on to list where each tribe camps in relationship to the Tabernacle: Judah, Issachar and Zebulun on the east, Reuben, Simeon, and Gad on the south, Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin on the west, and Dan, Asher, and Naftali on the north, with Levi camped in the center. Then the parashah details the particular duties of each subclan of the tribe of Levi as well as their census numbers. It’s as if we’ve discovered an Iron Age accounting tablet. Aside from the tale of the elevation of the Levites, there isn’t a story or a law to be found Read More >
5
11, 2014
Parashat Bemidbar
Bemidbar
Hazan Marcia Lane
Where Am I? (or “Stuck in the Middle Again!”)
The fourth book of the Torah, Bemidbar, begins with one of those statements that sounds, at least to me, as if it was being narrated by Charlton Heston.
“The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, on the first day of the second month of the second year, after they came out of the land of Egypt, saying: Take a census ….” (Num. 1:1-2)
It’s a cinematic moment. The entire nation (together with all the hangers-on) have been camped at the foot of the mountain, growing and weaving and building all the elements of the mishkan– the movable sacred space – and learning the necessary laws for what will be their life as an independent nation, living in its own land. For two years and one month the people have been sojourning here, in the wilderness of Sinai, at the Read More >
9
05, 2013
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 >
