Korach

Numbers 16:1−18:32

To Serve With Distinction

Korah's rebellion was based on his inability to appreciate the value of diversity and distinctiveness.

By Rabbi Bradley Artson. The following article is reprinted with permission from American Jewish University.

The rebellion of Korah against Moses and Aaron is painful to most Jews who read it, precisely because it is so complex and so timeless. While we are trained to sympathize with Moses and his supporters by our upbringing and by Jewish tradition, it is difficult for anyone who is passionate about democracy not to become stirred by Korah's powerful message. Our Jewish loyalty seems pitted against our democratic commitments. That conflict hurts.

Moses and Aaron have successfully led the Jewish tribes out of slavery in Egypt and through the dangers of the wilderness. The life of the tribes is now relatively secure and comfortable. God regularly speaks, through Moses, to the Jewish people, and the families live out their lives waiting to move into the Promised Land.

In the midst of this idyllic serenity, Korah rebels. He resents having to follow Moses in all matters, and challenges him with the moving line: "All the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord's congregation?"

Korah's challenge strikes to the heart of the democratic values so cherished by both our Jewish and our American traditions: If all people are created equal, then why should any one person have any authority over another? Why should one person ever have access to power, wealth or prestige in a way that another person does not?

Korah's challenge echoes in the words of Samuel and Amos, Jefferson and Lincoln, Marx and Trotsky. Great leaders in every age, these people fought for the assertion that each person has intrinsic worth, that all people have equal value.

Few in America would challenge that claim. But, we can still ask whether or not equality has to mean uniformity? All people are indeed equal (in comparison to the infinite God who created us), but we are not all the same. Equal in worth is not the same as identical in skills. Korah's flaw was to confuse those two traits--equal worth and identical characteristics.

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Sh'lach L'cha

Numbers 13:1−15:41

The Power Of Perception

The survival and success of the Jewish people stems from our ability to mold reality to match our dreams and ideals.

By Rabbi Bradley Artson. The following article is reprinted with permission from American Jewish University.

Moses instructs 12 spies, one for each of Israel's tribes, to investigate the characteristics of the land the people are about to enter.

They travel throughout the land of Israel during the course of 40 days, and they return to the camp bearing an enormous load of the fruit of the land.

Yet when they return, their testimony is contradictory. On the one hand, they assert that the land is one which "flows with milk and honey," a land bounteous and fertile. On the other hand, they also insist that the people in the land are giants--nefillim--who cause the hearts of those who see them to collapse. Based on the perceived strength of the inhabitants, the spies urge Israel not to occupy the land, despite the assurances of God and of Moses that they would do so successfully. Alone among the spies, Caleb and Joshua assert, with complete faith, that Israel should enter and take the land immediately.

What is striking about the spies' report is the central role of subjectivity in any report of reality. What mattered to them was not a simple compilation of facts, but rather an internal sense of what those facts mean: "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them."

The spies, faced with the sight of fortified cities and armed soldiers, looked at each other. And what they imagined revealed a lack of imagination, a failure of vision. Rather than envisioning themselves as carried by God's promise, sustained by the covenant of Israel, they became overwhelmed by the facts as they appeared on the surface.

Caleb, on the other hand, saw the same facts and refused to bow before them. Infused with passion, conviction, and Torah, he intended to shape reality to conform to his vision. And his vision was one of a faithful Israel, led by a loving God, occupying the land of its promise. The facts looked glum--they demonstrated just how unlikely Israel's occupation of the land would be. Yet Caleb, with his idealism and his energy, proved to be correct.

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B'haalot'cha

Numbers 8:1−12:16

Trying To Remember The Reason I Forgot

Being constantly engaged in learning allows us to guard against the pervasive forgetfulness around us.

By Rabbi Bradley Artson. The following article is reprinted with permission from American Jewish University.

The human mind presents us with both a marvel and a mystery.

Capable of mastering a remarkable range of complex tasks, of remembering obscure experiences or facts, that same organ will also forget an important appointment, an acquaintance's name, or the contents of this morning's breakfast. Simultaneously able to outperform a computer in our manipulation of data into concepts, each of us also faces the unpleasant reality that we continually forget information we desperately desire or need.

Anyone who has reviewed notes taken in college or remarks scribbled in the margins of books read years ago has admitted to the enormity of what is routinely forgotten. It is not uncommon for authors to report rereading their own writing after the passage of several years with the uncomfortable sense that they are no longer the masters of what those essays or books contain.

Today's Torah portion hints at this problem, and the rabbinic tradition suggests a remarkable reason for such frustrating lapses of memory. In our portion, Moses "told the people of Israel that they should keep the Passover." Nothing surprising here, Moses often tells the Jewish people what they should or should not be doing.

But the midrash Sifrei Bamidbar objects that, in this case, the information he conveys is redundant. Didn't the Torah already relate in the Book of Leviticus that "Moses declared the festival seasons of the Lord to the people of Israel?" So why does he have to repeat himself now?

Sifrei goes on by answering its own question. "This teaches that he heard the passage of the festival seasons at Sinai and stated it to Israel, and then went and repeated it to them when the time had actually arrived to keep the rules ... He stated to the people the laws for Passover at Passover, the laws for Shavuot at Shavuot, and the laws for Sukkot at that season."Continue reading.

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Naso

Numbers 4:21−7:89

By Rabbi Bradley Artson. Provided by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, which ordains Conservative rabbis at the American Jewish University.

Situational Ethics And God

The importance of preserving the relationship between a husband and wife provides an example of the Torah's use of relative morality.

Often, we define the moral position as the one that adheres to objective standards of right and wrong. Consequently, someone who evaluates an action in the light of eternal, immutable values demonstrates a higher level of moral development than a person who uses other, more situational standards. The roots of this perspective lie in ancient Greek thought, which associated the true with the eternal--what was perfect never changed. Similarly, the highest level of morality would be immutable.

The Greek mind sought out "laws of nature" which functioned in the realm of human morality no less than in the realm of astronomy. Modern psychologists of moral development--primarily students of the late Lawrence Kohlberg--looked to those Greek suppositions and found confirmation in the moral development of boys and men. Apparently, the highest level of moral development among males involves recourse to external rules of ethical standards that are always true and always definitive.

A Feminist View

A challenge to this notion of moral objectivity emerges in the work of Carol Gilligan, who argues that girls and women base moral decisions on how the decision will affect human relationships. Rather than rules, Gilligan argues that women govern their moral lives by weighing the cost among different human beings. Consequently, their view of morality is situational and relative.

The Torah anticipates this feminist view of morality, also holding that ethics ought to be dynamic and inter-subjective: whether between one person and another, or between a person and God.

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Bemidbar

Numbers 1:1−4:20

What Is Parenting?

Transmitting Jewish culture by embodying Jewish practice is part of the responsibilities of Jewish parenting.

By Rabbi Bradley Artson. The following article is reprinted with permission from American Jewish University.

One of the greatest mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah, the very first command given to humanity, is that of bearing children.

"Be fruitful and multiply" is the necessary underpinning of any Jewish community, since without renewed Jewish people, there can be no Torah, nor any Judaism either.

But parenting is more than simple biology. Any animal can spawn, and most animals have the necessary instincts to guide their young through a relatively brief infancy before the new generation takes off on its own, guided by its own internal barometer. Humans are distinctive in the extraordinary length of our infancy and youth, the extreme degree of dependence of our young, and by a lack of instincts on which to fall back to guide us in raising our children.

Instead of biological drives, we rely on social norms and religious values to guide our parenting and to mold our children. Our friends, our parents, books, rabbis, magazines and popular psychologists all instruct us about how to raise our children and what standards and expectations we can rightly apply to them. Human parenting, then, is executed within a network of other adults, and is guided by the cumulative experience of our own communities.

In this sense, anthropologists also speak of the transmission of a traditional culture in similar terms. A culture is normally passed from one generation to another, from knowledgeable adult to learning child. Since the adult has imbibed the norms and practices of the culture from older acculturated adults, this transmission is often simply through exposure and through example--the stuff that memories are made of, i.e., watching Bubbe lighting Shabbos candles, sitting next to Zeyde at a Seder.

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B'chukotai

Leviticus 26:3-27:34

Rebuke and Reward in this World

The fate of the individual is often determined by the behavior of the community as a whole.

By Rabbi Ismar Schorsch. Reprinted with permission of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
The penultimate chapter of Leviticus consists of a divine plea to heed God's commandments. It takes the form of inducements and intimidations, promises of agricultural bounty and national tranquility and threats of defeat, chaos and exile. The future of ancient Israel in its homeland will depend entirely on its adherence to the revelation at Sinai. Aside from the poetry of the passage, its rhetoric pulsates with a tone of urgency. Free will has its risks; people may choose to put themselves in harm's way. Rebellion against the strictures of God is the persistent evil that endangers society.

Neither this collection of admonitions nor those at the end of Deuteronomy are cast in terms of life after death or the world-to-come. They are utterly different from the hell-fire sermons of Puritan New England in which compliance is coerced through damnation. The religious vocabulary of the Torah, and indeed the Tanakh, is pervasively this-worldly. Life predominates as the supreme value and relegates an inchoate notion of the afterlife--Sheol--to the margins of collective consciousness. Accordingly, retribution or reward are natural phenomena, occurring in the here and now. The language betrays no notion of a soul that transcends death.

Equally noteworthy, the audience for our concluding address is the people as a whole, and not the individual Israelite. What will be weighed in the balance is the piety and morality of the nation, which if found to be wanting will impact adversely on the fate of the minority of God-fearing citizens. To abide personally by God's will can secure one's well-being only if a sufficient number of others do the same. Hence, the paradigmatic nature of Abraham's discourse with God on the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. How many righteous members will it take to avert the destruction of a community? Throughout much of the Tanakh the group takes precedence over the individual. The marquee actor in the drama is the nation. The Torah's legislative agenda is to forge a mass of slaves into "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," a beacon of justice and righteousness for an ever wayward humanity.

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B'har

Leviticus 25:1-26:2

Our Love For The Land Of Israel

The commandment to bring the redemption of the Land of Israel reminds us of the inextricable link between Judaism and Israel.

By Rabbi Bradley Artson. The following article is reprinted with permission from American Jewish University.

One of the central paradoxes of Jewish history is that the Jewish people were landless through most of our history.

Yet, we were always profoundly aware of our link to the Land of Israel, perhaps because we did not live in a place we could call our own. The intense love between the Jews and their homeland permeated our prayers, our Torah and our hearts. Today's Torah portion speaks directly to the centrality of the Land of Israel in Jewish thought and deed. God instructs the Jewish People, "You must provide for the ge'ulah (redemption) of the land."

What does it mean, to bring redemption to a land? It might make sense to use tangible terms--"irrigate" the land, "fertilize" the land, even "cultivate" the land. Those are terms upon which a farmer would act and recognize. But how does one "redeem" a land?

According to most biblical commentators, this verse is understood as mandating a loving Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. Thus, Hizkuni (France, 13th century) interprets our verse to mean that "there can be no [permanent] selling, only [temporary] dwelling."


Jews do not have the right to sever their connection to the Land of Israel. That claim--our inextricable link to the Land of Israel--is at the very core of biblical and rabbinic religion. The Land is referred to as an "ahuzzah," a holding--given to the Jewish People as God's part of our brit, our covenantal relationship. Our ancestors agreed to serve only God, and God agreed to maintain a unique relationship with the Jewish People.

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