This week's portion is one of the most colorful in the Bible, telling the story of the evil king Balak and his attempts to hire the prophet Balaam to curse the people of Israel. Balaam is waylaid by his own donkey, who is miraculously able to talk. In the end, he praises the people of Israel rather than cursing them.
That much is familiar to many people. But there is a twist at the end: the people are corrupted through temptation, and they fornicate with the daughters of the Moabites. What armies and prophets could not do, the lustful women easily accomplished. The result is pain, suffering, plague -- and, eventually, violence.
Jewish philosophy wrestles with the question of lust. There is a famous episode in the Talmud, in Tractate Sanhedrin (link below), in which the people manage to imprison the desire to commit the sin of idolatry. Having succeeded in that effort, they try to imprison the sin of lust, and they are successful in doing so.
But then things begin to go wrong. Without lust, they discover, chickens stop laying eggs. It turns out that lust is part of the essential life-force that makes the world go around. So the people release lust from imprisonment, and they merely blind it, so that desires like incest disappear. As for the rest of them...
This week'd portion begins the book of Numbers. Interestingly, the Hebrew name for the book is "In the Desert," not "Numbers." The portion, which happens to be my bar mitzvah portion, focuses almost as much on the names of the princes of each tribe as the number of soldiers it fielded. It also focuses on the configuration of the tribal camps around the central Tabernacle and the Levites.
So why "Numbers" instead of "Names" or "Places"? The numbers are, to be sure, a unique feature of the opening of this Biblical book -- but they are not the focus of the rest of the narrative. The Hebrew focuses on the place where the events in the book take place, because essentially this is the narrative of the Israelites' wanderings from Egypt to Israel, across 40 years. We move from the giving of the Torah and the construction of the Tabernacle in Exodus and Leviticus, to the final valediction of Moses in Deuteronomy -- Bamidbar is the story of wandering that happened in between.
The question of ...
This week's portion begins with the laws of the Sabbath and the Sabbatical year, and the Jubilee year that restores all land to its original (tribal) owners. It also explores laws of property and labor that will apply in the Land of Israel, and the laws of vows and inheritance.
The Israelites are presented -- not for the last time -- with the essential moral choice that they must face, and the rewards for choosing well, along with the consequences for choosing poorly.
We learn that doing good things will earn God's protection from enemies. That does not mean that victims of terror, God forbid, were sinful. But it does mean that we can respond to evil by committing ourselves to a higher path.
This week's portion describes the major sacrifices that are to be offered by the Jewish people, including those that are offered only by the priestly Kohen class, and physical requirements of the people (men) who serve in that role.
Inter alia, there are interesting commandments -- such as an injection to treat animals with respect and care, first, by letting a mother animal nurse her offspring for a week before being offered in any sacrifice; and second, by refraining from slaughtering an animal and its offspring on the same day.
The commandments regarding animals remind us of the purpose of those regarding human beings: to uphold a divine connection, through ritual.
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111878/jewish/Rabbi-Isaac-Luria-The-Ari-Hakodosh.htm
