My wife and I took the kids to our old neighborhood in Santa Monica this weekend and stayed overnight on Friday evening. A year ago, Santa Monica was devastated by the Black Lives Matter riots. On that fateful May 31, while a "peaceful protest" was happening on a beautiful Sunday afternoon on Ocean Boulevard, rioters and looters fanned out across the downtown area -- just one block inland -- and destroyed stores and vandalized just about everything. The city looked like a war zone for months. Many shops are still empty or boarded up. But with the slow reopening of California and Los Angeles County, life has returned to downtown Santa Monica. Outdoor dining in particular has brought the place back to life. Those restaurants that managed to survive are doing very well, and well-dressed people are enjoying the beach and the whole scene. There are lots of homeless people, far more than before, but Santa Monica manages to prevent them from setting up tents (unlike the city of Los Angeles, which has allowed homeless encampments to line the streets).
As happy as I was to see life returning, something was bothering me the entire day, which only became clear to me as I returned home this evening. When I look back at the past year, so much of what happened was unnecessary. Not just the COVID restrictions, which were way over-the-top, and largely political, but all the protesting and rioting and canceling -- everything.
We didn't just live through a pandemic; we lived through a violent revolution that we're not allowed to identify as such. When Joe Biden emerged -- almost by default -- as the Democratic Party nominee, the left, which hated him and did not believe he could win, decided that it would take matters into its own hands, and they launched violence across the country. The message -- alter echoed by Biden -- was clear: the violence will continue if Trump wins. The Democratic Party apparatchiks did their part by changing the voting rules and using Zuckerberg's money to push turnout and censoring social media and all of that. But the bigger picture was that the left used violence and censorship to take power. The sooner we are honest about this, the sooner we can start to push back against the ongoing efforts to take our freedoms away from us.
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
