Chukkat, part one, the synopsis

Chukkat, a synopsis: (Numbers 19 - 21)

God tells the priests burn up a red heifer and mix it with water. This potion will purify people made unclean by contact with death. Many paragraphs explaining how to do this. Involves hyssop.

Miriam dies. The people complain to Moses that they’re thirsty. No water in the desert, why’d you bring us here, will this wandering never end. Moses throws himself down on his face. God, could you help? Also, please, please make the whining stop. God says, “ Take your staff, stand at that boulder, speak to the boulder and water will come.” Moses goes to the boulder, says “Look how much God loves you even though you are all ungrateful wretches.” and hits the rock, twice, with his staff. Water springs forth, and everyone drinks it. God says “Moses, I didn’t tell you to hit the rock. Because of this neither you nor Aaron will reach the promised land.” (Moses does not point out to God that this punishment violates the clear meaning of ‘promise’, and what does Aaron have to do with it anyway?)


Then they travel some more. At several places they send to the king and ask for safe passage through the land, always saying "it's a small thing, we won't cause any trouble". The people who live there never seem to think it’s such a small thing though, so then they have big battles that the Israelites always win. Somewhere in the midst of the wandering and the battling, two interesting things happen:

First, God says Aaron will die, and Moses takes Aaron and his son Eleazar up the mountain, tells Aaron to take off his priestly robes, and puts them on Aaron’s son. Aaron dies. Moses and Eleazar troop down from the mountain, sans Aaron. This looks a little suspicious to the people down below, but no one says anything this time, because whenever they bitch about Moses’s authority someone gets smited.

After more battling over easements and rights of way, the people forget that God smites them every time they complain, and they complain again to Moses. “The people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this desert, for there is no bread and no water, and we are disgusted with this rotten bread."” (Numbers 21:5) God sends venomous snakes among the people and many of them die until they beg Moses to do something about it. So Moses makes a bronze serpent head, sticks it on a staff, and tells everyone who is bitten to look at the serpent head and be cured. And lo, it works.

Then some more traveling, and another well for water, this time without anyone getting in trouble about anything. Slaughtering of Amorites, smiting of the people of Bashan, including their fantastically named king “Og”. “They smote him, his sons and all his people, until there was no survivor, and they took possession of his land.” (Numbers 21:35)

Meta

There is a lot of commentary out there and I read what I can, but I tend to get caught up in the endlessness of available commentary and could easily use up all my available time studying without ever getting to write down anything. I try to remind myself that I don’t have to learn everything all at once, but I do have to let the words of torah speak to me in the context of my own life, in the context of what I do know and have experienced about Judaism and about how life actually is. I want to recognize the sticky bits before Rashi or whoever explains them all away to me, I guess. But I can’t actually explore all the sticky bits each week. So I’m making notes of everything I find interesting/difficult/inspiring/awful or whatever about each parsha so in the future I can come back to those issues. Maybe next time around some of them won’t seem so baffling or urgent to me. Maybe there will be new things. Who knows?


The Sticky Bits

Anyway, here’s this week’s list:

1. Really? Someone had a king named Og?
2. That punishment God gave Moses and Aaron seemed pretty harsh given the offense. After all, Moses hit the rock, which is way better than whaling on the nearest whining Israelite.
3. It sure sounds like kids in biblical times must have been picky eaters, because that Israelite complaint sounds like nothing so much like my dinner table. “This food is gross, you’re starving me, I’m dying of thirst, it’s not fair!”
4. Why not let Aaron die on his own instead of setting a specific time and place for it to happen? Was it to ensure an orderly succession? The priest is dead, long live the priest! ?
5. All the battles, smiting, and dispossessing peoples of their land freak me out. I hate that our Torah records God sanctioning , supporting, and even sometimes commanding that behavior toward neighboring nations. That is not what I want God to do.
6. Serpents and complaining and healing via the symbol of a serpent.

Next post for this parsha (to be posted tomorrow before sundown, I hope): Thoughts on the Ritual of the Red Heifer