A couple of weeks ago I complained about Balak to a Rabbi teacher of mine and he said something like “maybe you should skip the next couple of parshas for your blog, because they’re pretty tough to swallow...” But no, I am de-VO-ted to my parsha project, swallowing be damned. Anyway, I ought to know what’s in those scrolls I go to shul each week to hear read out loud in a language I don’t speak. I ought to know what I’m revering as Torah when I revere the Torah. Wait, I’m getting perilously close to having an Alanis Morrisette song stuck in my head, though given what’s been stuck in my head the last few weeks, an Alanis Morrisette song is a distinct improvement, which goes to show how very badly my brain has broken.
So: Matot and Masai.
Matot: Tribes.
Numbers 30: Vows and stuff
You have to keep vows you make in God’s name. Unless you’re a girl, in which case you have to keep the vow only if your dad or husband hears about it and doesn’t annul it on the same day he hears about it. This is interesting because it does, as is often the case in these old Torah rules, give women some autonomy; the man to whose household the woman belongs actually has to make some effort to annul her vow when he hears of it, and he has to make such effort without delay. So if your husband or father is lazy and a procrastinator, which he could well be, you are home free, ladies, to make your own idiot vows and then be stuck with them. (c.f. Jephthah, who promises the Lord to sacrifice whatever comes out of his house first to meet him upon his return if the Lord helps him in a successful war against the Ammonites or someone, and expects it to be a goat or something, but no, his only child, his daughter, is quick out the door that day and off she goes to the altar. This was before Jephthah had rabbis to get him out of jams like this. He made the vow and felt like he had to fulfill it, even though in later days any Rabbi could have told him that first of all, you don’t sacrifice your children, second of all, the positive commandment to preserve human life trumps most other commandments like ‘keep vows’, and third of all, you should have run that vow by a legal scholar to begin with who would have put appropriate limitations on it before you checked the I agree box and clicked “submit”. Man, am I off-topic. Oh, that’s in Judges, by the way, chapter 11 by my JPS translation.)
Numbers 31: Kill ‘em all. Except virgin girls.
Numbers 31 we are off to slaughter the Midianites. 31:1-2 “The Lord spoke to Moses , saying ‘Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites; then you shall be gathered to your kin.’”
You have to go back to parsha Balak to figure out what the Midianites did that needed avenging. The Moabites (led by Balak) and the Midianites formed an alliance out of concern about the Israelites; it was Balak plus the Midianites who sent for Balaam who prophesied their ruin, and meanwhile back at the camp the Israelites were apparently “whoring” with the Moabites, except in the next verses it’s a Midianite woman who gets killed along with the Israelite man by the God-fearing priest Pinchas. So is it the Midianites or the Moabites who enticed Israel into sex and idolatry? Not clear. A mix, I guess. An alliance.
Now apparently the proper revenge for having been enticed into a little pagan orgy is to utterly destroy the people you partied with. Or maybe to destroy the people they were allied with, or both, or who can tell the difference anyway, all those people look the same, right? Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out. So a bunch of Israelites go out and slay all the Midianite men, every last one. Also killed Balaam, though what did Balaam ever do to them? We find out when they all get back to camp, with the Midianite women and children and animals and booty and riches and stuff:
Moses, Elaezar the priest, and all the chieftans of the community came out to meet them outside the camp. Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. Moses said to them “You have spared every female! Yet they are the ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, so that the Lord’s community was struck by the plague. Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man.” -- Numbers 31.13 - 18
So they do, and seriously, what is this, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?
After that there are a bunch of boring and complicated verses dividing up the booty.
Numbers 32: Home on the Range
By now I guess the Israelites are on the wrong side of the Jordan from Israel, about to cross in to the Promised Land. The Reubenites and the Gadites, however, have a lot of cattle, and they like the grazing land right where they are. They want to settle down right there, and build some little houses on the prairie for themselves, and give up their piece of the Promised Land. Moses says to them that they can’t get out of going to war for the Promised Land just because they don’t actually want a piece of the Promised Land. Fine, say they, we’ll build our houses, leave our families and cattle behind, and go to war with you all till all the land has been won. Then we’ll go back across the Jordan, to our little houses on the prairie, carrying great bolts of calico in brown with little pink sprays of flowers and pink satin trim so Ma and the girls can make themselves new Sunday dresses.
Wait, I think I’m getting a little confused. The calico was actually blue, with yellow flowers.
Anyway, Moses agreed to all that, and Pa brought out his fiddle and played long, long into the night, and Laura hadn’t felt so happy since Pa brought back that darling Midianite girl to be her slave.
Masai: (Journeys of...) Previously on ...
Numbers 33:
Previously on Lost ... , “These were the marches of the Israelites who started out from the land of Egypt, troop by troop, in the charge of Moses and Aaron.” Blah blah blah de blah blah, for verses and verses. You can look in Biblical Atlases and see, based on this recap, the proposed possible routes the Israelites might have taken, but the archeaological evidence is slim. And everything keeps shifting around, like a certain island some of us know and love. Numbers 33 is nice for the sing-songy repetitive nature of its recap; it probably sounds good in shul, but I didn’t make it to shul yesterday due to Teh Crazy.
Verses 50-56 are worth looking at, however. They are precise instructions about how to handle the Others the Israelites will find on the island (er, land of Israel).
In the steppes of Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, you shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their figured objects; you shall destroy all their molten images, and you shall demolish all their cult places. And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess. [ ... ]. But if you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live; so that I will do to you what I planned to do to them.
Wow. There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin. Three religions born of this people, duking it out over the same piece of land for centuries, building up and tearing down and dispossessing and slaughtering. Thorns in your sides and stings in your eyes. Settlers and suicide bombers.
Numbers 34 sets out boundaries of the land (still arguing over those, of course) and assigns different parts to different tribes. Numbers 35 is not so painful to my modern sensibilities (at last!). It instructs the Israelites to set up six stations to study the land, the Fig, the Pomegranate, the Olive, the Date, the Grape, the Wheat, and the Barley. Oh, wait, that’s the seven species. My bad. No, it says make six cities of asylum, where people can go when they’ve killed someone accidentally, where the families of the dead are not allowed to come and kill the killers for vengeance. And call them The Swan, The Flame, The Hydra, The Pearl, The Orchid, and The Arrow. Oh wait, God never names the cities of refuge. Can't I keep anything straight?
Then we get a few sensible rules about legal testimony, the differences between murder and manslaughter, how many witnesses are required to convict someone, the usual. We Jews like to spin this stuff as totally original, but these legal codes were pretty much all over the place in the ancient Near East, at least after Hammurabi. What was, perhaps, original, was the vesting of the authority of the law in a single, eternal God, the only God, the Ground of Being, and enlarging the lifespan of the legal code to “throughout your generations forever” rather than “till the current government falls”, which back then, there, would not have been a long time coming. So there’s an authority and a permanence to the Covenant which must have provided some measure of stability. Well, and really, like our times are so stable?
Self-evident truths and inalienable rights, authority vested in an eternal God; you can see why people thought of America as the Promised Land. It’s a powerful promise, and a powerful base on which to build. If I were not feeling so despairing right now I’d probably have taken this idea and spun it into an inspirational d’var about the greatness of a such a covenant, about the radical idea that certain laws and certain rights were established by God and can never be revoked, are not subject to the rise and fall of nations, parties, corporations, or what Christians call “principalities and powers” which means all those institutions in the world that have somehow turned evil and try to exert authority over us and get us to forget that really we are not ultimately subject to earthly authority but to a higher authority, so take that, you insurance reimbursement forms! But that we have to uphold our end of the bargain, which is making sure to seek justice, walk humbly, love the lord, love our neighbors, or else George Bush comes and takes away our inalienable rights and then Obama comes and forgets to give them back. So you know, vigilance, service, join the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, cue the Progressive Jewish Social Justice Guitars.
I see that other d’var that I could write, through a looking glass. But I’ve got demons in me, baby, and the demons won’t ignore or explain away or soften the demon bits of the whole damn edifice, built on sacrifice, slaughter, war, conquest. There’s good stuff buried here, and the Rabbis have spent a long time interpreting it in good ways, but my interpretive skills are all off right now. I can only see the blood, so much blood, throughout your generations forever. That was a very different time and place. Are we so very different now, though? What has changed, and what remains the same? What can we leave behind as a legacy of laws for a land in chaos, and what do we only think we can leave behind but really still find right here, in our time. It’s peaceful here, where I live, but my nation fights wars all over the world. I just read that the war in Afghanistan has gone on longer than the Vietnam war now. Fewer of ‘our people’ have died, though. The Afghans haven’t fared so well. I’ve stayed behind in my little house, and someone else’s Pa went off to join the shock-troops in an endless war. Is this what we’ve inherited? Endless war? Everyone’s fighting in Israel, and no one is safe. What is there to give us hope? Shall we cling to our laws that God gave us, for all eternity, so that there is something solid when all else has melted into air?
Well, I know that God is holding me up. Not like those cheesy footprints in the sand. Like ground. I hear the voice of God in Torah, but like I said before, it’s full of static. Some Christians say God came to Earth in Jesus so we could know God without the static: so some people could get a crystal clear image of God in terms they could understand; in human terms. What Jesus says is easier to tolerate than much of what dear old I yam what I yam says in the good old Pentateuch. Still, you look at Christianity and there seems to be, nevertheless, an awful lot of static.
Those prophets, though. They say some good stuff. You know, half the time Jesus was quoting a prophet.
Here’s Isaiah, for example: “No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin. Then shall your light burst through like the dawn and your healing spring up quickly.” ( 58:6-8)
There’s some ground to stand on, people. That’s self-evident truth, whatever Nietzsche or Ayn Rand thought. That’s the God who is holding me up right now, as my mind goes round and round down and down, like a hobbit in the goblin’s caves. At the bottom, under the mountains, under the lake where Gollum lived, or not under, but elsewhere, only here too. Both here and elsewhere. God was in this place and I did not know it, exclaimed Israel. That’s here. God is holding me up here, and God asks me to deal justly and compassionately with my neighbor, and says nothing about dispossessing and nothing about slaying. Shhhh. Listen.
Listen. “These are the commandments and regulations that the Lord enjoined upon the Israelites, through Moses, on the steppes of the Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho.”
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