Pinchas

Oh, DOODY! I did not manage to post an entry on Pinchas. I did read Pinchas, and I did make some notes on it, but I was a little slower than usual last week because of a bizarre out-of-nowhere debilitating episode of depression.

Anyway, Pinchas is really not that interesting. God gives Pinchas some kind of special covenant for having killed that guy having sex with that Midianite or Moabite woman (not clear which). There’s a census plus some lottery for distributing land (maybe I recall wrongly though, there seems to be a census and land lottery every other freaking parsha ). The only interesting bit about that is that someone’s daughters show up and complain to Moses that they shouldn’t be permanently disinherited because their dead father left no sons. Moses asks God about that, and God agrees, so the inheritance laws set down in the Torah actually count daughters as inheritors, although only if all the sons are dead. Ladies, get ready for fratricide! Or something. Sorry, I’m a bit weird today, having some funky-ass responses to some meds.

The rest of Pinchas is verse after boring verse about appropriate offerings to be made to God in the form of sheeps, goats, bulls, grain, oil, aromatic spices, and whatever else people have on hand that is precious and can be burnt. Not quite as dull as the endless descriptions of how to build the tabernacle that we got back in Exodus (er, I think) but still. If I’d managed to write an actual d’var last week it would have been something about sacrifice, and the temple, and how Orthodox prayer books still include page after page of descriptions about what sacrifices we ought to be making at particular prayer services which we replace instead with prayer since we don’t have the temple anymore, and even non-Orthodox versions of the Amidah usually say something about rebuilding the temple speedily in our day, and really? We’re looking forward to temple sacrifice again? As a good thing?