(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



A Song of Zion / Dvar Torah: Parashat Behaalotecha [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-20  

Welcome to the diary series A Song of Zion/Dvar Torah, our weekly check-in and virtual minyan for Jews on Daily Kos. This is an open thread, and we treat it as a safe space for Jewish folks here. Non-Jews are welcome but we ask that they listen more than speak. No squabbling, please: if you want to fight, kindly step outside.

I offered to host this week’s installment because I had some interest in this week’s Torah portion, Behaalotecha. It was the portion I read for my Bat Mitzvah, and I thought that after some 40 years it was time to revisit it.

I wasn’t much of a Torah scholar back then, and I haven’t exactly applied myself in the meantime. My Bat Mitzvah training, at a Conservative congregation, was quite rigorous. But I fell out of my religious habits some time during high school and neglected them for several decades. I became an atheist, and cultivated other interests. Fortunately, mettle fatigue has provided links for Torah dilettantes and I found among them several discussions of Behaalotecha. I will lean heavily on these sources.

(Mettle fatigue, incidentally, also offered a lovely and meaningful discussion of Jewish atheism – or is it atheist Judaism? – in last’s week’s Song of Zion.)

I remember the opening lines of the Haftorah portion, apt as they were for a Bat Mitzvah girl:

…. a vivid depiction of the joy that will prevail when G‑d will return to Jerusalem: "Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion, for, behold! I will come and dwell in your midst, says the L-rd.

What else was going on in those Torah and Haftorah sections?

A bunch of whinging, for one. The exodus from Egypt was underway, and some of the Israelites were just so done with the whole wandering-in-the-desert thing; and really, really sick of mannah. Navy Vet Terp offered this discussion a few years ago:

This week’s parasha resumes the story that was previously reported in the latter part of the book of Exodus about the continuous whining and carping of Israelites as they wandered through the Sinai Desert. God took care of their everyday needs, providing a cloud that shielded them from the desert sun and all the mannah they could eat. But they couldn’t stop complaining, as detailed in this week’s parasha (and elsewhere in Exodus and Numbers) in chapter 11 of Numbers: The people took to complaining bitterly against the Lord. . . . The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving, and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to!” Numbers 11:1, 4-6. And the Lord responded to this griping by killing a bunch of the complainers, first by creating a wildfire on the edge of the encampment (Numbers 11: 2), then by a plague (Numbers 11:33).

Yikes.

Ramara, writing in 2017, focused on other parts of the reading.

Over the years I have been doing this, I have written divrei Torah for Bechalatecha a couple of times, and it seems to fit with the searching for inspiration to do good in the world. This year that seems more necessary than ever.

2017, ah yes, that first year of the Trump administration. And this year? The need has not diminished.

Ramara goes on:

This week's parsha begins with a major symbol, both of the Jewish people, and of the light of wisdom in the world: the menorah, the seven-branched candlestick that illuminates the tabernacle in the desert, and later in the Temple. But the menorah did not create itself, nor did God create it directly. There is an artist involved, named Bezalel. Bezalel received his specifications for the Tabernacle and its ritual objects from Moses, but he more than the other artisans who built all these things was led by the spirit of God in his work. God chose Bezalel as one with special gifts, who would be able to take the blueprint given to Moses and turn it into art. Could God have created the menorah himself? Of course. But in the world after creation, God works through human beings…. So the creative spirit that comes from the Creator enters humans who are led to create. They are in-spirited, or inspired as we now say. Isaac Luria taught that the six branches on either side of the menorah represent the six branches of human learning, while the center represents Torah. Human and divine knowledge are both necessary to light the world. God and science are not opposed to each other; rather, God supports science as the central stalk of the menorah supports the other six.

I love this interpretation.

Ramara also mentions “the story of Miriam and Aaron complaining about Moses’ leadership, with Miriam spreading gossip about Moses, and being punished with leprosy”. Notably, the text specifies that the complaints centered around the “dark-skinned woman” that Moses had taken for a wife prior to the exodus. I believe that this is the part I focused on in my Bat Mitzvah speech. (Unfortunately, though I think a printed copy exists somewhere in my house, I couldn’t find it this week. If I find it, I’ll update this discussion accordingly next time I do this.)

For tonight’s discussion, I looked into this story some more. Here is one translation:

There Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses regarding the “dark skinned woman” whom he had married, for he had indeed married a “dark-skinned” woman. They said, “Has God indeed spoken only with Moses? Has God not also spoken to us?” And God heard their words against Moses. Now Moses was extremely humble, more than all the persons who live on the face of the earth. God suddenly said to Moses, to Aaron and to Miriam, “Go all three of you, to the Tent of Appointed Meeting.” God descended in a pillar of cloud and stood at the entrance of Tent of Appointed Meeting. God called Aaron and Miriam. “Hear now My words: My servant Moses is trusted in all my house. Mouth to mouth do I speak with him, in a vision and not in riddles, and he beholds the image of God. Why, then, were you not afraid to speak against My servant Moses?” The wrath of God was kindled against them and when the cloud departed from the Tent, Miriam was leprous as snow. Aaron turned to Miriam and saw she was a leper. Aaron said to Moses, “O My Lord, do not count it as a grave sin against us what we have done thoughtlessly and how we have sinned. Let Miriam not remain like a corpse.” And Moses cried to God, “O God, please heal her.”

God did, and the encampment moved on. There are some interesting questions here. For one, why, if both Aaron and Miriam were going after Moses, was only Miriam punished? Aaron also had some responsibility for the creation of the Golden Calf, and escaped immediate punishment for that infraction as well. I suppose as a high priest, and Moses’s brother, he had some standing. It’s hard for me not to bristle at the discrepancy here, though, as Miriam was punished quite severely.

Who was the “dark-skinned woman?” The texts state that Moses’s wife, Zipporah, was a Cushite, and thus likely darker than we’d expect Egyptians or Canaanites to be. (The biblical Cush is associated with the region that’s now Ethiopia and Sudan.) Moses was of course born in Egypt, but as a young man he ran off after killing an Egyptian overseer who’d been beating a slave, and he met and married Zipporah during his years away. She didn’t return to Egypt with him when he went to work on freeing the Hebrew slaves, but they reunited in the Sinai while the Jews were wandering in the desert.

For speaking out against the “dark-skinned” woman, Miriam was stricken with a disease that turned her skin white. As a Bat Mitzvah girl, I interpreted this story as anti-racist, which seemed an obvious interpretation. Now I’m not sure. Leprosy turns up in the various Hebrew texts as standard-issue punishment for sins of all kinds, so it may just be coincidence. It’s not even clear that Miriam’s complaints about Zipporah focused in some sense on her skin color; she may have had other complaints about Moses and his wife. It may be that the text mentions her coloring simply as a matter of descriptive identification, and not as a negative attribute.

I found it interesting back then to learn that Moses had a Cushite wife, racial intermarriage being pretty uncommon among the suburban California Jews I grew up among in the 1970s. But was this even a mixed-race marriage? I mean, what race was Moses? As a white kid, I suppose I tended to imagine Moses as white, as were most of the other Jews I knew. That the text notes Zipporah’s skin color indicates that she was darker than whatever he was, and that’s all we know. And did that matter, to Egyptians and Israelites of that time period? I wonder. (Is skin color mentioned much elsewhere in the Old Testament?) Intermarriage along the length of the Nile River and across the Arabian Peninsula has been going on for thousands of years, and I’m sure that then as now the people of the area were greatly varied in their complexions.

The Behaalotecha story does serve as a reminder that intermarriage with the locals has been a longstanding tradition for Jews. As evidence, we have come to resemble whatever people our ancestors lived among. I am a blond-haired, blue-eyed descendent of German Jews: there was obviously quite a bit intermarriage back in my family tree. (Yet our appearance did nothing to save my family from the Nazis, who assigned us to the “Hebrew” race.) Though American Jews tend to look white, being mainly of Ashkenazi descent, Israel is remarkably multi-racial, reflecting the global diversity of Judaism.

I’ll welcome your views on Behaalotecha, as I said, I’m no Torah scholar. Perhaps next year I can add some more insights.

I’ll close with a nod to Louisiana’s new law inflicting the Bible upon public schools. Here are Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys with “Top Ten Commandments:”

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/20/2247616/-A-Song-of-Zion-Dvar-Torah-Parashat-Behaalotecha?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/