A Quick Torah Thought

A well-known question asked about this week's parsha is, "What exactly was Miriam punished for?" Rashi shares that Miriam had commiserated with Tzipora, Moshe's wife, after Moshe had separated from her to grow closer to Hashem.  It is an every day matter that we ask people we're close to about the behavior of others. "Do you think he did the right thing?" or perhaps, "How would you have acted in such a situated?" In essence, it can be said that Miriam was simply "bouncing something off of" Aharon, seeing what he had to say.  But in essence, when we look at Hashem's response, we can infer that the conversation Aharon and Miriam had had, in of itself, was not the problem.  Rather, the Torah itself interjects right after the verse about Aharon and Miriam's forbidden speech, "Now Moses was a very humble man, more so than any other man on earth." Thus, lies the secret, perhaps. Miriam was right to speak to Aharon, but her...

 Years and years ago, when I was in Queens College, a very kind-hearted Reform family reached out to me and asked me to prepare their son for his bar mitzvah. I have no recollection of how they got to me, but more than anything, I was impressed by the parent's genuine desire that their son know how to read each and every word of the portion that would become his own. That parsha was Nasso, this week's portion. We read each and every word, and covered a wide range of topics, from the different duties of different Levite families in the mishkan , the holy tabernacle, to the laws of purity in the Jewish camp and the fidelity expected in a Jewish home, and the unfortunate sequence of events that would be set in motion if a woman was suspected of being adulterous. Likewise, we spoke about the laws of the Nazirite, and the gifts brought by the nesi'im , the heads of each and every tribe. I remember even asking a halachic question of a rabbinical authority; the 12-year-old child h...

 One of the things that startles me about our most recent war is that more Arab blood has been shed on the part of the Arabs, than Jewish blood has been shed on the part of the Arabs. To choose a tasteless metaphor, imagine a soccer or football game in which a team loses 2-1 after scoring not only one but two "own goals." And yet, repeatedly, what we learn as Jews living in Israel is not only that Jewish blood is cheap, but that Arab blood is cheap as well, and that from the perspective of Hamas, were you to kill Arabs, as long as you kill Jews on the way, albeit fewer, it would well be worth the price.  In the latest campaign, fire from Hamas terrorists has killed more Arabs in the form of inadvertent rocket fire, and premature explosions - in Gaza itself - than it has killed Jews. Which shows us the sheer pain, rigor, and almost impossibility of countering an enemy who wants to die. If you kill them, they're holy martyrs. If they kill their kids in the process, they are...

This week's Torah portion offers an interesting perspective on property ownership in walled cities in Eretz Yisrael. There is a contradistinction between property in cities that are walled, and otherwise. In the former, were one to sell the land vested to him or her as a tribal inheritance, then, after one year's time, the land could not be repurchased. As such, it would seem that this was a sanction or punishment of sorts; if you sold tribal property in a walled city, after a one year statute of limitations, the land could not be repurchased. In contrast, were the land sold to have been land not found in a walled city, but rather a home with a courtyard with fields for agrarian purposes, that land could not be repurchased for the first 2 years, but then thereafter, could be repurchased during all of the successive years leading up to the jubilee year, at which point it would return to its rightful ancestral owners.  The ideas presented in the Torah in this respect may be forei...