TorahParsha

Priesthood

i
The people revolt against the priesthood of Aaron, the High Priest.

All the people are holy, they say.

So everyone should be a priest.

*
Because of this revolt, God sends a plague.

But Aaron runs into the midst of the congregation.

And standing between the living and the dead, Aaron blocks the plague’s spreading.

ii
God makes Aaron’s wooden staff sprout blossoms, like a living tree.

The people, seeing Aaron’s specialness, know that not just everyone is fit to be a priest.

*
Then God speaks to Aaron directly.

Even Moses does not accompany Aaron when God speaks to him.

God speaks to Aaron alone.

iii
There is a difference between a holy man who can stand before God, and a holy man who helps his people to be with God.

Standing between the people and the plague, Aaron becomes this second kind of holy man.

*
Then, God guides the people to accept him.

Then, God speaks with him.

~~~

Special thanks to Jordan Rosenberg for helping me think through the conclusion of this piece; and to my wife, as always, for editing.

Vows

i
Moses sends the leaders of the tribes to spy out the Land.

They bring back a terrifying report.

They say: It is a Land that devours its inhabitants.

*
The people become hysterical.

They cry at their tents. They say: Let us appoint a new leader and return to Egypt.

They bear no faith that God will protect them; their faithlessness spreads like wildfire across the camp.

For this, God will not let that generation ever enter the Land.

ii
Shortly afterward, God speaks of vows.

When you come to the Land, God says, and you take a vow to offer a gift to God, this is what you must do.

*
You take a vow to God because you feel personally close to God.

You feel so personally close to God, you offer your own way to serve Him. You offer your vow.

*
In times of widespread apostasy, a person who feels such personal closeness to God will not stray from God.

A person who feels such closeness to God will say: Others will do what they may; but I feel close to God.

iii
That generation of the spies, the generation of mass hysteria, felt little of this personal closeness to God.

*
It is no surprise that the people who vow to God are the ones whom God describes as the people who will come to the Land.

Trumpets

i
When the Cloud of God lifts up from upon the Tent, the people are to continue on with their journey.

You would think that the people would need no other sign to wander on, other than this.

*
And yet Moses is to make two Trumpets; and the priests shall blow on these trumpets to announce the time for the journeying of the camps, when God wants the people to move.

*
We must explain why there is a need for these Trumpets, this other signal.

ii
To follow God’s moving Cloud is to follow a vision of God.

There is a difference between following a vision of God, and internalizing God’s will—to make God's will into your own want, your own wish: so much so that you move in God’s path of your own accord, of your own pronouncement, to the sound of the trumpet-blast that you, yourself, have sounded.

*
This second way is the way of a mature faith.

It is to this mature faith that God wants us to come, that the Trumpets which He has commanded allow us to come.

Promise of Sacrifices

As the people ready to leave the Mountain of God to trek through the Desert to come to the Land, two kinds of sacrifices are discussed:

• The offerings brought by a wife in a troubled marriage
  
  
• The offerings of the holy man; even the holy man whose holiness is cut short because someone dies very suddenly beside him--death sprung as from nowhere to taint his holiness.

*
So that even as the people will wander the Desert, away from God’s Mountain; and the path is full of unknowable troubles (like trouble between man and wife, like troubles of unforeseeable death)—even then, God says to the people: Come to My Tent, come to My altar, come before Me.

*
So you see in these sacrifices how God brings us in—how God extends His promise—when there is no other certainty in life.