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This Week’s Torah Reading

Naso

In parashat naSO, we learn of some duties for which the Levites were responsible, most of which had to do with maSA or porterage, but which might more commonly be expressed as schlepping. Since they were schlepping parts of the mishKAN, the tabernacle, the schlepping was an honor. The Israelite camp had to remain holy so impure people would leave the camp for the duration of their impurity. Those who had wronged another had to make restitution, even if the wronged person had died and there was no remaining kin. Restitution amounted to whatever was taken plus 20% more and that handed over to the priest, that is, to God. The case of a soTAHor suspected adulteress is discussed. Should a man suspect his wife of adultery, he brought her to the koHEN or priest. The koHEN mixed sacred water and some tabernacle earth, dissolved a curse of sterility into the murky concoction, and made the woman drink it. The mei meraRIM or Ordeal of the Bitter Waters, was meant to expose a guilty woman by rendering her sterile. Next we learn of the naZIRor Nazirite, a man or woman who took on special restrictions in order to live a spiritual life. The Nazirites could not drink liquor or wine; eat any grape products; cut their hair; or be near a dead body, even a dead parent. At the end of the Nazirite term, sacrifices were made and the Nazirites’ hair was cut off and burned. God tells Moses how Aaron is to bless the people and the three-fold priestly benediction is thus recorded. Finally, the gifts brought by each of the twelve tribes at the time of the mishKAN dedication are recorded. Each tribe gave the identical gift, yet the Torah records each one separately.  

A SHABBAT THOUGHT

I have a terrible memory. I never forget a thing.

~~ Edith Konecky  ~~

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Top 60 Plus One Reasons I Love Israel

By Barbara Sofer / May 8, 2008
Why do I love Israel? Let me count the whys. Here, in no particular
order, is an updated list, with new additions and highlights of recent
years.

1. Jerusalem is so quiet on Shabbat that you can hear birds singing even
on the main streets.

2. We change our calendars on Rosh Hashana, not January 1, because that's
the real new year

3. Just hours after leading his Chelsea team to its first Champions League
final, Petah Tikva-born coach Avram Grant joined the March of the Living
in Auschwitz, and told all of Europe that his pride at Israel's emergence
from the horrors of the Holocaust surpassed any football achievement.

4. We serve kosher food in the trendiest malls.

5. Streets bear the names of prophets and medieval poets. Our
communications satellite is called "Amos."

6. Land of milk and honey: Big news when Israeli archeologists recently
discovered evidence of the beekeeping industry - even beeswax - that goes
back 3,000 years.

7. Land of milk and honey: We're so successful at making milk products
that we have hundreds of choices of cheese and advise New Zealand about
making sheep cheese.

8. The Nahariya-based Strauss company, started by dairy farmer immigrants
from Germany in 1936, together with the Elite company started by a
candy-maker immigrant from Riga in 1934, are the largest coffee
manufacturers in Central and Eastern Europe, and second biggest in Brazil.
Aviv Matza exports its unleavened bread to Egypt.

9. We have laboratories to check for the biblically prohibited mix of
linen and wool, shatnes, and we're the first country to make men's suits
from recycled plastic bottles, for sale soon at Sears.

10. At Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo, the loudspeaker announces "afternoon
prayers (minha) are now being held near the elephants."

11. The Biblical Zoo is kosher for Pessah. The primates eat matza; the
parrots get rice.

12. Every kindergartner knows that frogs are the second plague in the
Haggada, but our "save the frogs" campaign was launched at the Biblical
Zoo on Passover.

13. Mega investor Warren Buffet's first investment outside the US ($4
billion) was in Israel's Iscar company. He got so much positive publicity
that he told Iscar's CEO: "I was nobody before I bought your company."

14. Sixty years after statehood, even young people refer to something
old-fashioned as "from the days of the (British) Mandate."

15. Theodor Herzl's bearded image welcomes visitors to hi-tech Herzliya,
and we celebrate Herzl Day.

16. My five-year-old grandson can tell you all about Theodor Herzl. Also
about Spiderman.

17. Combat soldiers aren't embarrassed to phone their moms and
grandmothers.

18. While Intel Haifa workers were working in an underground shelter
because of the missile attacks in the Second Lebanon War, Intel announced
the new multi-core processor developed there.

19. Entire families show up for military graduations, and bring enough
food to feed an army.

20. Name droppers. The poet Chaim Nachman Bialik named the Egged bus
company and also the Tishbi winery

21. Youngsters travel far to visit the Kibbutz Kinneret cemetery where
poet Rahel and national song laureate Naomi Shemer are buried.

22. First graders read the Bible in the original Hebrew, and celebrate
with a party.

23. We follow the level of the Kinneret more faithfully than we do our
stock portfolios.

24. We have only one Pessah Seder but Purim, our dress-up holiday, lasts
three days. In Jerusalem on Purim, it's hard to tell who's in costume and
who isn't.

25. We have the highest concentration of hi-tech companies outside Silicon
Valley, and also the most yeshivot anywhere.

26. After a calamity, police have trouble keeping away bystanders who want
to help.

27. Thousands of free-loan societies flourish. You can borrow wedding
dresses and pacifiers.

28. Despite the tensions and political dissension, Israel has the highest
Jewish birthrate in the world.

29. Despite the tensions and political dissension, Israel is the fastest
growing Western country in the world.

30. "Jerusalem of Gold" is still voted the favorite national song.

31. We have timeless cuisine: You can order Israeli breakfast, business
lunch and dinner simultaneously at Israeli cafes.

32. Our pilots fought over the honor of taking part in a fly-by over
Auschwitz 60 years after liberation.

33. Israeli fighter jets accompanied tourists safely home from Mombasa
after they were threatened.

34. We have 120 members of the Knesset because that's how many were in the
ancient Great Assembly.

35. We first developed candy-sweet cherry tomatoes as a TV-watching nosh.

36. On Remembrance Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day, the act of
remembering halts traffic. Even kindergartners stand silently, and
understand why.

37. While dining rooms are shrinking in Western homes, Israeli dining room
tables are getting longer.

38. We invite strangers for a home-cooked Shabbat meal.

39. An Israeli artichoke farmer with a sore back developed the
sophisticated Hollandia beds and exports them from Sderot to many
countries, including Holland.

40. Strangers feel free to tell a parent to put a hat on the baby in a
country where we wear scarves, snoods, spodiks, streimels, wimples,
fedoras, berets, tarbushes, homburgs, kippot and keffiyot.

41. While other Western nations debate immigration, we absorb more
immigrants per capita than any other country in the world. Almost
immediately all learn the Hebrew word for patience, savlanut.

42. Our street musicians can play in symphony orchestras; our supermarket
clerks know calculus.

43. Our biggest shopping seasons precede Rosh Hashana and Pessah.

44. Municipalities' decorating contests feature succot, not trees. The
Succot holiday is high season in Israel; book hotel rooms a year in
advance.

45. Even politicians from anti-religious parties say "Baruch Hashem."

46. "Where were your grandparents from?" is a common question. Where else
would anyone care about my grandparents?

47. We celebrate Mother's Day, now Family Day, on the yahrzeit of
Henrietta Szold who, with Recha Freier, organized Youth Aliya but who had
no children of her own.

48. For all the talk about the greening of the planet, we're the only
country in the world that started the 21st century with a net gain of
trees. (Thank you, Jewish National Fund)

49. During the Second Lebanon War, JNF rangers stayed in the forests
during Katyusha attacks to save the trees

50. We're among the most Internet-connected people on the planet. We
invented the cellphone, instant messaging, the chat room and the silent
prayer, but still talk best with our hands.

51. Before Purim, the TV weather forecast relates specially to the day the
kids go to school in their costumes. For a week before Yom Kippur, the
weather report focuses on the upcoming fast.

52. We love children, and have more IVF per capita than any other country.
It's free up to the first two children.

53. We celebrate Independence Day with a Bible Contest.

54. Israelis developed both the system to see photos from Mars and cameras
to monitor crime on buses in Brazil.

55. Despite our soul connection to chicken soup, per capita we're the
world's biggest eaters of healthier turkey, bigger even than America. Go
figure!

56. We're among the first to help countries that experience disasters, and
the first to have our field hospitals up. When Israel helped Turkey after
an earthquake, an Israeli doctor made an incubator from a matza box.

57. Jewish soccer players for Bnei Sakhnin compete against Arab players
for Maccabi Tel Aviv.

58. Childbirth and burial are free. Even the homeless have health
insurance.

59. On Saturday night, the radio summarizes the news for all those who
don't listen on Shabbat.

60. We're agricultural high achievers, producing seven times the output
with the same water we used 25 years ago. Our date trees average 182 kilos
- 10 times more than the average in the Middle East. One date tree is
growing from 2,000-year-old seeds found in Masada.

And, as on a birthday cake, one for next year:

61. We come from more than 100 countries and dream in Hebrew.

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Separate and Really Unequal

Dear CyberRav,

When I went to the Bar Mitzvah of my Orthodox cousin in Borough Park, I was forced to sit on the women’s side. I was so angry, I couldn’t even follow the service. Am I not equal to my husband? Why wasn’t I able to sit with him? What is the point of sitting separately? If this is the way it’s going to be, I have to think twice about involving myself with any simhah with these people! 

CYBER RAV ANSWERS

Dear Steamed,

The same thing has happened to me when I have gone to Orthodox funerals and it seems as if within certain circles, separate seating is the rule. But I would hate for you to stop going to family functions because of where you are seated. Let me see if I can move you to a different understanding of what mehitzah or separate seating is all about.

Mehitzah (its actually a reference to the divider that separates men and women) typically raises the ire of many liberal Jews because it is regarded as demeaning to women, as if they can only be treated as sex objects or because it underscores that their role is different, and others would more emphatically say irrelevant, in the conducting of services. One of the most difficult things in the world for people to understand is that the same phenomenon can have different meanings to different people. I recently spoke to a congregant who hates going to synagogue, even though he likes me and feels like his child is receiving a good education and he finds services interesting. But going to synagogue for him "means" visiting a place where his father was financially harassed. Since a little boy, a certain episode in the life of his family left a bitter taste in his mouth. He cannot seem to get around it. I love going to synagogue. He hates it. Who is right? No one—it’s all in what it means to you.

You may hate mehitzah, but for some people, mehitzahmeans that they are being faithful to a Halakhah or Jewish law that liberal Jews all but ignore. To some people it means that during prayer we need to position ourselves differently from the way we might normally position ourselves. If someone came to you as a rabbi and said, "I and my wife need to sit separately in order for our prayers to be effective," would you refuse them that choice? I certainly would not. I don’t think your cousin’s community wants you to be angry, but they do want to create seating within religious ceremonies that helps them create the mood of prayerful meditation they hope to achieve.

Please don’t be offended when I tell you that you are thinking as an Orthodox Jew. In other words, you think that there really ought to be one way for all Jews to create religious ceremonies. But there is never one way. So many of us want everyone to believe and to pray the way we believe and pray. I don’t buy it. There must be many options for people and mehitzah is one such option. I do not ask--Why can't you pray like me? I ask, how can we get you to pray? And then I would try to establish the conditions by which prayer becomes possible, even if that means putting up a mehitzah. Keep going to your Orthodox family’s religious events and just keep in mind that their way is one of many ways to worship God. Isn't that the better approach to dealing with the God's people?

Rabbi Rafi Rank
CyberRav

Shabbat Shalom Everyone!!

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