Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
The Torah teaches us that because of rebelliousness and lack of faith, the generation of the Exodus – i.e. those Israelites who physically went out of Egypt – died in the wilderness. Our parasha for this week tells us that the same punishment is pronounced on its leaders, Moses and Aaron. It is all described in yet another story of Moses getting water from the rock:[…]
Poor Moses. The Book of Numbers doesn’t give him a moment’s rest. In the parsha Behaalotecha, read two weeks ago, opposition to his leadership was expressed by Miriam and Aaron. A week ago, the parsha of Shlach Lecha described a rebellion of Israelites incited against Moses by ten scouts who returned from a reconnaissance of the Land of Canaan negative about their chances of conquering it. This week Moses must face another rebellion among the Israelites. Our parsha describes this rebellion as follows:[…]
In the Bible, the Divine wrath is typically seen as a punishment, exerted on Israelites or other peoples. The same is true of this week’s Torah portion; however, there are nuances that make this story different from other biblical accounts of the Divine anger and punishment. The first thing worth noticing here is that if we slightly change the language and its underlying logic this particular Divine wrath can be[…]
We perform mitzvot and do many things to achieve certain goals. We do them because they are meaningful, because they improve our life and the life of others; we expect the desirable outcomes to happen; among positive outcomes of our actions there are things we perceive as ‘rewards’, ‘changes we want to happen’ etc. Some of those expected outcomes can be considered miracles, depending on their likelihood within the state of matters at the moment we wish something to[…]
