Parashat Shlach L’cha

KI Torah Gems, Parashat Shlach L’cha

This week’s parasha features the famous incident of the 12 scouts sent to examine the Land of Israel. Ten of the spies bring a negative report (laced with some truth – that the land is flowing with milk and honey). On the basis of this, the children of Israel panic and to some extent repeat the sin of the golden calf. G-d threatens to destroy them and Moses intercedes on their behalf, again echoing the events surrounding the golden calf. The generation which committed the sins of the Golden Calf and lost faith due to the scouts’ report is destined to die out in the desert. They attempt to force an entry into the land against Moses’ instructions and fail disastrously.

Rashi, the prolific French medieval commentator, notes that in BT Megillah 23b the verse at chapter 14 line 27 is cited as the textual source for minyanim being composed of ten adults. “The Lord spoke further to Moses and Aaron, 27 "How much longer shall that wicked community keep muttering against Me?”. This means that our definition of what constitutes a community for prayer – the number of people that allow us to make the call to prayer, to say the various kinds of kaddish, and conduct a Torah reading – is derived from one of the low points of Jewish history. Indeed, it is traditionally understood that the day of the scouts’ negative report was the 9th of Av, the day that became the saddest day in the Jewish calendar.

I wonder if on some level deriving the minyan from the number of scouts who delivered the bad report represents a takkanah; an effort to repair our ancestors’ mistake. Every time we gather to daven in a minyan whether it is to bentch the birkat ha-mazon after kiddush or three times daily in the Rabb Chapel downstairs we’re undoing some of the damage done by the minyan of scouts who caused B’nei Israel to lose faith. A community of people can do damage or it can do mitzvot and acts of loving-kindness (gimilut chesed). In and of itself a community is a neutral entity, what we do with that community and the strength that it gives us is what counts.

Shabbat Parshat Naso

Torah Gems -
June 5 2009 / 13 Sivan

This week's Torah Gems were prepared by

Anochi Atoncha

Shabbat Parshat Naso



The kohen shall now adjure the woman with the oath of the curse, and the kohen shall say to the woman, "May the Lord make you for a curse and an oath among your people, when the Lord causes your thigh to rupture and your belly to swell. For these curse-bearing waters shall enter your innards, causing the belly to swell and the thigh to rupture," and the woman shall say, "Amen, amen." Then the kohen shall write these curses on a scroll and erase it in the bitter water. (Bamidbar 5:21-23)

Great is peace! For to make peace between husband and wife, the Torah instructs that the name of G-d, written in holiness, should be blotted out in water. (TB Chullin 141a)

Parashat Sotah, regarding the suspected adulteress, is often misunderstood as an episode of unfair and unjust persecution of a wife by her husband. The quotation above from Tractate Chullin informs us that the rabbis understood the sotah ritual differently. They understood the ritual as a means to elevate the principle of shalom bayit (peace in the home).

Rav Tvi Leshem explains that the case of the sotah involves a woman who is not necessarily guilty of adultery, but neither is she necessarily innocent, as she has already been seen alone with a man who is not her husband:

[The woman's] flirtatious behavior leads her husband to formally warn her not to seclude herself with a certain main. Disregarding his warning, they again seclude themselves and there is now a halachic presumption that relations have taken place. If this is the case, her husband must divorce her. The sotah procedures come in order to permit husband and wife to remain together. According to Levinas, the importance of this procedure is that the case is taken out of the hands of the husband (who in the ancient world could simply murder his wife), and placed under the responsibility of an outside judicial body.

The sotah ritual is more a remedy for a jealous husband than a punishment for a wayward wife. The Torah recognizes that human passions can destroy marriages. In order to preserve shalom bayit, and by extension the integrity of the community at large, the Torah douses jealousy with water, and in so doing guides husbands and wives back into each others' arms.