Torah Posting: מסעי
It is time for the climax of the penultimate book of the Torah. I don’t know about you, but I find myself a little nervous at this point. All the other books ended with the children of Yisra’el overcoming something traumatic happening to them, which is easier to handle. The Torah is about the traumatic formation of my people, sure. Makes sense. But all the foreshadowing here in Sefer ba’Midbar makes pretty clear that the traumatic event coming up soon — though not quite by the end of this book — is going to be inflicted by us, except all the characters we’ve been getting to know all year (including God) are going to be super happy about it.
As I said last parashah, this is the whole point. The Real Work™. What kind of flimsy tradition would just pat itself on the back with some puff-piece sacred text with the moral depth of a Marvel movie? If you’re Jewish, this is your story, and so is everything else that’s happened to your people since. I don’t mean it’s your history; we’ve been over this. There is very little historical evidence for any of the events or people in this book. I mean that this story — which is what it is — is your culture’s constitution. Its founding document. And it’s full of bloodshed and brutality on your people’s part. Contend with it.
And you know what? As it melds into the historical, archaeologically evident kingdoms of Yisra’el and Yehudah and so forth, the Hebrew Bible doesn’t have a happy ending. All this conquest is for nothing. Our land is conquered by larger empires. Our Temple is destroyed. TWICE. And look around us now. Look at the pain, the brutality, the devastation. We and the other peoples with whom we are karmically entangled are reenacting our ancestral traumas on all sides because we haven’t integrated them, and because we — let alone the others who appropriate our culture — treat the Torah like a simplistic Marvel movie instead of a story that presents the true nature of humanity and forces us to confront it.
That is the task before us. We have to enter the land of this text, wage war with the parts of ourselves who would keep us out, and learn to live there by facing what we’ve done.
The last parashah of ba’Midbar begins with a recounting of all the marches the hundreds of thousands of children of Yisra’el had made since they left Mitzrayim. The Passover events are briefly retold. Then all the places are named, one after another. For the most part, these marches were still only given one sentence when they happened, just like they are here, but with all the intervening laws and arguments and idolatries and other scenes removed, those terse statements of migration from one place to the next become a winding road, lengthening a short trip to last two generations.
When the recounting gets to the steppes of Mo’av, it records God speaking to Mosheh, telling him to order the people to cross the river into the land of Kena’an and then dispossess its inhabitants, destroy their idols and demolish their altars and temples, then settle the land, apportion it by lot according to the size of the clans, and to make sure all those indigenous people are gone. If they don’t, God says, they will be “stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you dwell.” And if it comes to that, God makes clear God Godself will drive out the children of Yisra’el just as God planned to do with those prior inhabitants of the land.
I’m just going to sit in silence with that bit for a moment before I go on.
Next, as though assuming that won’t happen, God begins to define the borders of the land that the children of Yisra’el shall rule after they conquer its inhabitants. It’s large. Then leaders from each tribe are assigned to handle the apportioning. Then the Israelites are instructed to assign towns for the tribe of Levi to dwell in and to tend the surrounding pastures for their own livestock. The fields shall extend from the town walls for a thousand cubits all around.
There are to be 48 Levite towns, including six ערי המקלט (cities of refuge), which the Levi’im are to administer as safe places for fugitives to flee to avoid those who would take their revenge. One who kills another — regardless of intent — must be justly tried before the assembly of leaders. The cities of refuge provide places for killers to await their trial without anyone they’ve wronged taking justice into their own hands. Of course, if they murdered someone, they shall be put to death, and if they struck someone with intent to harm them, even if they didn’t mean to kill them, that’s as good as murder. In fact, the person who was wronged gets to be the one who executes them! But there has to be due process. It can’t happen without a trial. That’s one thing the cities of refuge are for. The other is in cases of accidental killing, to protect the one who caused the accident. But such a person had better not leave the city limits, for the blood avenger is not culpable for killing them if they do.
A single witness is not enough testimony to convict someone of capital murder; multiple witnesses are required. In cases this serious, monetary ransom is not enough to punish the killer or for them to avoid their term in a city of refuge; they must be executed. When the sitting high priest dies, that ends the term of the fugitive in the city of refuge. They may return to their home and resume normal civil life.
The last two lines of this section are injunctions against “polluting” the land, which is tied here explicitly to bloodshed. The people Yisra’el are not to defile God’s land by spilling each other’s blood on it.
This is the part where the ironic foreshadowing of the conquest to come becomes sickening to me.
Interestingly, though, without any segue from the murder section, the last chapter of ba’Midbar is spent relitigating one of the most progressive rulings in the whole book: the property rights of the daughters of Tzelofehad. The heads of the families of a clan from the tribe of Menasheh come before Mosheh and the council and say, “God commanded you to apportion the land by lots, and furthermore to assign the share of our kinsman, Tzelofehad, to his daughters. But if they marry people from another tribe, we’ll lose that portion of our tribal holdings, and the other tribe will gain them. And when the yovel comes around, their holdings will be released to their new tribe, rather than to ours. What gives?”
And Mosheh (as instructed by God) says — just like he said to the daughters themselves — that these men’s plea is just. Mosheh clarifies what God wants for the daughters of Tzelofehad: They can marry anyone they wish, but only from within their father’s tribe. No inheritance may pass from one tribe to the other, and any heirs must remain part of their ancestral tribe. Every woman of Yisra’el may inherit property, the law clarifies, but in order to preserve tribal justice, they must marry within their tribe. And the daughters of Tzelofehad obeyed this ruling, marrying their uncles’ sons.
This is the end of the book. One good solid start at a feminist ruling is given earlier in the book, and right at the end, an asterisk is added. A weakening. Based on the claims of men. The biggest clues to whose perspectives are reflected in this text are the questionable perspectives that go unquestioned. In this case, the entire fourth book of the Torah is capped off with such a questionable perspective, a little snuck-in modification to make things sound a little less feminist.
To me, this has an irony that is deeply entwined with that of the careful impositions of due process around bloodshed right after laying out the blueprints for conquest. There’s almost a split personality here. The Torah is establishing a legal framework for new, enlightened values amongst its people and the annihilation of other peoples simultaneously. But that irony exposes cracks in the former, such as the incongruity of sneaking in this clawing back of women’s property rights at this critical juncture. It’s like the Torah narrator can’t help himself. And this, I claim, sows the seeds of this story’s unhappy ending just before its moment of triumph.
🏰
