This is the orderly part of the book of Bamidbar. Everything is being prepared for the march away from the mountain and toward the entrance to Eretz Yisrael. Nothing untoward has happened yet. The trouble doesn’t start until next week.
The order of the preparation has a logic to it -- everyone is organized and accounted for; everyone is placed in marching order. The...Read more...
There are lots of Amirot -- lots of acts of speaking -- in the beginning of the Parasha. It says “Hashem spoke to Moshe,” which is normal, but then He tells him to say to the Kohanim, saying.” Why so much “saying”? Rashi famously says that it implores Moshe to warn the “Gedolim about the K’tanim.” This is usually taken to mean that the adult Kohanim have to start to teach the young Kohanim...Read more...
Boris was born to Berl & Ida Rashkovskiy, in Moscow in 1936. His brother Nahum, who just passed away a few months ago, followed a few years later. The central event of Boris’s childhood, which he repeated often, was the death of his father after Germany turned on the Russian army in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Although his mother ultimately re-married, and had a third child, Sima or Simcha, his father’s...Read more...
The Torah does not pair Parashiot at random or just out of convenience. There are thematic connections. That was obvious last week but not as obvious this week. These two Parashiot seem like they have little to do with each other. One is about Yom Kippur and the encounter between the Kohen Gadol and Hashem while the other focuses largely on issues between people. But they are profoundly...Read more...
