Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Pinchas, the name of the guy who ended last week’s parsha by shishkabobbing two people who were in the middle of having sex. We’ll start with a brief recap:
On the tails of that public execution/act of zealotry, God praises Pinchas, granting him and his descendants eternal priesthood. God then tells the Israelites to hunt down and kill the MIdianites, and tells Moshe and Elazar to conduct a census of all males over the age of 20. The count is done and the total comes out to 601,730, not including the Levites. The land of Israel is divided among the tribes according to the count, and then the Levites are counted. After all this, the daughters of Zelophehad approach MOshe and say that it’s not fair that they get no land just because their father, who died, had no sons. “Can we have his plot, please?” they ask, to which Moshe says, “hmm good question… god? Thoughts?” and God says, “hmm good question, sure”. God then tells Moshe to climb Mount Avarim, so he can see the Land of Israel before he dies, and to pick a worthy successor. Moshe picks JOshua, and gives him some spiritual powers, before publicly naming him as the official next leader. We then get a lot of information about communal sacrifices: the daily, Shabbat, rosh chodesh, passover, shavuot, rosh hashanah and yom kippur sacrifices are all mentioned, closing out with Sukkot and Shmini Atzeret, which involve A LOT of animals.
If your first thought when I started talking about a census of men over the age of 20 was “wait, didn’t they JUST do this like, a few parshas ago?” the answer is yes, yes they did. THe number comes out a little smaller this time, by about two thousand. So what’s up? Why did they need to count again? Chizkuni, a 13th century commentator known as a “Rashi Super-Commentator” for his general tendency to talk about what Rashi has talked about, notices that what’s changed between these two censuses (Censi?) is the incident of the spies. If the people were worried before that they wouldn’t have enough military might, Chizkuni says, then surely they feel even more nervous now that they’ve lost two thousand troops! BUt this,Chizkuni says, is exactly God’s point. They’re not going to succeed in their military campaign because of numbers and might, they’re going to succeed because they have God on their side. We don’t need abundance, or overwhelming power. We need faith. It’s a hard sell to people about to go into battle, I imagine, but it sets up the dynamic that God is going to insist on: your success and failure is less about your power, and more about mine.
So I want to offer a blessing for the Israelite men who are about to be drafted into battle, knowing that they have fewer fellow troops for the same task. I hope they were buoyed by the reminder that they are not alone, no matter how many people are with them. And to anyone who is facing down a task that feels daunting and lonely, I hope you too are blessed to know that you are not alone, no matter how many people you can see or count around you.