Sh'lach L'cha

[cellio]

Last night I led the evening minyan, which meant giving a short d'var torah. Here is approximately what I said.

Comments

[baron_steffan]

Perhaps they were not punished for failing to simply follow, but rather for doing so.

So they were punished not for questioning G-d, but for *not* questioning their fellow men. What a great insight!

(It is for this and not for the golden calf that the people were condemned.)

That's rather difficult to accept. I'd think that the incident of the Golden Calf would have been considered pretty heinous, and especially so relative to this seemingly minor infraction. So what was the punishment for the Golden Calf? There must have been something.

[cellio]

So they were punished not for questioning G-d, but for *not* questioning their fellow men. What a great insight!

Thanks! I don't know if it's accurate; it's just a theory.

That's rather difficult to accept. I'd think that the incident of the Golden Calf would have been considered pretty heinous, and especially so relative to this seemingly minor infraction. So what was the punishment for the Golden Calf? There must have been something.

The punishment for the golden calf was that a lot of the perpetrators got killed. It seems a more heinous offense; I speculate that mitigating factors would include (1) they were reverting to what they knew only a couple months ago; (2) they were proven wrong (if the calf was really a god Moshe wouldn't have been able to grind it up; their "god" was defeated); (3) midrashically, not everyone particpated (the women opted out); (4) it was a first offense.

[wrenb]

Thanks for the useful insights! I'm reading 3 verses tomorrow (because I'm a slacker Torah reader) and was struggling to find something interesting for our minyan's discussion.

[cellio]

Glad to hear it helped. What three verses did you read, and what did you end up talking about?

[wrenb]

I read Numbers 15:20-23, which is God forgiving the people (the quote is used in the Yom Kippur liturgy) and then announcing that this generation will not live to see the Land. We chatted about the topics you brought up in your post -- it wasn't a very lively discussion, so mostly it was just me talking.

Funny thing with the Torah reading. I assumed that the scroll would be rolled to somewhere near this week's portion. Ten minutes before we were due to start the service, I started looking for my portion. I'd forgotten my tikkun at home, so I only had a chumash to go by [translation: I had the Bible broken into logical chunks with commentary and vowels, but nothing that looked just like the scroll]. Thank goodness I had an Israeli willing to help me; Michal and I spent 20 minutes looking for the parsha. I'm not sure I'd have found it at all without her. The scroll hadn't been used for months, by the looks of it.

[cellio]

Some chumashim indicate in the (Hebrew) text where the white space is (look for free-floating pehs or samechs). That can help with navigation. Others don't, and in that case you're kind of stuck. :-( (Been there, done that

[starmalachite]

We are a people that wrestles with God. We don't hold with "shut up and do what you're told". Yes, we are expected to have faith in God, but we tend less toward blind faith and more toward "trust but verify". We are expected to use our God-given capacities for analysis and reason.

I am a practicing and committed Christian, but this quote beautifully sums up why I have always deeply respected and appreciated Judaism.

I also suspect that it has a lot to do with why Judaism is so threatening to so many varieties of fanatics and fundamentalists.

[cellio]

Thanks for the feedback. I hadn't considered the threat angle before, but that seems plausible to me. Certain strains of fundamentalism -- and let me stress that this is not true of all or even most Christian denominations -- seem to require a level of obedient group-think in order to function.