D'var Torah in a Minute

I really wanted to talk about quails this week. I'm going to talk at greater length about other things, but I'm going to start with the quails. Beha'alotekha is home to my favorite story in the whole Torah. The Israelites are agitating, complaining that they are sick of eating manna and want meat. Moses, unable to deal with all the kvetching, goes to God and says "If this is the treatment You intend me to receive, then I beg of you, please kill me now and free me from this suffering." To this, God engages in a bit of phenomenal   trolling. God doesn't just give the whining Israelites meat to eat for a day, or two days, or even a week. No, God promises that they will have meat until they cannot stomach it anymore and it is coming out their nostrils. Overnight, a massive flock of quail is dumped on the camp, leaving a layer of fowl two cubits deep, so that the least successful quail gatherer collected 10 homers over the course of a month-long quail-pocalypse. Fo

This week, we read the longest parasha in the whole of the Torah, Naso. The portion starts with a continuation of the census from last week, finishing up the enumeration of the Levites and their tasks; from there, we are commanded regarding interpersonal sins - one who commits a sin against another person must pay restitution in the value of the wrongdoing plus one-fifth of the aggregate value (that is, if the monetary value of the sin is $100, the added fine is $25 so that the value of the supplemental damages is one-fifth of the total amount of restitution paid). The parasha also includes the laws of the Nazarite, the Priestly Blessing, and the narrative of the consecration of the Tabernacle. And then, stuck in the middle of all this is the ritual of the Sotah, the accused adulteress. Also known as the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, the Sotah ritual is among the strangest ceremonies prescribed in the Torah, and it was abolished by an edict of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, though that became

This week, we begin the fourth book of the Torah, known in English as Numbers and in Hebrew as Bamidbar (technically, it should be B'midbar, but the grammatical construct being used shows definiteness by specification rather than using an article, and the name we use drops the specification, so we insert the definite article, or rather its assimilated form with the existing preposition, so that we call the book "In The Wilderness" and not "In a Wilderness"). But you didn't come here for a lesson in the nuances of Hebrew grammar, at least not when it's unrelated to the topic of the parasha. So, here we go.  This portion is boring. It's 159 verses of census-taking, for example, "As for the Tribe of Asher, their rolls by clan and household, listed by name, of all those 20 years and older, eligible for military service; the enrollment of the Tribe of Asher was 41,500". It repeats this exact formula for each tribe, with the names and numbers cha