This is a weekly series I have, you can find previous Torah studies here.
BRIEF PSA: If you’re gonna be a freshman at Yale this fall, first of all, hi!, second, please consider applying to the Yale Effective Altruism summer fellowship. Here’s their description of the program:
The YEA Fellowship is a great opportunity not only to participate in deep and impactful conversations with other Yalies about meaningful career paths, but also to join a global community stretching across all disciplines (philosophy, economics, psychology, political science, computer science, history) working to identify and solve the world’s most pressing problems.
This virtual fellowship requires a commitment of about 3 hours per week throughout the summer (1.5-hour weekly discussions and ~1.5 hours of weekly reading) and is an amazing way to both meet fellow ’29s and think about important questions before you start your Yale career.
Seems like it will be lots of fun! Apply here by 11:59 PM this Wednesday, June 18, if you’re interested.
Ok, on to the Bible stuff…
This week’s parsha is Beha'alotcha, and it mostly consists of Israelites kvetching, God punishing them harshly, and then Moses telling everyone to just chill out.
The story starts pretty boringly:
The people took to complaining bitterly before God. God heard and was incensed: a fire of God broke out against them, ravaging the outskirts of the camp.
The people cried out to Moses. Moses prayed to God, and the fire died down.
I mean, alright, pretty straightforward!
Probably figuring that their complaints hadn’t been specific enough to lead to any sort of improvement, the Israelites tried again:
The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat!
We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.
Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to!”
Moses is sympathetic to their meatlessness concerns, and he gets all self-hate-y about how he can’t allay them. He laments to God:
Where am I to get meat to give to all this people, when they whine before me and say, ‘Give us meat to eat!’
I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me.
If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness!
God does a whole fancy ritual—summons 70 men and gives them all prophetic visions—and then a magical bunch of dead quails pile up around the encampment. All the Israelites are very happy and they go out and collect the quails and start eating them, which for some reason makes God very mad:
The meat was still between their teeth, not yet chewed, when the anger of God blazed forth against the people and God struck the people with a very severe plague.
The lesson here is that your leaders don’t owe you anything. It’s not about how good or sympathetic or specific your request is—you should just suck it up and be happy with your lot. Or else you’ll get struck with a very severe plague.
The surviving Israelites decide to call the site of the quail-plague “Graves of Lust” and they set out to encamp elsewhere.
When they arrive, Miriam and Aaron get cranky for whatever reason, and start agitating over how Moses had wed, and then divorced, a Cushite woman.1
Given that, in fact, “Moses himself was very humble, more so than any other human being on earth,”2 God becomes pretty upset with all this criticism. So He walks in on Miriam and Aaron having sex, condemns them, and then afflicts Miriam with scales.
Moses takes pity and asks God to heal her, and God says, “ok, after a week, I will,” and after a week, he does.
The lesson here is, of course, that your leaders are always more virtuous than you. When they do things that seem bad or immoral, actually they’re doing them for good and humble reasons, and you should be ashamed for not being better and humbler yourself. Sure, it looks like Moses wed and then quickly divorced a hot piece of ass just to get laid without strings attached; but actually he only divorced this beautiful woman so he wouldn’t be tempted to have sex with her anymore, and he could remain pure and devoted to God.
Duh!
I don’t like to criticize organized religion so much anymore; I think it probably does more good than harm for most people who adopt it.
But what’s going on in this parsha is pretty blatantly dumb and bad. It’s trying to instill total fealty to religious and political leaders. Actually, it’s in many ways reminiscent of Trump’s cult of personality: he can do totally incoherent things on policy, and all his supporters just have to suck it up; when he has a million sex scandals, it’s cool and awesome, but you should be finding a tradwife and settling down already.
Today’s dominant versions of Judaism tend to be better about this. Where the priests were spiritual dictators, rabbis are spiritual advisors. The widespread adoption of liberal norms in the diaspora helps too: we like to be free-thinking and rational now, in a way that just didn’t really exist back in Biblical times.
Of course, some Jewish communities maintain traces of the cultiness: For instance, in Israel, many ultra-orthodox Sephardi Jews hang on the every word of their Chief Rabbi. This wasn’t great, but in the 1980s, someone had the bright idea to turn it all into an influential political party called Shas.
The leader of Shas today, Aryeh Deri, is a real piece of shit. He’s held a number of ministerial positions, in which he’s been taking bribes for decades—he was first caught and convicted in 1999. A notable Sephardic rabbi, Ovadiah Yosef—officially the “Spiritual Leader” of the party—declared, insanely, that Deri was innocent, simply a victim of elite sabotage.
This act kicked off a major realignment in Israeli politics: a new divide between secular, wealthy Ashkenazi Jews and religious, poor Sephardim. It’s a divide that basically only one man has ever capably bridged: Benjamin Netanyahu. A secular, wealthy Ashkenazi Jew with an uncanny ability to play the part of Moses. To do nasty things, and punish everyone else for it. To promise, promise, promise, so convincingly, everything his coalition partners want—and then get off on a technicality like “Oops, we’re at war with Iran now!”
I’m not really sure what my point is. Mostly it’s shock that this archetype somehow still exists—that people so consistently fall for the slippery-strongman routine. I hope we get over Trump fairly soon—return to a politics of liberalism and rationality, not personality and loyalty. And I hope the Haredim eventually come to their senses too, and lose some of the cultishness—though I don’t think it’s incredibly likely to happen.
This is either a literal reference to an Egyptian-ish tribe (whom the Greeks called “Aethiopians”) or, as Rashi argues, an idiomatic term for a beautiful woman:
Because of her beauty—she was called, “the Aethiopian” just as a man calls his handsome son “Moor”, in order that the evil eye should have no power over him.
Based on this reading, many scholars think the “Cushite wife” refers to Moses’ wife Zipporah, the Midianite daughter of Jethro.
Numbers 12:3—the Trumpiest verse of the Bible so far.