Unscrolled : 54 Writers and Artists Wrestle With the Torah (9780761178743)

by Bennett, Roger (EDT)

  The glut of dead quail that blanketed the Israelites’ encampment was also a problem. What are we going to do with all of these dead birds, Motl? Nu, we’ll put them on sale. Although God intended it as a punishment, hoping the gluttons would eat until they puked, the quail turned out to be an integral element in the development of another national trait, the “Going Out of Business” sale. Two-for-one quail. The revered commercial abilities of the nation received an early start.

  From Nasology, Or Hints Towards a Classification of Noses, by Eden Warwick, London, 1848.

  When I read this portion, I can’t help but be taken back to the debunked pseudosciences of the nineteenth century. Nasologists often raged about the Hebrews’ “vending acumen,” linking it to their “commercial noses.” According to the tenets of nasology, as outlined by Eden Warwick, the author of its central tome, personal and national traits determine the shape of one’s nose. Its nasal taxonomy holds that a nose of the hooked variety is Hebraic in origin and commercial in nature. Ms. Warwick further argued that although the Hebraic-Mercantile nose was “good and practical,” it did not “elevate [its owner] to any exalted pitch of intellectuality.” Moreover, owners of such noses, although undoubtedly inclined commercially, were considered to be “curious wranglers, ingenious cabalists, fine splitters of hairs, shrewd perverters of texts, sharp detecters of discrepancies, clever concocters of analogies, and finders of mysteries in a sun-beam”1—in other words, irritating, whiny nudniks with nothing better to do after they’d sold out their stock in dead quail.

  A subsequent interpreter of nasological sciences, Gustavus Cohen, held that the Hebraic nose was inherently a “combative nose, receiving its peculiar form principally from an extraordinary development of the sign of apprehension.” A combative nose. “Combative,” indeed. An allusion, perhaps, to the biblically established tradition of “it’s not good enough.”2 Combative. Because saying “everything’s fine” is an affront to the nation. As much as they were pilloried and discredited, even the pseudosciences understood the Israelites.

  From the personal collection of Eddy Portnoy

  1From Nasology, Or Hints Towards a Classification of Noses, by Eden Warwick (London: Rich. Bentley, 1848).

  2From On the Manners and Customs of Modern Judaism, by Gustavus Cohen (Nottingham: J. Derry, 1880).

  “Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, ‘The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are men of great size.’” —Numbers 13:32

  SH’LAKH L’KHA (“Send to you”)

  Numbers 13:1–15:41

  The Lord orders Moses to recruit one man from each of the twelve tribes to scout Canaan. Moses explains the mission to them. The twelve are to report back on the region’s topography, military strength, resources, and fortifications.

  The scouts explore as far as Hebron, cutting down a branch of grapes so large that it takes two men to carry it. The mission lasts forty days. When it is over, the returning scouts exhibit the giant grapes and breathlessly tell the Israelites how the land is inhabited by powerful, well-fortified tribes. Only one scout, Caleb, confidently predicts an Israelite victory. His telling is soon supported by that of a second scout, Joshua. The rest fearfully tell tales of giants swarming the area and suggest that the region is a land that devours its settlers.

  The effect of these fear-driven reports is immediate. The Israelites begin to wail, questioning Moses and the decision to leave the comparative safety of Egyptian slavery. Moses and Aaron, siding with Caleb, urge the Israelites to remain rational. They reaffirm that Canaan is a land of milk and honey: If God is with them, the Israelites should have no fear. Their words have no effect. As the community prepares to pelt them with stones, God is forced to make an appearance.

  God speaks to Moses, demanding to know how long the people will lack faith, despite all that has been done for them, and threatening to unleash a disease that will destroy them. Moses protects the Israelites by asking God to imagine the pleasure the Egyptians will derive from such an act; will not the Lord appear impotent?

  God promises to be patient; however, because of their incessant moaning, of those who left Egypt, only the loyal scouts, Caleb and Joshua, will live to see Canaan. All those aged twenty years and older will die in the course of the forty years the Israelites will wander in the wilderness. (The number forty is selected to represent one year for each of the forty days the scouts spied on Canaan.) The ten failed scouts die immediately of a plague.

  In their grief, a group of Israelites vow that they have seen the error of their ways and will set forth for the promised land of Canaan immediately. Moses warns them that they cannot enter the land without the Lord’s permission, but they ignore his advice and are instantly cut down by the Amalekites and Canaanites.

  Sacrifices for the promised land

  The Lord then offers a list of sacrifices required to mark the moment the Israelites enter Canaan, and reminds the Israelites about the role of the sin offering, repeating that those who defiantly break a commandment will be cut off from the community.

  An example is soon provided: An Israelite is found collecting wood on the Sabbath. God instructs Moses to have him stoned to death.

  The Lord then tells Moses that he must ensure that the Israelites wear fringes on the corner of their garments as a visual reminder of the Lord’s commandments and the role God played in freeing them from Egypt.

  Caitlin Roper

  Truth v. Peace, or How My Tiny Life Reminds Me a Little Bit of SH’lakh L’kha

  I married the wrong man. Before that, I’d had misgivings. When I would tell him I was upset about something that had happened between us, he’d say, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  I talked about my worries to close friends, and to some family. But though they listened and advised, no one told me not to get married. More than one friend recalled the trepidation they’d felt before committing to marriage.

  You can’t blame other people for not telling you the truth1—truth is often the enemy of peace. Most of us would rather stay safe than say what we feel is true.2 That is how I married the wrong man, after all.

  One friend told me the truth.3 She told me not to marry him. She asked a few cutting questions. Could I share my feelings with him? Could he talk to me about what I cared most about? Did he want to? Was the sex good enough? Did I feel connected to him? She told me she didn’t think I should do it.

  I remember where I stood while she said these things. I was clutching my cell phone, pacing the sidewalk across the street from the house I shared with my boyfriend. Looking up at the light from the windows as darkness shaded me in. My friend was thousands of miles away, but she could hear me.

  I didn’t feel angry that she’d told me the truth.4 But I didn’t listen either.5 Months later, she came to my wedding, flying across the country to be there, knowing I was making a mistake.

  It wasn’t long before I left him.6 We divorced. I was sad for a long time. It was a mess of guilt and pain, but there is one indelible thing from that time—that single conversation, the voice of truth, the one person who put truth before peace. I aim to be more like her.

  1Unless you’re God. It really pisses Him off. When He told Moses to send spies to the promised land, and they came back shaking and mewling about undefeatable giants mucking up the milk and honey, full of crap and unmotivated to press forward at God’s command, He was furious.

  2As desperate as the Israelites were to find a home, they wanted to stay safe more than move forward into the unknown.

  3Brave spies Caleb and Joshua told the truth about the promised land.

  4Clearly, I’m not God. He was SO MAD.

  5Neither did the Israelites. I mean, they didn’t listen to Caleb and Joshua; they were fearful, and the
y mucked up.

  6The Israelites had to walk in the desert for forty years for their mistake. I was married for four months.

  “They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, ‘You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourself above the Lord’s congregation?’” —Numbers 16:3

  KORAH (“Korah”)

  Numbers 16:1–18:32

  Korah’s rebellion! Moses’ and Aaron’s leadership is challenged by Korah. Abetted by Dathan, Abiram, and On, he rounds up 250 respected chief- tains and demands to know why the brothers are exalted more than any other Israelite.

  Moses meets the challenge with a challenge. He suggests that Korah and his confidants return in the morning with fire pans and incense so the Lord can demonstrate exactly who should be considered holy and worthy of communicating with God. He finishes by suggesting that Korah has overstepped his bounds and proclaiming that he and his band—Levites all—should have settled for the honor of being priestly assistants without aspiring to be priests themselves.

  Moses sends for Dathan and Abiram, but they refuse to recognize his command. Moses is annoyed, yet he instructs Korah and his band to return the following morning.

  The next day, the whole community assembles to watch the spectacle. The Lord’s presence appears, commanding Moses and Aaron to stand back so the rebels can be annihilated. Moses questions whether God should punish the collective for one man’s sins, and God relents, instructing Moses to evacuate the area around Korah, Dathan, and Abiram’s tents: They are wicked and must be wiped out accordingly.

  Just as Moses does this, the three men wander out of their abodes accompanied by their wives and children. Moses declares that if these men end up dying a natural death, he should be considered a false prophet. But if they are spectacularly swallowed up by the ground, then it should be taken as a sign that Moses is acting on behalf of the God they spurned.

  No sooner have the words tumbled from Moses’ mouth than the earth opens to swallow up the families and their possessions. The 250 chieftains are simultaneously burned to death by fire dispatched by the Lord.

  The Lord orders the fire pans of the dead rebels to be turned into plating for the altar to serve as a warning to the people. Yet the following day the entire community rails against Moses and Aaron, disgusted by the death and destruction they have wrought.

  As they menace Moses and Aaron, God’s presence appears in cloud form, ready to annihilate the people. Moses realizes that God is prepared to unleash a plague and quickly orders Aaron to make an offering on behalf of the people. The plague descends nonetheless. Aaron begs for penitence, but is unable to check it before 14,700 lives are lost.

  Vote of confidence for Aaron

  God instructs Moses to take a staff from each of the tribal chiefs, plus one from Aaron, and deposit them in the Tent of Meeting. The staff of the individual whom God deems the elected leader will sprout into flower as a sign that will end the Israelites’ incessant grumbling.

  The next day, Moses enters the Tent and discovers Aaron’s rod has sprouted blossoms and borne almonds. God orders that it be left in the Tent as proof of Aaron’s elevated status. But the Israelites continue to moan, voicing a collective fear that they will be struck down if they approach the Tabernacle. God responds by carefully articulating the roles of Aaron and the priests as well as the Levites, in regard to safe maintenance of the Tabernacle.

  Adam Levin

  Like so many conflicts in the Torah, the basic one described in Numbers 16 is fairly straightforward: good Jew versus dummkopf Jew. And like so many other times that this conflict arises in the Torah, the good Jew in Numbers 16 is Moses, and the dummkopf Jew, a man called Korah, is little more than a redshirt with a speaking part. Korah thinks Moses—who gave up an extremely easy and unimaginably privileged life as an Egyptian prince to murder a slave driver, go into exile, turn prematurely gray, then return to Egypt to bring Korah and all the other enslaved Jews out of Egypt by walking them through the middle of a sea God split open on his (Moses’!) cue, only to spend what he shortly came to realize would be the rest of his life listening to people whine in a desert—is hogging God.

  Korah thinks Moses is hogging God, and, having convinced a bunch of Jews that Moses is hogging God, Korah gets these Jews to stand behind him while he complains to Moses about the perceived hogging, and demands that he and his family (i.e., Korah and his family) get more access to God. Moses finds this so hilarious that he falls “on his face.” But then Korah makes it clear he’s not kidding at all, and Moses tries to explain that who gets access to God and who doesn’t isn’t up to Korah or Moses, but God, and that God wants to deal pretty much exclusively with Moses and Moses’ brother, Aaron.

  Korah’s not having any of it, though, and Moses, still hopeful, tries to talk sense to two of Korah’s friends, Dathan and Abiram, but Dathan and Abiram make it clear that they agree with Korah; they too think Moses is hogging God. They even go so far as to refer to Egypt as a “land of milk and honey.”

  Moses tells the lot of them to break out some incense and shut their pieholes.

  So a bunch of them break out some incense and shut their pieholes, at which point God appears. He tells Moses and Aaron to get away from all the incense-lighting piehole-shutters because He’s going to do something extremely violent. At the mention of extreme violence, Moses and Aaron both fall “on their faces,” not so much because they think extreme violence is as funny as all that, but because they know that God appreciates a well-executed face-plant, and since, after all, He’s just a man without a body (unless everything that exists plus everything that will exist and has formerly existed and might or might not one day eventually exist can be said to be a body), they know that if they can get Him to laugh, He’ll be more likely to listen to reason. And it turns out, they’re right. He listens to reason. They tell Him He shouldn’t kill all those thousands of people—people who can pratfall as good as anyone—just because Korah and a couple of his pals are dummkopfs, and God tells Moses to warn anyone who doesn’t want to experience extreme violence firsthand to get out of the way. And though Moses warns as commanded, Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and their wives and babies and their extended families stand firm. The rest of the Jews get out of the way.

  And then God opens a sinkhole beneath all the members of the families of Dathan and Abiram and Korah who aren’t holding burning incense (all the wives and children), and He does so quickly enough to scare them crazy, but gradually enough to prevent them from dying at impact. And then they stand there, in the darkness at the bottom of the sinkhole—which, being a miracle sinkhole, then covers over, but doesn’t fill in completely—and they scream until they die of fright or dehydration.

  Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and all the other guys from their extended families who are holding burning incense, however, are killed in a trice with a wall of Godfire, and that’s that.

  Double face-plant notwithstanding, what makes this episode stand out among others of the good Jew versus dummkopf Jew genre is that the dummkopfiest of the dummkopf Jews seem to get off quite a bit easier than the less dummkopfy of the dummkopf Jews. That Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, having played the most active roles in the rebellion, are nonetheless granted a quicker and seemingly more merciful death than are the members of their families, who were, when the sinkhole opened up beneath them, only honoring their husbands and fathers as the law commands, is . . . interesting. God—quite possibly overcompensating for His own feelings of self-hatred—seems to be insisting that it’s more reprehensible to have an angry, stubborn man for a father or husband than it is to be an angry, stubborn man. Either that, or it’s better to die screaming beneath a desert than it is to die suddenly by fire.

  “Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid.” —Numb
ers 19:2

  HUKKAT (“Decrees”)

  Numbers 19:1–22:1

  The incredibly strange ritual of the red heifer: God breaks down the esoteric ritual law of the red heifer for Moses and Aaron. The Israelites are commanded to offer an unblemished red cow that has never once worn a yoke. One of the priests, Aaron’s son Eleazar, is to slaughter it outside of the camp, sprinkle its blood toward the front of the Tent of Meeting, and burn it with cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson stuff. The ashes are then to be swept up and kept as “water of lustration,” which can cleanse any Israelite who comes into contact with a corpse.

  Instructions for its usage are then provided. The ashes are to be mixed with fresh water and hyssop and sprinkled on objects and humans exposed to corpses. Any individual who fails to follow these procedures shall be cut off from the community.

  The deaths of Miriam and Aaron, plus more grumbling, and a tough patch for Moses

  The Israelites arrive at the Wilderness of Zin. Miriam dies and is buried there.

  The Israelites begin to complain loudly about their lack of water, repeating their now familiar line of questioning to Moses and Aaron: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to suffer like this?”

  The Lord commands Moses to solve the drought by taking his rod, assembling the community in front of a rock, and commanding it to spring forth water. Moses does so, but after informing the Israelites of the wonder he is about to perform with God, strikes the rock twice. Water pours forth, but God expresses displeasure that Moses has not struck the rock according to the Lord’s instructions. This act of disobedience is perceived as a symbol of Moses’ lack of trust for which he receives a severe punishment: He will not be able to lead the Israelites into the land that has been promised to them.