Month: May 2026

A. The Problem: The Desert Madness Routine
Parashat Behaalotecha presents us with one of the most fascinating – and psychologically exhausting – descriptions of the life of the Children of Israel in the Sinai Desert. The Torah describes in unusual length how the entire camp moved according to the movement of the Divine Presence cloud.
"And when the cloud was lifted from over the Tabernacle, the Israelites would set out, and in the place where the cloud settled, there they would encamp. . . . Sometimes the cloud would remain from evening until morning, and when the cloud lifted in the morning, they would set out. . . . or for two days, or for a month, or for days [a year] . . ." (Numbers 9:17-22)

Try for a moment to imagine this situation on a human, everyday level. Entire families, elderly people, children, tents, animals, and possessions. You arrive at a station, unload your equipment, set up the tent, and get the kids settled for sleep. In the morning, you wake up, the cloud lifts – and you have to pack everything up and set off again. On the other hand, sometimes you are parked in a desolate, boring, and uncomfortable spot, and you are stuck there for a whole year without knowing when you'll be able to move.
There is no schedule. There is no five-year plan. There is no ability to plan for tomorrow. The Torah presents us with a reality of extreme uncertainty, nerve-wracking, and almost impossible to control.

B. The Distant View: Israeli Helplessness and Japanese Awareness
I am writing these words from Japan, where I have been for the past few months. Observing Israel from here evokes deep thoughts about this concept, uncertainty.
The current Israeli reality feels exactly like the desert in the Parshat Behaalotecha. Israeli society is living within a thick cloud of immense and exhausting uncertainty: Will war break out again in the north? What will happen with Iran? When will elections be held? The collective feeling in the country is that we have lost the ability to plan even a week ahead. This uncertainty breeds constant anxiety, deep frustration, and a sense of helplessness.
But here in Japan, in the heart of a culture of over a hundred million people, completely removed from Jewish tradition, I encountered a very different worldview.
In Japanese tradition, conceptually and culturally, there is a fundamental Buddhist concept called "Anicca" - the law of impermanence. According to it, the natural state of the world is that everything flows, changes, and is temporary. Nothing is permanent: not the political situation, not health, nor the weather. The Japanese developed an entire philosophy called Mono no aware.
(Mono no aware), meaning the awareness and sensitivity to the transience of existence
While we, in the West and in Israel, perceive impermanence as a disaster and a threat to be fought, Japanese culture actually finds beauty and inner peace in it. The most familiar example is the cherry blossom (sakura) – it is beautiful and celebrated with immense excitement precisely because it lasts a week or two and then falls. The Japanese do not try to stop the cloud or time; they practice accepting the present moment, the "here and now.".

C. The Solution: What happened at the graves of craving?
And here we return to our portion, and discover that the Torah and Japanese wisdom meet in the exact same place.
Immediately after the description of the journey following the cloud, the people in the desert broke. The psychological burden of uncertainty overwhelmed them. They became "complalers," and cried at the graves of craving: "Who will feed us meat? We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free... and now our soul is dried up, there is nothing but the manna before our eyes.".
Psychologically, the people are sinning by fleeing. When they are unable to bear the uncertainty of the desert, they flee into a false nostalgia for the past—for Egypt. Although they were beaten slaves there, at least everything was fixed and known in advance. They are fed up with the manna.
What is manna? Manna is the ultimate food of the "here and now." It is given out day by day, and it cannot be stored for tomorrow (because it will rot), and it requires man to rely on the present. The people hated manna because manna forced them to live in that moment, without existential guarantees for the future.
The solution that the parsha offers us—and which harmoniously resonates with Japanese Zen—is the understanding that holiness does not reside in stability and absolute security, but rather in the ability to let go of control and dwell within the present moment. The pillar of cloud was not meant to stress the people, but to train them. The desert is a tough school for accepting impermanence. God tells them, and also us: You cannot control the cloud, you cannot know when you will travel and when you will return. The only thing you can control is how you behave in this moment, within your tent, with the people beside you.

D. Conclusion: Finding Calm Within the Cloud
The complex and painful Israeli reality will not change tomorrow morning. The threats and political and security upheavals will continue to accompany us for a long time.
But perhaps, this practice of the cloud page, combined with a bit of the quiet and humility of Japanese wisdom, could offer us a little relief.
Instead of exhausting our strength on existential anxiety about a future beyond our control, or on nostalgia for a past that is no longer, we can choose to focus on the "manna" of today. In the present. In our ability to build supportive and sensitive communities, like in an Israeli house of prayer; in the ability to meet the other, to sit around a Shabbat table, to listen, and to find moments of peace, sanity, and holiness within the fleeting nature of the journey.
The external reality may not change immediately, but who knows – our full and stable presence within the "now" can, in the end, wonderfully impact tomorrow. Shabbat Shalom

Parshat Naso, the second parsha in the Book of Numbers, continues the preparations for the dedication ceremony of the Tabernacle.
At the beginning, the sons of the tribe of Levi are counted, who were chosen to carry the tabernacle from place to place. Their very small number in relation to the other tribes presents difficulties in itself, and also in relation to the number of firstborns (22,273), which the Levites replace (out of over 600,000 Israelites, only one in 27 or more is counted as a firstborn).
The portion concludes with the dedication of the altar and the sacrifices of the tribal princes, and the list of gifts brought by each prince is repeated exactly 12 times (perhaps to show that the size of the tribe does not matter, or alternatively, that none of them were willing to have their name omitted from the list of gifts).
In the middle are three eclectic portions concerning ritual purity and impurity (the command to remove lepers and other impure persons from the camp, the laws of the Nazirite, and the strangest of all, the "Sotah portion" dealing with a magical ritual to identify women suspected of adultery).
The trial process of a woman who strayed refers to a woman who was warned to stop isolating herself with a man who is not her husband, yet she was found to persist in this behavior and is therefore suspected of adultery. During the ritual, she is required to drink bitter waters into which verses of imprecation (the curse) from the Torah portion (Numbers 5:18-22) are erased from a parchment. These verses include the text, among others, 'May the LORD make you a curse and an oath among your people, when the LORD causes your thigh to waste away and your belly to swell. May these bitter waters that bring a curse enter your body, causing your belly to swell and your thigh to waste away.' Drinking the bitter waters ends in one of two outcomes: either the woman emerges unharmed from the event, thereby proving her innocence and gaining a healthy offspring and renewed trust in her marriage, or she experiences severe pain and even dies if she is guilty. In any case, this is a supernatural process that includes many elements that contradict fundamental principles of legal process and justice according to Halakha.
First, unlike ordinary legal proceedings, which the relevant parties must attend, a woman suspected of adultery has the right to refuse to participate in the ceremony. In such a case, she is permitted to agree to the decision to dissolve her marriage and forfeit any right to payments due to her by virtue of the marriage contract (Mishnah Sota 4:2).
This is surprising because if the court had convicted her of adultery, she could have been sentenced to death – yet she is given the option to avoid legal proceedings if that is her wish.
Furthermore, direct intervention by the Creator in a dispute between man and his fellow man is not found in any other instance (and as Ramban notes (Numbers 5:20), this is the only commandment in the Torah whose fulfillment, in the case where the woman is found guilty, depends on a miracle). After drinking the bitter waters, "her belly swelled and her thigh fell away." In all matters between one man and another, we find a clear procedure whereby the responsibility for judgment in cases between man and his fellow man is given solely to the judges sitting in the courts (Deuteronomy 17:11). And perhaps this is also the place to mention that even in matters between man and the Creator, the Sages have removed the Creator's opinion from the discussion (Bava Metzia 59b - the oven of Akhnai).
Why, then, does the Creator of the world have a role in resolving this particular conflict?
Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik believes that the purpose of the ceremony is the opposite of what is apparent, and when one carefully reads Tractate Sotah, it appears that its purpose is actually the rehabilitation of the relationship between husband and wife.
According to Rabbi Soloveitchik, the entire ceremony is a complex psychodrama designed to provide an opportunity to salvage a marriage on the line. If the wife is at fault, she has a low-risk alternative in the choice not to participate in the ceremony and instead to dissolve her marriage. Conversely, if she is not at fault, the ceremony gives her the opportunity to face the risk and show that she is confident in her marital fidelity.
The ceremony is not in line with the rules because its goals are not legal (and therefore the partner suspected of an affair is not a participant in the process at all) but rather rehabilitative, and it creates a platform for the dissolution or rehabilitation of the marriage.
And in contemplation of our present day. In the Mishnah (Sotah, 9:9) it is written that at a certain point, 'the waters of bitterness ceased' due to the changing needs and realities among the Jewish people. Similarly, the mitzvah of yibbum (levirate marriage), which was practiced and accepted in the past in cases where a married man died without children, has disappeared, and in our time, the default option is to perform chalitzah, which exempts the widow from marrying her deceased husband's brother.
It seems that as norms change, the adherence to the Torah and the preservation of its values are adapted to our changing world, and there is room to adapt current Halakha in other areas, such as agunot and refusal to grant a get.
On second thought - perhaps all the great effort surrounding the breakup of a single family stems from the Sages" answer to the existential question, "So what do you do all day?"
The Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 68:4) tells of a matron who asked Rabbi Yossi ben Chalaphta what the Holy One, Blessed be He, has been doing since the creation of the world. Rabbi Yossi replied: 'He sits and matches couples: This man's daughter with that man, this man's wife with that man, this man's money with that man.'.

The matron scorned the answer, claiming that matchmaking was an easy task she could perform herself. Rabbi Yosi replied to her: "If it is easy in your eyes, it is difficult before the Holy One, blessed be He, like the parting of the Red Sea.".
God of the universe sees his work falling apart and decides to intervene.
In previous parshiyot, I mentioned the importance of leadership that knows how to stand by essentials when facing a major event (Abraham in the argument over the fate of Sodom, Moses in "Blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book, which thou hast written" after the sin of the calf). Parshat Sotah shows us an example where the Creator commands to erase His name (erasing the verses that include God's name into the bitter waters) from the book in order to save one household.
And from here – to our lives.
While success is not guaranteed, if the Creator is willing to have His name erased in the case of a wayward woman to promote harmony and prevent injustice, surely we are called to do our part to ensure justice for those who have been wronged and for harmony to prevail in our homes.
Shabbat Shalom!

What we read this week in Parshat Bamidbar echoes our current reality. A year and a month after leaving Egypt, the Children of Israel are in the Sinai Desert. Now they are beginning to organize. God speaks to Moses in the Tent of Meeting and asks him and Aaron to take a census of all the congregation of the Children of Israel, according to their families. This is a broad bureaucratic undertaking; each family is assigned a chief of staff, who is mentioned by name.

Whom do they count in the census? Only the males! Twenty years old and above, who are eligible for military service. (This refers to those fit to serve, not those who have completed their service and are leaving the army, as is common in modern Hebrew.) The text provides a meticulous breakdown and summary of the numbers of those counted, the name of the tribe and the families composing it, its structure, and its roles. This census is detailed for each of the tribes: Reuben, Simeon, Gad, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh), Benjamin, Dan, Asher, Naphtali... until the tribe of Levi is reached.

Here God gives a completely different instruction: "But you shall not take a census of the tribe of Levi, nor count them among the children of Israel. Instead, you shall assign the Levites to the tabernacle of the testimony, and to all its furnishings, and to all that belongs to it. They shall carry the tabernacle and all its furnishings, and they shall serve it, and they shall encamp around the tabernacle..." (Chapter 1; 49-50)

The Levites receive a different task, not one for army veterans. The descendants of Levi are entrusted with the Tabernacle; they must carry the Tabernacle and its vessels and are obligated to camp around it and serve in it. Any descendant of another tribe who approaches the place will die.

The Children of Israel accept the decision and organize themselves for camping. Each tribe is marked by its own flag and receives instructions on where to camp.

In contrast to the census of the rest of the Israelites, the census of the descendants of Levi is detailed by their families: Gershon, Kehath, and Merari. And from which tribe? They are counted not from the age of twenty, like the rest of the Israelites, but from one month old. The text specifies precisely the role of each family and where they are encamped to guard the Tabernacle. The descriptions of their duties for sacred use are numerous and beautiful: they removed ashes from the altar, covered it with curtains of blue and badger skins, and mentioned are censers, forks, and various vessels for carrying out the task. The extensive detail suggests that this was a very important task, but it was also dangerous. God commands that the descendants of Kehath be protected so that they not be struck down for approaching the Tent of Meeting in the Holy Tabernacle.

Let's bring this up to the present day. Do you think modern-day Haredim see themselves as if they, like the tribe of Levi, have been exempted from the obligation of military service that the rest of the Bnei Yisrael have? Is the root of the matter here, in the Parashat Bamidbar? Do Haredim today believe that they, and only they, have been entrusted with the role of guarding the Bnei Yisrael, the work of the Mishkan, the Torah, and God? In your opinion, is the task of preserving the heritage of the people of Israel solely in their hands?

I want to suggest that we, the Zionist sons of Israel, also have a significant role in preserving heritage and preserving the people of Israel. Lift your heads and stand tall!

Today's Zionists revived the existence of the people of Israel in their land: we have become, for example, "Bnei Dan," people of "Mateh Asher," "IDF veterans." Zionists brought the Hebrew language back to being a spoken language, thereby preserving the Hebrew tradition, which also allows us all to read the Bible in its original language and keep the Torah as a foundational text in our lives. And also – the Zionist Jews returned the use of beautiful Hebrew names that we encounter here in the Parashah of Bamidbar: Nachshon, Amminadab, Nathanael, Eliab, Elizur, Zuriel, Elisaph, Ammihud, Pedahzur, Abidan, Nadab, Abihu, Labani, Gersoni, and many, many more...

So, in my opinion, the preservation of the heritage of the Children of Israel and the people of Israel is also in our hands, the Israeli Zionists of the twenty-first century. With all due respect.

At the same time, my true hope is to reach a comprehensive understanding that every tribe in the people of Israel has a role in preserving our heritage. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. We must find the connector, the common good, or at least strive to reach it.