Numerology

The book of Numbers begins with another census. All of the men, we are told, number 603,550 (Numbers 1:46). Or at least that’s the translation if elef means one thousand, as it does in modern Hebrew. This is unlikely, given the forbidding terrain through which they traveled. The wilderness would have had to support at least four times that figure to include the Hebrew wives and children—not to mention the hostile tribes they encountered over the 40 years of wandering. More probably, scholars believe, elef was some kinship group of uncertain size.

So much has changed since the people pulled up stakes
and marched away from Sinai—Temples built
and sacked; Kohanim, who touched the Ark
and lived, reduced to neighbors, who for one instant,
cover their heads with prayer shawls and convert
on Yom Kippur to priests, claiming once more
the power to bless us*. Is there not one constant
we can carry forward, the remainder
in a complex sum? No, even numbers
must evolve. Six hundred thousand men?
The land, promised or merely slogged across,
could not support them. So we learn, their thousand
is not like ours, no more than is their G-d.

* The ritual referred to is the Birkat HaKohanim, the priestly blessing. On Yom Kippur, all those who are descendents of the priestly class, or Kohanim, cover their faces with their prayer shawls, ascend the altar, and offer the traditional blessing, “May the Lord bless you and keep you…”

The Lord is My Shepherd

Another double portion this week. This one introduces the idea of the tithe; that is, the duty to give a tenth of what we have to G-d (or to the priests). When a shepherd tithes, he is not to discriminate, either by setting aside the worst or best for his offering: “Of all that passes under the shepherd's staff, every tenth one shall be holy to the Lord. He must not look out for good as against bad, or make substitution for it” (Leviticus 27:32-33).

The shepherd trails the stragglers through the scrub
where they have strayed looking for a shoot,
a nubbin of clover. These sheep have been his charge
since his father culled them from the flock,
and lonely in the nights with only a stone
for pillow, he laid his head on the warm wool
of a lamb and drew his cloak across them both.
Now he must pass the sheep beneath his crook
and, willy-nilly, sequester every tenth
for sacrifice. He must not spare the good,
but like G-d descend upon these creatures
for reasons they would never understand.

B'Har: At the Mountain

Suddenly, at the beginning of parashat B’Har (At the Mountain), G-d begins speaking to Moses “on Mount Sinai,” not, as He had been doing since the beginning of the book, from the Tent of Meeting. Many scholars believe that this chapter is interpolated from a different version and that locating G-d on Mount Sinai is meant to emphasize the importance of what follows.

for my husband

As the mountain is purely background,
part of the story insofar
as everything important happens
against it, so you are here
in this manual for priests:
Do this. Do that. There is no love
amid the unadorned decrees.
And yet, this week as I have studied
“At the Mountain,” I’ve seen your face
behind the words, not because
they have the slightest thing to do
with you, the man whose beard, whose lips,
whose gray-green eyes are the last things
I’ve looked into for twenty years
before sleep overtakes me
but because you are the ground
against which every story unfolds.

Fixed Times

This week’s parasha includes an enumeration of holidays: “These are My fixed times, the fixed times of the Lord, which you shall proclaim as sacred occasions” (Leviticus 23:2). But because Jewish holidays are lunar, they actually move around the Roman calendar. If we adhered strictly to the lunar system, the holidays would eventually become disconnected from what they celebrate. Succoth, a harvest holiday, might end up in the winter; Passover, with its symbols of rebirth, might migrate to September. To correct this problem, once every four years, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month.

Every leap year, we lasso the wandering feasts—
Succoth, which strays too far into the rain,
the palm fronds dripping on the challah, returns
to harvest time. Shavuoth replants its roots
in June. Pesach, wrenched from Easter Sunday
at its birth, returns to nodding acquaintance
with its old twin. The Days of Awe blast us,
once more, with heat, our dresses stained with sweat,
as if to remind us that for a people wandering
in the desert, G-d required fixed times.
We do not come from temperate lands or Lords.

My Father's Kingdom

At the dead center of Torah, midway between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 34, comes a group of disparate laws sometimes called the “Holiness Code.” The second of this week's portions, K’doshim, or Holiness, begins by enjoining the whole Israelite community: “You shall be holy, for I, your G-d, am holy” (Leviticus 19:1). How do we accomplish this? The first rule is to revere our parents.

My father could fix anything. The aunts came in procession,
bearing vacuums, beaters, toasters, fans, and he laid hands
upon appliances until they rose up from the dead.
He tightened sprockets, straightened spokes; the bike wheels hummed
the music of the spheres and all their orbits aligned.
He fashioned blazons out of copper salvage, reliquaries
from balsa boxes, still redolent of his cigars; we filled them
with river stones, cicada shells, white cowries he brought back
from some great service rendered to the nation in a far-off place—
each object sacred because he taught us how to notice it.
His bed was high; most weekdays, he descended in a cloud
of talc before we woke, went off to pace the girders, riveting
the I-beams that delimited the corners of our world.
But Sabbath mornings, we could visit him, plump his throne
of pillows, cluster at his feet. We cherubs, whom he lifted
in ecstatic somersaults and pirouettes, we worshipped him.

Goat in the Wilderness

The origin of the "scapegoat" can be found in this week's parasha. In Levitus 16:21, Aaron confesses all of the peoples' sins "on the head of a goat." The animal is then set free in the wilderness. As I tried to picture this ritual, I realized that the Bible is very stingy with description.

There goat is in the text, but no scrub.
No creosote bush clings to the crust of the dunes.
No pale crag martin nests in the cliffs. No cliffs,
orange, gray, or parched. No darkling beetle
with the scavenged barley from their sacks
scuttles like a thief across their path.
No metaphor of any kind. Their eyes
can’t make connections in this wilderness,
which is not like Egypt. They sigh for leeks,
for fish, while a G-d they hardly know
speaks his sentences: “Do not uncover."
"Do not lie down.” It is an abstract world
they will inherit: a Land they’ll never reach,
a holy word, a G-d who turns the face
He does not have toward them and away.

Tazria-M'Tzora

A two-fer today, as we read a double portion this week (and I fly off to Washington tomorrow). Both portions deal with the duties of the priests, who were responsible not only for the purity of the sacrifices but also for the purity of the camp.

In the Emergency Room

One function of the priests was to check people afflicted with various communicable diseases and sequester those who might pose a danger of infection. The passage reminded me of a trip to the emergency room, where the doctors' insistent questions can have the same incantatory quality as these priestly examinations: "If the priest sees that the eruption has covered the whole body — he shall pronounce the affected person clean; he is clean, for he has turned all white. But as soon as undiscolored flesh appears in it, he shall be unclean; when the priest sees the undiscolored flesh, he shall pronounce him unclean. The undiscolored flesh is unclean; it is leprosy. But if the undiscolored flesh again turns white, he shall come to the priest, and the priest shall examine him: if the affection has turned white, the priest shall pronounce the affected person clean; he is clean" (Leviticus 13:13-17).

Are you having any pain in your arm, in your chest, in your heart?
Is there tingling in your hand, in your shoulder if you twist toward your back?
Can you breathe when you lie down, when you rise up, and when you walk?
On a scale of one to ten, is your pain like the breaking of a rod on a rock?
On the treadmill, do you trudge like a woman climbing stairs
with their tops in the sky? Do you sense the plasma pound in your veins
as the cuff constricts your arm like the fingers of a demon? Is the pattern
on the screen of your breathing and your heart, prophetic as a screed
on the evils of your youth? If the enzymes in your blood betray damage
to your core, can you live outside the camp of the hearty and the well?

Plague House

One of the afflictions the priests checked for, sometimes translated as leprosy, was a kind of lesion that might appear on a person, a fabric, or the wall of a house. It was the duty of the householder to report potential infection with the odd locution, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house” (14:35). But according to the Talmud, "The house affected by the plague never existed and is not destined to exist. It was stated for the purpose of edification" (Sanhedren 71a).

This house, with green and reddish veins
that spread through the grout like sepsis
streaking from a lesion to the heart,
does not exist and never has,
the rabbis say. Why
of all the implausible stories—
talking asses, parting seas—
should this wall blossom
into parable? Deconstructing
the erupting house, stone
by imaginary stone,
carrying the abstract debris
to an unclean place outside the city
that will come to be inside
the Land, we learn that what is hard—
plaster, rock, timber, plague—
is a kind of language, pointing
to something realer than we know.