Parshat  Pinchas   5774  /  2014  

Story  and  the  Future     Numbers  27:3   Our  father  died  in  the  wilderness.   He  was  not  one  of  the  faction,   Korach’s  faction,  which  banded   together  against  the  Eternal,  but   died  for  his  own  sins;  and  he  has     left  no  sons.       RadioLab  –  “Things”   Suppose  what  happens  is  a  yellow  duck  goes  behind  a  screen,  moving  left  to  right,   and  then  out  the  other  side,  instead  of  the  yellow  duck,  there’s  a  little  blue  bunny!   Now,  most  adults,  if  they  saw  this,  would  wonder  what  happened  to  the  duck.  But   the  babies  are  totally  blasé  about  that.  And  we  suspect  that  the  reason  for  this  is  that   is  the  most  important  thing  about  the  duck  to  the  babies  is  not  that  it  is  yellow,  or   round,  or  duck-­‐like  in  any  way;  the  most  important  thing  is  the  object’s  trajectory,   its  story,  what  it  did  in  the  past,  what  its  history  is.       Rachel  Adler   Narrative  theologians  and  narrative  ethicists  believe  that  all  values  come  to  us  in   stories,  from  which  they  cannot  be  abstracted.  The  philosopher-­‐ethicist  Alisdair   MacIntyre  said,  “I  cannot  answer  the  question  ‘What  am  I  to  do’  without  answering   the  prior  question,  ‘Of  what  story  or  stories  do  I  find  myself  a  part?’”  There  is  no  one   generic  religious  Story  anymore  than  there  is  generic  Language.  One  can’t  speak   Language;  one  can  only  speak  English  or  Hebrew  or  Urdu.  Values  and  the  actions   they  motivate  are  embodied  in  particular  stories,  and  sometimes,  different  stories   have  different  implications  for  action.       Chayim  Nachman  Bialik  –  “Halakhah  and  Aggadah”   As  dream  seeks  its  fulfillment  in  interpretation,  as  will  in  action,  as  thought  in   speech,  as  flower  in  fruit—so  Aggadah  in  Halakhah.  …     Halakhah:  “Any  of  the  holy  writings  may  be  saved  from  a  fire  on  the  Sabbath.  This   applies  to  a  translation  in  Aramaic  or  in  any  other  language—Coptic,  Medic,  Elamic,   Greek.  But  Rabbi  Jose  says  that  translations  may  not  be  saved”  (BT  Shabbat).     Aggadah:  (1)  When  God  revealed  God’s  self  to  give  the  Torah  to  Israel,  God  did  so   not  in  one  language,  but  in  four—Hebrew,  Latin,  Arabic,  Aramaic.  (2)  The  day  on   which  the  Torah  was  translated  into  Greek  was  as  disastrous  for  Israel  as  that  on   which  the  golden  calf  was  made,  and  in  the  Land  of  Israel  there  were  three  days  of   darkness.  

Source  sheet  prepared  by  student  rabbi  Daniel  Reiser  |  [email protected]  

Parshat  Pinchas   5774  /  2014     Numbers  27:4a   Let  not  our  father’s  name  be   lost  to  his  clan  just  because   he  had  no  son!    

    Tz’lophchad’s  name   Tz’lophchad  ben  Cheifer  ben  Gil‘ad  ben  Machir  ben  M’nasheh  ben  Yoseif     Additional   Yoseif   Forgotten  

M’nasheh  

Known  

Machir  

Monument  

Gil‘ad  

Digging  

Cheifer  

Protection  from  fear  

Tz’lophchad  

 

‫יוֹסֵף‬ ‫ְמנַשֶּׁה‬ ‫ָמכִיר‬ ‫ִגּ ְלעָד‬ ‫ֵחפֶר‬ ‫ְצ ָל ְפחָד‬

    ===   Newseum  –  A  Glimpse  of  Life:  The  Pulitzer  Photographs   A  well-­‐taken  photograph  captures  a  single  moment  in  a  way  that  a  film  reel  cannot.   A  film  reel  captures  only  the  duration  of  time  during  which  the  camera  is  rolling.   The  reel,  and  thus  the  moment,  has  a  definite  starting  and  ending  point.  A  well-­‐taken   photograph,  on  the  other  hand,  freezes  a  singular  moment  in  such  a  way  that  it   captures  everything  that  led  up  to  it  and  everything  that  will  happen  after  it.    

  Source  sheet  prepared  by  student  rabbi  Daniel  Reiser  |  [email protected]