Beha’alotekha 5783 Rachel Braun
This week’s parasha, Beha’alotekha, includes these two remarkable pesukim (verses):
Numbers 10:35-36 (JPS)
They are notable not only for their place in the Torah service liturgy (the former at the beginning, the latter in the closing paragraph), but also for their unusual configuration in the scroll, set apart as their own paragraph and surrounded by inverted letter nuns.
We’ll focus on the first of the two verses, Numbers 10:35, that begins vayehi binso’a ha’aron. With its inclusion in the liturgy, we are exposed to a remarkable experience of rabbinic subversion. First, let’s consider the implication of having inverted nuns, and then, the verse’s placement in the Torah service.
The rabbis and commentators have long mused about the meaning of the two inverted nuns. Do the two verses constitute their own book of the Bible, breaking Numbers into three distinct sections? That would lead us to count not five, but SEVEN Books of Moses. Rabbi Yehuda haNasi, in the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 116a:1, suggests just that. Proverbs 9:1 provides a prooftext supporting this explanation: “Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out her seven pillars.”
Rabbis Shmuel bar Nahman and Yonatan advance this view in Shabbat 116b.
Or — were they set apart with the inverted nuns because they have been edited out of their original placement in the Torah narrative? That analysis is provided in Shabbat 115b. The Talmudic text argues that the two verses were uprooted from their proper spot in order to break up stories of continued grumbling among the Israelites, each resulting in punishment. At some future moment, explains Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, the verses will be restored to their rightful location. Rav Ashi identifies this spot as Numbers Chapter 1, a section describing the marching of the Israelites by their flags, where a verse about the marching of the Ark of the Covenant would be more fitting (Shabbat 116a:3).
How remarkable, then, that this verse falls into our liturgy! “Vayehi binso’a ha’aron” (verse 10:35) is sung just as the Ark is opened, early in the Torah service. And later, we literally point to the Torah and proclaim
Beyad Moshe! In Moses’ hand! Yet the rabbinic backstory in Talmud tractate Shabbat plays around with this orthodoxy. We may call out pages of the Humash (literally, five) as the Torah reading begins, but Shabbat entertains the possibility of there being seven books. We may sing a statement that Adonai placed this scroll directly into Moses’ hands, but the rabbis contemplated edits and future un-edits. We may be nodding to God, but we’re winking at one another.
A second moment of subversion follows our singing of “vayehi binso’a ha’aron”, wherein we ask God to scatter our enemies as the Ark leads the Israelite march. The liturgy adds a verse, ki mitzion teitzei Torah…, from Isaiah 2:3: “For out of Zion comes forth the Torah, and the word of Adonai from Jerusalem.” This verse immediately re-centers the experience of Torah, from the wilderness march of Numbers 10:35, to Zion and Jerusalem, words and locations from the prophetic period. Moreover, it begins by imagining all nations pursuing God’s wisdom, in contrast to the verse from Numbers that focuses on the Israelites needing the Ark’s protection to negotiate their way around hostile desert nations. From Isaiah (JPS Gender-Sensitive translation):
To boot, in contrast to the militaristic verse from Numbers that invokes the power of God to scatter our enemies, the prophet Isaiah continues with what is perhaps the Hebrew Bible’s most well-known call for peace (2:4):
And might a selection from the prophets, even as the Ark is opened, temper the military motif of vayehi binso’a ha’aron, anticipate the haftarah, and suggest that revelation continues well past Sinai?
So. The Torah is the word of God handed directly to Moses … but maybe it got edited just a bit. And the holy Ark will lead us on our marches through hostile territories and peoples … but ultimately military hardware will be repurposed for agricultural use. The well-versed reader cannot help but smile a bit conspiratorially at these moments of subversion.
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