Forward.com

Excessive PrideWhen I was in the fourth grade, my Brooklyn yeshiva held a Torah fair. My partner — a girl whom I fancied a close friend but who was to move to California two years later, never to be heard from again — and I quickly decided on a parsha that had fascinated us since we’d learned about it earlier that year. We went to Manhattan Beach to gather sand, crafted petite people out of pipe cleaners and fashioned an angry God from cotton balls (stained red with a waxy Crayola crayon) purchased at a local drugstore. We then took a cardboard box, cut a large groove into the bottom, poured in the sand and glued our pipe cleaner people to the sides of the indentation so that they looked like they were falling into the cavernous space.
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Reluctant Prophets, Humble Leaders‘My lord Moses, restrain them!” So shouts Joshua as he and Moses observe that two men, Eldad and Medad, are behaving as prophets within the Israelite encampment (Numbers 11:28). Prophecy, after all, is Moses’ claim to authority. Should it be discovered that Moses has no monopoly on prophetic powers, perhaps his authority would be eroded, his leadership subject to challenge. Joshua, as his loyal acolyte, is acutely sensitive to that danger.
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Making It Our OwnLate in Naso, this week’s portion from the Book of Numbers, we find Judaism’s most famous blessing. Beginning at verse 6:22, we read the following, in the version of King James.
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