Following the annual cycle of Torah readings is a way of being connected even if you are not able to hear the Torah read in synagogue every week.  The same Torah portion is read across the Jewish world in all denominations of synagogues every week  (there are two weeks only that are exceptions to this for Progressive communities). 

A short precis and comment on the weekly Torah portion for the current month follows.

July 3rd - 21st Tammuz - Pinchas

This wonderful Davar Torah on Pinchas by Rabbi Deborah Kahn Harris reminds us of the wonder of our daughters having the voice they have in our synagogues. 

 The daughters of Zelophehad – Machlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah, as they are named in the biblical text – approach Moses, Eleazar the priest, and the assembled chieftains and elders of the Israelites with their problem.  
“Our father died in the wilderness. He was not one of the faction, Korah’s faction, which banded together against the LORD, but died for his own sin; and he has left no sons. Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!”  (Num. 27:3–4].


Moses’ answer is rather blunt or, rather, non-existent. Moses utters not a word of direct speech in response to Machlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah; instead he simply retires to consult with an even higher authority, God. God then answers Moses, not Malchah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah, directly. God says, however, that “the plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just; you should give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kinsmen; transfer their father’s share to them” (Num. 27:7).

What seems to me to be the point [of this story] is as follows: These five previously unknown women open their mouths, challenge the patriarchal establishment, are heard and rewarded for their courage. Machlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah are extraordinary in every sense of that word – brave, insightful, challenging, strong, anything but the norm. After all the last woman who challenged Moses’ authority, his own sister Miriam, was struck down with leprosy. 

But then again, we learnt in the verses just preceding this story that all those Israelites who had once been slaves had now died out. This generation, the generation of Machlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah, were free. They were not tainted by slavery. And these five women are the embodiment of that freedom – women who believed in their own right to be heard and vindicated, women who believed in their own ability to stand up in public and demand, from a pantheon of male authority figures, justice. And to receive it from no less an entity than the Divine judge.

When we are looking for the real message of the story of the daughters of Zelophehad that seems to me to be where it lies – that we, too, can open our mouths and be heard, that we, too, continue to have voices worth hearing and believing in. And that is a message worth scoring points with, in whatever context you can.

July 10th  - 28th Tammuz - Mattot-Massey

Parashat Masey records the names and locations of all Israelite camps and journeys from exodus through the forty years in the desert to the steppes of Moab at the Jordan River near Jericho.   The memory of these wonderings is what could be said to form the heart of our Jewishness. A theme that continued out of Biblical writings into the Middle Ages and beyond. The heart of the wandering Jew is no empty metaphor.  What is poignant now is the journey each Jew is on whether they have moved and travelled or stayed put. The cycle of the year and the passage of time through our lives are the Jewish journeys each of us is on. Abraham at the start of the Torah is told; ‘Go to a Land … that I will show you.’ We have been moving literally and symbolically since.

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If you would like more information, please contact one of the Rabbis at rabbi@wesminstersynagogue.org.