Nasso 5773
It is that time of the year when so many of us are thinking about gifts: gifts for mothers’ day and gifts for fathers’ day and graduation gifts and we are wondering how to make those gifts special and personal and meaningful. And then along comes Parashat Nasso with its repetitive list of identical gifts brought by each of the twelve tribes for the dedication of the tabernacle in the wilderness.
There is little if anything that indicates that room was left for even a spark of creativity. Perhaps that was the intention of the original Biblical text which did not want us to think that the Torah favored any of the tribes over the others. If all the tribes brought the same gifts then all the tribes would be perceived as being equal. Certainly that is how it would appear that we are meant to read the situation.
However in Midrash Bemidbar Rabbah 13.14 we learn that each tribe’s gift was actually in some way symbolic of its own unique personality, history, character, values and style in ways that were too subtle to be revealed in the Torah. Each tribe may have brought a bowl, for example, but the bowls brought somehow connected with their particular devotion to the study of Torah or the leadership roles assumed by their members or some other tribal trait.
This tension between routine gifts and the unique personal touch is something we experience in other parts of our lives as well. For example, one of the greatest gifts a parent can bestow upon a child prescribed by our tradition is that blessing contained in our parasha usually known as “birkat ha-kohanim/ the priestly blessing”. While I have great memories of my children hiding beneath my tallit while it was chanted in the synagogue by the kohanim, I have even fonder memories of my children lining up for me to recite the blessing with my hands resting on each their foreheads just before we made Kiddush at home on Friday evenings.
According to the tradition we recite a different introductory passage for our sons than for our daughters. For our daughters we recite: May God make you like Sara, Rebecca, Rache and Leah. And for our sons: we recite: May God make you like Ephraim and Menashe.
And then we continue:
May Adonai bless you and keep you
May Adonai cause His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you
May Adonai turn His face towards you, and grant you peace
(Bemidbar 6:24-26).
These three short, beautiful verses, which God commanded Aaron and his sons to use to bless the Jewish people with the gift of God's presence, indeed God's face, are deeply ingrained in Jewish cultural memory. It would seem as if like the gifts brought by each tribe to the dedication of the tabernacle everyone is equal as each child is blessed using the same words of the same Torah based formula.
But the truth is that after each recitation of the Biblical blessing I pull my child’s head close to my own and at that moment add my own private prayers – my own special gifts thinking about the needs of that child at that moment – creating at that moment the kind of gift that reenergizes the special bonds between us and each child we treasure – that strengthens the bonds between us and each person we love.
And just as the blessing ends with a request that God grant our loved ones the gift of peace on Shabbat, I wish you Shabbat Shalom.
Matt Futterman
Senior Educator
