The following source sheet was created for Temple Micah, Washington, D.C.
[PDF version]
[PDF version]
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.
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
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Additional
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Yoseif
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יוֹסֵף
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Forgotten
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M’nasheh
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מְנַשֶּׁה
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Known
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Machir
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מָכִיר
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Monument
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Gil‘ad
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גִּלְעָד
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Digging
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Cheifer
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חֵפֶר
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Protection from fear
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Tz’lophchad
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צְלָפְחָד
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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.