Story and the Future: Parshat Pinchas

The following source sheet was created for Temple Micah, Washington, D.C.
[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

Additional	Yoseif	יוֹסֵף
Forgotten	M’nasheh	מְנַשֶּׁה
Known	Machir	מָכִיר
Monument	Gil‘ad	גִּלְעָד
Digging	Cheifer	חֵפֶר
Protection from fear	Tz’lophchad	צְלָפְחָד

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.