Parashat Nasso 5784

by Rabbi Margie Cella

At 176 verses, this is the longest parashah of the year. After commanding Moses and Aaron to take a census of the Levites according to their clans, and describing the ritual to be used to determine the guilt or innocence of a sotah, a woman suspected of adultery by her husband, God gives instructions to the priests on how they are to bless the people. The beautiful words of the birkat cohenim are familiar to most of us from shacharit services, Additionally, many rabbis use them when giving blessings on special occasions.

The largest part of the parashah consists of the description of the gifts brought by the chieftains representing the twelve tribes over the course of twelve consecutive days. Every tribe gave the exact same gifts, in identical quantities; twelve straight paragraphs are identical except for the name of the tribe and its chieftain, telling us precisely what was brought by each tribe. We may wonder why the Torah goes to great lengths to  list the gifts of all twelve tribes and their representative chieftains. Wouldn’t it have been enough to list the gifts for the first tribe and then state that all the tribes gave the same gifts? The answer, I think, is that God values all the gifts (and their offerors) equally. No one of them is to be valued more highly than the others, nor is any of them to be devalued as being less than the others. We, too, must give each other the same kavod. Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Ba’Zeh — All the people of Israel are responsible for one another.