Sedra of the week: Naso

Does God speak to you? It may not be politic to say it, but we are supposed to be a ‘Kingdom of Priests and a Holy People’. God speaks to us through Torah.

The greatest Jew of all time was Moses, who spoke to God, as the Torah tells us,  the way a person speaks to their fellow – face-to-face. No other prophet had that privilege, as they all spoke to God in visions or dreams.

The Torah portion says God spoke from between the cherubim on the Ark. There we kept the Tablets received from Sinai, and the first Torah scroll.

The Midrash has a parable. A king had a daughter whom he loved exceedingly. So long as his daughter was small, he would speak with her in public or in the courtyard.

When she grew up and reached puberty, the king determined it no longer befit his daughter’s dignity for him to converse with her in public. So he directed that a pavilion be made for his daughter so he could speak with her.

Likewise, in our portion we read that when God encountered us in the wilderness, we Jews were like children. At Sinai we started to become responsible, more like adults.

So realising we had grown up, God instructed the Israelites to make a Tabernacle, and when He needed to communicate with the Israelites, He did so from the Tabernacle. Numbers 7:8 bears this out when it says: “And when Moses went into the tent of meeting that He might speak with him.”

Rabbi Zvi Solomons serves JCoB.org, the Living Jewish Community in Reading