The biblical lists of generations include descriptions of very long lives. For example, Adam lived 930 years (Gen. 5:5), Noach 950 (9:29), and the longest — Mesushelach 969 (5:27). How do we relate to these descriptions of longevity, well beyond anything we can expect of human beings? Two approaches emerge from Medieval Jewish commentary.

I. Theories of Longevity

Rambam (Moreh Nevukhim 2:47) finds this question puzzling and says that these individuals were exceptions. Nearly all people in biblical times lived to ages similar to people of all eras. Regarding the biblical figures, Rambam offers two suggestions that he says are the only possibilities: either they ate and behaved in such healthy manners that they achieved exceptionally long lives or they acted normally but lived longer due to miracle.

Ramban (Gen. 5:4) asks why these people would merit a miracle. Not all of them were prophets or righteous people, meriting the same miracle for generation after generation. If their longevity was due to healthy living, how could that more than quadruple someone’s lifespan? Certainly that knowledge of long life would have been transmitted throughout the generations so that even post-biblical individuals would live such long lives. Yet we have no record of that.

Rather, Ramban offers a completely different explanation for the long lives in the early Bible. These extended biblical lifespans were not exceptions but characteristic of their times. Adam was divinely created directly, so that even after his expulsion he naturally lived a very long life. His descendants inherited this naturally long life. However, the Flood changed the nature of the atmosphere. The air deteriorated and damaged the human organism, dramatically reducing lifespans. Man didn’t change but his environment did. Even after the Flood, specific righteous individuals merited longer lives but nothing like the pre-Flood lifespans.

II. Debating the Theories

Rabbeinu Nissim of Gerona (Ran; quoted in Abarbanel, Gen. 5:3) challenges Ramban’s approach. Ran points out that the Flood was a punishment, not a natural occurrence. Once the generation received its punishment, the effects of the Flood should recede. According to Ramban, the Flood’s impact remains for millennia. Even if we consider the Flood a natural event, we face a different problem. We can detect ourselves that after a heavy rain, the air is cleaner than before, not dirtier. A natural rain would have washed away toxins, not inserted them into the atmosphere.

Ritva (Sefer Zikaron, ch. 2) defends Rambam. He points out that the scientists of his time were skeptical of the possibility that the atmosphere changed dramatically. It is more likely that the world has remained in its natural since it was created, except during miracles. Additionally, while good living can greatly extend someone’s life, the same behavior will work differently for each person. A person’s physical make-up, including his genetics, affect the length of his life. Furthermore, not all knowledge is successfully transmitted through time. Some get lost to history. The fact that people today do not know how to achieve long lives does not mean that no one ever knew. And if the longevity was miraculous, we cannot ask why God performed those miracles. The divine wisdom is inscrutable.

Abarbanel (Gen. 5:3) offers possible reasons for these miracles. It was not for the benefit of those individuals but for their societies. First, the world at this stage was barely populated. Long lives allowed for fewer people over centuries to live as large groups. That reason would have greater explanatory power if everyone lived long lives. However, Rambam believes only specific individuals enjoyed this longevity.

Abarbanel offers another, perhaps better, reason for the miracle — to allow for the continuity and development of knowledge. The basic inventions that allowed for societies required innovation. Individuals require time to learn what others have discovered and can only then innovate themselves. Imagine what would have happened if Newton had lived to team up with Einstein. The combined brainpower would have moved science decades ahead. Longer lifespans for unique individuals enables experimentation and innovation while also allowing for the sharing of knowledge across many generations.

In defense of Ramban, Abarbanel suggests that people damage their bodies when they eat and otherwise act improperly. People passed on that damage to their children, who further damaged their bodies. When generation after generation eat and act gluttonously, they debilitate their bodies and shorten their lives. After the Flood, people were further hurt not by the air but by the weak food that was grown in soil depleted of minerals. Additionally, after the Flood people began eating meat and drinking wine, which also diminished their lifespan.

III. Tereifos

I suggest that this debate between Rambam and Ramban about the longevity of early biblical lives is somewhat related to a different debate. The Mishnah (Chullin 42a) lists specific tereifos, deathly injuries that render kosher slaughter (shechitah) invalid. The Gemara (ad loc.) records a debate whether a tereifah, an animal with one of these eighteen injuries can continue living. Later (ibid., 57a), the conclusion seems to be that a tereifah cannot live longer than 12 more months. What if an animal with one of these injuries does, in fact, continue living?

Rambam (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhos Shechitah 10:13) says that even if we see based on the scientific tools at our disposal that a certain tereifah continues living, we still treat it like a tereifah and refrain from eating it. in contrast, Rashba (Responsa 1:98) says that if a scientist says that a tereifah lived longer than months, he must be mistaken.

According to Rambam, the normal rules for longevity allow for exceptional cases. Those exceptions do not invalidate the norm but also do not prevent us from using the general rule as a guide. While the Rashba sees the rules of longevity as absolute. According to him, it is implausible that animals under similar circumstances mortality will respond dramatically differently.

This debate seems to mirror that of Rambam and Ramban regarding the longevity in the Bible. According to Rambam, human longevity never changed and those mentioned in the early Bible are exceptions. Those exceptions do not invalidate the general rule, no matter how surprising they may be. Ramban and Rashba seem to agree that these rules do not allow for dramatic exceptions. Longevity can vary but only within limits.

Eruvin 13b tells us a bat kol, a Heavenly Voice, told us how to rule between the houses of Shammai and Hillel. The bat kol said elu va-elu divrei Elokim chayyim, these and these are the words of the living Gd, והלכה כדברי בית הלל, but normative practice follows Beit Hillel.

Although there has been some debate about whether a Heavenly Voice can establish normative practice (since the Gemara elsewhere says lo ba-shamayim hi, Torah is not in Heaven), Jews have long seen the first part of the statement as true of all debates among qualified Jewish thinkers. Proper scholars using legitimate processes necessarily arrive at ideas or perspectives the system sees as valid, in some sense.

I will not try here to define who counts as a qualified scholar, what constitutes a legitimate process, nor what type of validity elu va-elu grants (whether it means all views are right in some way, or only systemically legitimate). Books have been written on the issues, with no absolute consensus on an answer, and I do not pretend I can resolve any of those here.  

What I find sometimes lost in the focus on pluralism, on accepting all these scholars’ divergent ideas, is how much they share, since they all start with the same devar Hashem, word of Gd. I have taken to looking for those unifying elements because I have met many Jews (in person or through their writings) who have forgotten how much of Torah is nigh universally agreed, no matter what brand of elu va-elu one accepts.

Shared ground seems to me as pressing an agenda to articulate as any specific acts of obligation. As important as details and rituals are, they cannot divert our attention from the overall framework shared by all the scholars whose debates of details we assiduously unpack. As we all struggle to find our best Jewish selves, I think we need to start with what is common to us all, but too often forgotten.

The World of Rashi and Ramban

I proposed a list of such common ideas and commitments in my book We’re Missing the Point: What’s Wrong with the Orthodox Jewish Community and How to Fix It, with mixed results. My two recent samplings of commentaries on the Torah allow for a more modest attempt (and therefore I hope more convincing, at least for these two commentators), to see what Rashi and Ramban agreed was important to the life the Torah recommended.

There are other equally authoritative Torah scholars, so what is true of Rashi and Ramban does not necessarily obligate us. But their influence and impact are broad and deep enough to make whatever they agreed upon a pretty likely candidate for how Jews need to approach the world, and to place a burden of proof on those who would insist on assuming otherwise.

For me, this started almost four years ago, when I marked the passing of a good friend and chavruta, Bruce Ritholtz a”h, studying five comments of Rashi’s on each Torah portion. This year, I did something similar for Ramban’s commentary on the Torah, and now we can step back and see what themes cropped for each often enough for us to notice.

A reminder: they also differ on much, which I will ignore. This essay does not answer a high school exam compare and contrast question. I am discussing only where they are the same, or close enough, despite significant differences. Each time I write “both saw” or other similar phrases, I do not mean they agree exactly, I mean they included those issues or questions as part of the agenda of a Jewish life.

Once we’ve seen their list, we can discuss the light they shed on our Jewish lives today.

The Shaping Forces of Life

Rashi and Ramban drew our attention, over and over, to who runs the world, and included a more diverse list of participants than I would have expected. Both saw elements of life beyond human control, individual or national, and others fully within such control. They phrased it differently, but both thought Jews and people generally were supposed to work to improve a world which Hashem set up, within what could be frustrating or upsetting contours and limitations.

Both thought the metaphysical affected the world, thought purely physical “laws of Nature” insufficiently describe how the world works, especially in the Land of Israel. Both also thought human activity impacted the world physically and metaphysically, with the Torah as a guide to how to produce the best outcomes.

Human Beings in Their Groupings

Rashi and Ramban focus on two nations, primarily, the Egyptians and the Jews. The Egyptians presented the prime example of a nation which resisted and rejected Hashem’s messages, could not or would not see Hashem’s Hand or heed Hashem’s orders, and bore the consequences.

The Jews are and can be representatives of Hashem, who declare the truth of Hashem’s Oneness, role as Creator, and continuing Providence. Or they too can be punished for their failure to live up to their responsibilities.

 A level below entire nations, both Rashi and Ramban also addressed tribes of Israel, particularly the Levi’im. Tribes, clans, and families all had roles of their own, were a part of the whole, but with distinct contributions to make.

Individuals

Given Rashi and Ramban’s agreement about how much Hashem determines, how nations, tribes, and families impose a certain character on their members, how geography and neighbors shape people’s lives, we might think there’s nothing left, no room for or reason to expect individuals to do much.

Yet both Rashi and Ramban are sure of the opposite, of the ability of any of us to redirect history in positive ways, or to do the opposite and send history the other way. Through their readings of the lives of the Avot, the Patriarchs, and other notable figures of the Torah—Aaron, Moshe, Noach, in alphabetical order—their comments on where individuals did or should have earned merit or opprobrium through their choices, Rashi and Ramban made clear their belief in how much each person matters.

A Basic Judaism

Generalities leave much room for difference and debate about particularities of how it all works. Even so, I believe the ideas I have presented here portray a vision of Judaism many observant Jews have forgotten, and therefore bears repeating and rejuvenating.

Rashi and Ramban seem to agree that to be Jewish is to recognize one inhabits a world created by Gd (whatever that means), with certainly regularities we can reasonably call Nature, but also significantly affected by forces which are not purely physical or natural.

That’s because Hashem continues to care about and be involved with the world (whatever that means), commanded a Torah (however that happened), which expects people to participate in helping the world become its best version, as legislated by the Torah.

People do so in groups, large and small, and as individuals, and we are each—as individuals or in our groups– responsible for our attitudes, what we support or oppose, condone, protest, or ignore, actions, and inactions. For all of which we will be punished or awarded, as appropriate.

As I cannot say often enough, the specifics are much debated and can end up looking extremely different. I know people who could ascribe to everything I’ve written here and yet seem to me clearly far from what Rashi, Ramban, or any other rabbinic writer I am familiar with. I do not mean to imply adopting the worldview I’ve inferred from Rashi and Ramban is all we need.

But I know many, many Jews who are ritually observant, more or less, but have forgotten or rejected some or all of the basic picture we saw in Rashi and Ramban. Those people spend much time and effort observing a religion they think is Judaism but which dismisses the basic picture of these two giants of Jewish tradition.

Of course, they may have an equally authoritative source, but our project here at least challenges such Jews to find such an authority or rethink their understanding of the religion to which they adhere.

We get caught up in cleaning up details, sometimes, when we have not yet taken care of the big picture. I have sampled Rashi and Ramban to find the big picture, and this is what I’ve found: a world given to us by Hashem, with clear contours, yet with much room for each of us and all of us to affect how it comes out. It’s just for us to take up the mantle left for us, and do our best to usher in the best version of Hashem’s Kingdom over the world.

A Non-Apology

I have been taking samples of Ramban’s comments on the parsha since the end of Pesach 5777 (2017; I took two weeks for each parsha of Devarim). At the end of each book of the Torah, I’ve paused to share the ideas of themes which popped up repeatedly. As I reviewed those five summary essays to see what flowed through the commentary as a whole, I realized I’ve each time worried aloud about whether I was subconsciously selecting for my preconceptions, was molding Ramban into my own image.

After reading and re-reading to write this essay, I feel comfortable saying that if I have done that, I’ve done it so well that, week after week, without reviewing earlier weeks’ pieces, I managed to pick comments which came together into a remarkably cohesive picture.

I don’t think that’s what happened, however, I think my random sample did what it was intended, showed us concerns of Ramban’s we might not have noticed had we studied the commentary straight through. I cannot say these were what was most important to him, since we were sampling—in theory, a sample can happen to have always missed his more central concerns, over and over. But I feel confident that the ideas we’ll see here would have to be part of any picture of the ideas which mattered to Ramban in his Torah commentary.

After you read, you may disagree, and I’d be happy to hear from you with your reactions, comments, or criticisms (my email is in the paragraph after next).

Ramban’s commentary as I’ve found it focused on the many participants in shaping the world. Hashem could have done it alone, could have completely determined what would happen, yet Ramban thought Hashem in fact allowed a large cast of characters, from Hashem down to each of us as individuals, with many stops in between. His view of the variety of actors who improve or diminish the world carries the assumption each of us is responsible for doing our best, individually and in the groups to which we belong, to bring the world to its best.

Since this is a summary essay—the originals appeared weekly on torahmusings.com, as did the summaries of each book of the Torah, or you can email me (grothst, a gmail account) for the file with the essays—I will not give all the examples which fueled the conclusion I present here. I will name actors Ramban thought affected the world, give some examples, and move on.

Hashem

Any consideration of the world starts with Hashem, Who (for Ramban) created yesh me-ayin, out of complete nothingness, continues to be invested in what happens in the world, and continues to wield the power to change the natural patterns of the world as valuable or necessary. Hashem’s role and powers mean Hashem decides who lives where (as shown by the generation of the Flood, whose lives were forfeit for their misdeeds, and of the Tower, whom Hashem scattered).

Especially since Ramban sees a role for physical and metaphysical powers other than Hashem, he repeatedly stresses Hashem’s sole hold on ultimate power. Hashem leaves room for angels and nature, even prefers the world follow its ordinary patterns, as we’ll see, but is always in full control. Hashem stopped Par’oh’s sorcerers’ usual powers during the plagues, for example, and showed His incomparable power at the Splitting of the Sea.

For reasons Ramban does not lay out quite explicitly, Hashem has an interest in people acknowledging these truths, which is why worship of other powers is so serious, the only sin for which Hashem visits the sins of earlier generations on later ones who continue sinning that way. For the flip side, Hashem sanctifies some items, such as the incense-pans of the Korach group, solely because they served to prove Hashem’s power.

Ramban also pointed several times to Hashem’s overall kindness in administering the world, such as when he said miracles only come to help people or to fully punish evildoers, thought Hashem told Moshe to send more spies to give the Jews the best chance of averting the disaster they were about to bring upon themselves.

Ramban’s world starts with an all-powerful Gd, kind and invested in the world.

Angels

Despite his insistence on Hashem’s sole power and control, Ramban believes in angels, who do have some ability to affect the world. He thinks angels do guide all lands other than Israel, have enough leeway to be punished for mis-stepping (such as the angels of Egypt, who were punished along with the Egyptians at the Exodus), and can choose to delay going into Lot’s house until he makes himself worthy. He also recognized a Heavenly Court, which seems to have more control over the night, and has some kind of leeway to enact strict justice rather than the merciful Providence of Hashem.

Angels’ leeway has strict limits, though. The angel of Esav wanted to hurt more than Ya’akov’s thigh while wrestling him, but was prohibited. The angels in Ya’akov’s dream ascended and descended a ladder to show their need to check with Hashem how to affect the world.

There are angels, which do have meaningful (and a bit independent) impact on the world, but never in any way to make us doubt or wonder about Hashem’s omnipotence.

Nature

The topic did not arise often, but often enough to show Ramban’s belief that Hashem prefers a world which runs naturally. He limited creation from nothing to the first moment, after which anything new was constructed from something which already existed.

When miracles are necessary, Ramban thinks Hashem brings them as minimally as possible. Noach’s ark, for example, was not big enough for the animals it needed to hold. Hashem made it expand, miraculously, yet also required Noach to build as large a structure as feasible, to sustain the natural pattern of the world to the extent possible.

Land of Israel

Nature matters less in Israel, where Hashem retains full and direct Providence. That can be positive, in that rain and other sustaining elements of life will come whenever the Jews act well enough to merit Hashem’s beneficence (or compassion). It’s why prophecy happened only in Israel, why the laws of the Torah are inherent to Israel (mishpat elokei ha-aretz, the laws of the Gd of the land, a Scriptural phrase Ramban repeats a few times), not just the particular legal system of one land’s inhabitants.

Ramban seems to have accepted the view of Sifrei that observance of mitzvot outside Israel was practice for when Jews got back to where the Torah obligated them to live, outside of which he thought they were as people who had no Gd.

The special Providence of Israel also leads to certain punishments, is why Sodom was destroyed more quickly than cities outside Israel of comparable evil. Clothing and house tzara’at could happen only in Israel, and the Land spewed out the Canaanites for their sexual perversions, as it would spew out the Jews if they took up those perversions.

Venue of Hashem’s most direct Providence, the Land itself has a role to play in our world.  

Metaphysical Within Physical

Mostly in Israel, Ramban thought Hashem showed the metaphysical within the physical. The central structure of Judaism, the Mishkan and then Mikdash (Temple), served to house the kind of Divine Presence the Jews had experienced at Sinai. Prophets, the Urim ve-Tumim, and bat kol, Heavenly Voice, were ways to have continuing access to communication from Hashem.  

We’ve already mentioned tzara’at, but Ramban thought zivah was another illness which would only appear in Israel (and only when the Jewish people were at a high enough spiritual state to deserve direct divine effects), a physical and contagious manifestation of a spiritual problem.   

Death showed Ramban two other ways the metaphysical interacted with the physical. He thought the sprinkling of parah adumah water created a reiach nichoach, a pleasing smell, to counteract the smell of death inserted by the sin in the Garden of Eden. The righteous are an exception, their lives of service meaning their corpses do not create the smell or ritual impurity of death.

People’s sins also affect their deaths, a second intrusion of the metaphysical into the physical. Ramban chose to quote R. Yehudah Ha-Levi’s assertion that death without sons is itself a sign of sin, when he does not quote him anywhere else, signaling his agreement with the idea.  

Hashem prefers the world to operate with largely regular patterns, but the metaphysical peeks out often enough to stop us from fooling ourselves to think it’s all natural.

Torah

The surest way to know how to engage a world which mixes the physical and metaphysical is the Torah. It predates the world, contains all wisdom, explicitly, implicitly, and in hidden allusions. Much of Shlomo HaMelech’s wisdom and Yechezkel’s readiness for his vision of Hashem’s Chariot came from their knowledge of Torah.

The Aron, the Ark, sat in the Holy of Holies and was the vehicle for the Divine Presence to reside among people. The Aron housed the Tablets, which had the Aseret Ha-Dibberot written on them. More than once, Ramban referred to the Dibberot as avot of mitzvot, broad categories which encompass all other mitzvot. It seems Torah and mitzvot bring the Presence to the world.

Torah and mitzvot will also let the Jews avoid other nations’ fates and punishments. Observing mitzvot serves a natural protective function, saving Jews from ordinary outcomes. Jewish observance helps nature itself, leads to rains which improve the air and enhance overall health.

Despite Torah’s broad wisdom, Ramban thinks it left out much, for various reasons. We know less about Avraham’s life because the Torah did not want to pay attention to the idolaters he defeated in Ur Kasdim, and are generally not told about hidden miracles (such as Yocheved giving birth at age 130). But what Hashem did tell Moshe was told leimor, clearly, no doubt as to what was said, Moshe Rabbenu conveying exactly the words Hashem meant and spoke.

People in Their Groups

I have been surprised, ever since working on As If We Were There: Readings for a Transformative Passover Experience, by Ramban’s insistence on the political power the masses have. I would have expected the subject of a monarchy, writing about monarchic societies such as Egypt, to dismiss the hoi polloi as irrelevant to history.

Instead, he repeatedly speaks of kings’ need to secure the agreement of their subjects. Par’oh needed to convince his advisers before elevating Yosef to second in command, and could not decree the killing of Jewish babies, since the people would object.

With or without kings, societies need civil law to avoid people running amuck, which is also why punishment must be meted out. Ramban knows of people who protest capital punishment as adding unnecessary death to our world, but he sees it as a community’s responsibility, its way of declaring its opposition to various acts.

The need for punishment is supported by his view of how poorly some people will use their power. In his view, many Egyptians voluntarily killed Jewish babies once they knew there would be no legal consequences, and fooled themselves into denying Hashem’s role in the Exodus so fully they could chase after the Jews into the Sea without thinking they would end up drowned.  

Nations and groups operate together, ideally to articulate, support, and enforce moral conduct.

Jewish People

Among nations, the Jewish one obviously has a special role for Ramban. The Torah calls Jewish coins kadosh, sanctified, because they are used for sanctified purposes, and the Jewish calendar reflects all of Hashem’s redemptions. When the nation as a whole acts well, they need not be subject to the laws of Nature, would be within their rights to consult prophets about how to deal with illnesses and other troubles, not doctors or other experts—as was true of righteous people in our past. Just wanting to the building of the Mishkan was enough for the verse to include ordinary Jews among those who were building it.

So the nation’s possible upside was high, and took less than we might have thought.

Unfortunately, Ramban mostly pointed out where the nation did poorly rather than well. While reading the Sodom story, he digressed to the rape and murder of the concubine at Give’a, with three groups failing to reach their best selves. The tribe of Binyamin failed to stop or protest the crime, then stood by their fellow Benjaminites when the rest of the nation called for justice.

The other tribes were not much better, since they reacted to this crime but not the setting up or theft of the idol of Michah, a story told in the previous chapter of the book of Shofetim. Then, when they went to war against the tribe of Binyamin, they were overconfident, failed to ask Hashem whether they should go at all.

In another digression to a later story, Ramban’s discussion of censuses at the beginning of Bemidbar leads him to David’s census, which led to a plague. Ramban thinks the people should have insisted on being counted only by giving half-shekels, but were already in the wrong for their failure to seek to build a Temple.

Ramban thought the Exodus was delayed thirty years because of the Jews’ many sins. At the late date it did happen, Hashem had to work hard (as it were) to allow it, since the Jews still did not deserve to go out. Once the process started, the Jews continued to err, with some pockets of the Jewish people doubting Hashem sent Moshe all the way up to the Splitting of the Sea.

Just as wanting the good to happen redounded to their credit, watching or joining wrongful causes created liability. The whole nation was at risk because they came to believe Korach was acting on their behalf. Their attitude when leaving Sinai again put them in the wrong, the fact of their relief at not having been given more commandments enough to deserve punishment, and maybe an indirect cause of their being doomed to thirty eight more years in the desert.

Nations, especially the Jewish nation, make the world what it is.

Tribes

Ramban does not spend a lot of time delineating the tribes’ individual characters, but he makes clear he assumed it. The gifts the heads of the tribes brought to mark the dedication of the Mishkan reflected aspects of their unique character, history, or future, Ramban thought.

He also inserted the tribe of Shim’on into the story of their head, Zimri’s, decision to publicly assert his right to marry Kazbi. While the Torah does not mention any action on their part, Ramban thought they accosted their leader over his silence as they were being tried and punished for their own dalliances with Moabite women. They also stood by him as he dared Moshe to react, were a reason Pinchas might have thought twice before responding.

The tribe he looked at most often was the one the Torah did as well, the Levi’im. Ramban thought they missed out explosive population growth in Egypt because they were not enslaved. After the Exodus, the reverse was true, Levi became the tribe most closely connected to and representative of Hashem, so they received no share in the Land or the booty of the war to conquer the Land.

The nation was not conceived as a shapeless whole, it had subgroups with their own ways of contributing, starting with tribes.  

Families

Ramban also points to the family as a corporate entity, which plays a role in the world as a unit.  Had Hashem killed all of Aharon’s sons as punishment for his role in the sin of the Golden Calf, it would have been a destruction of Aharon himself, because children are so fully a part of who parents are.

He noted commandments which legislated the ways members related to each other. Children have to treat parents akin to how they treat Hashem (acknowledging the parent’s role in the child’s creation, with the concomitant obligations of fear and honor), and siblings are to care for and protect each other (avenging Dinah’s honor or marrying a childless brother’s widow).

Moving farther out, Hashem punishes up to four generations for continuing an ancestor’s worship of powers other than Hashem (if the descendants continue the sin), because their sins have some roots in the great-grandfather’s impact on the family.

Families worked together and for each other, so they shared in their failures and successes.

Great Individuals

The smallest unit is the individual, some more impactful than others. The Patriarchs offer many examples, but Ramban’s principle says it best, ma’aseh avot siman le-banim, their actions foreshadowed and shaped their descendants’ experiences. Acts such as Avraham’s leaving Canaan during a famine or Ya’akov’s conquest of Shechem built the Jewish future in certain directions, positive or punitive.

Other remarkable individuals include Moshe, who learned how to invoke specific Divine Attributes as relevant to a current national crisis, could decide to send spies of his own accord, and had the right to plan the order in which the people would conquer and settle the Land.

Aharon was so spiritually excellent, expressed for example in his staying silent when Korach’s group denied he was worthy of being Kohen Gadol, Ramban was sure he could never have had a mum, a physical blemish, or contract the bodily impurity of zivah or tzara’at. His successor High Priests would also be exalted, with the downside of being unable to secure full atonement with sacrifice. A High Priest who sinned would need continuing repentance and prayer.

Noach, a significant step below the greats discussed until now, earned his special status by rejecting wrong, by avoiding the perversions of those around him. Just avoiding evil earned him his place in history.  

A nazir lived a better life than regular people, and was—similarly to a prophet—sent by Hashem to show us a model of a better life. Prophets defended the people to Hashem, a function on par with their more commonly recognized role, communicating Hashem’s word.

The nazir chose his status of his own free will, and was expected to promise sacrifices in addition to those the Torah required. Like ordinary people who volunteer to bring certain sacrifices, the nazir is given the room to define his/her nezirut.

Ordinary People

The list of groups and people who shape the world might seem to leave little room for more ordinary people to make a contribution of any moment. Ramban reads the Torah to disagree, in numerous places. The count which opened the book of Bamidbar chose a verb, pkd, to tell Moshe to take note of each individual. The Aseret Ha-Dibberot, the Decalogue told the whole people at Sinai, was expressed in the singular to make sure each Jew knew Hashem was setting up a personal, not just national, relationship.

As was true at the group level, people are responsible for attitudes and choices in addition to actions. The problem with sin starts at leaving one’s heart open to seduction, the Torah warns each Jew. People also can make mistakes about what is right. When the soldiers bring captive women with them from the war with Midian, Ramban thinks they honestly thought they had done what Moshe wanted.

Reading a few comments a week, the world I suggest we found in Ramban’s commentary on the Torah is populated by a multitude of actors, each of whom change the world to varying degrees and in varying ways. To choose our best way, individually or in our various groupings, we need to understand the whole picture, who does what in what contexts. It’s only in putting them all together, each to their proper extent, that we see how we have gotten here, and can know what we need to do to be doing our best to bring out the world’s best.

Ramban to the Book of Bamidbar: Becoming Our Best Selves, with a Divine Background

I built this project on an assumption: by taking comments of Ramban’s as they appealed to me, with no attempt to relate them to each other, I would over the course of time nonetheless find recurring motifs, which would reflect underlying concerns of Ramban’s. My goal was to let Ramban speak for himself instead of imposing my issues, interests, or ideas on him (I previously sampled Rashi in much the same way, and am in the midst of doing much the same in my A Responsum a Day project, audio shiurim at ou.org, a weekly essay here on TorahMusings).

It’s why I pause at the end of each book of the Torah, to see what our sample shows, is why after we look at the themes of Bamidbar this time, next time we’ll look at all five of those summary essays, to see what we found in Ramban’s Torah commentary as a whole. But it’s only as good as my having in fact been able to choose randomly, my not having subconsciously taken only comments which tapped into an agenda of my own. If I did that, I’d be cutting and pasting Ramban as I want him to be, not seeing him as he actually was.

My concern with getting out of the way leads me to worry a bit when I find the comments on Bamidbar once again organizing well around the balance between the human and the divine. The repeat framework raises the possibility I unawares chose comments to fit my preconceptions. Or, possibly, the teasing out of the balance between how people and Hashem affect the world in fact was so central to Ramban, we’d find it in almost any random sampling of his commentary.

I certainly hope it’s the latter. In the case of Bamidbar, I take some comfort in seeing the balance here tip more towards the human than in the other books of the Torah, and whatever divine shows up being more subsumed within the physical world than superimposed onto it.

Let’s start with the human.  

Pointers Towards Human Perfection—Nazir, Prophet, And Priest

We did not see any comment where Ramban took the time to define a perfect human life, but three of his comments gave us components. First, he surprisingly thinks the Torah prefers the physical abstemiousness of the nazir to ordinary human life. Rabbinic statements noticed the Torah’s requiring the nazir to bring a chatat, a sin offering, as part of the ceremony completing his/her time in that status, and said s/he had sinned by foregoing permissible pleasures.

Ramban instead saw the chatat as atonement for choosing to return to the lesser existence of the ordinary person. Since “ordinary” in this context meant only having the right to partake of grape products—not necessarily intoxicating ones and not necessarily to excess— of perhaps coming into contact with corpses, and being allowed to groom one’s hair, Ramban’s reading draws our attention to his objections to physical indulgence.

One proof the nazir’s elevated status he cited was Amos 2;11-12, which paired the nazir and prophet as people Hashem sends to enlighten the rest of us. The verse (and our intuition, I think) paints a prophet as Hashem’s messenger. Ramban sees more.  

In chapter twelve, Hashem spoke of Moshe as exceptional (to rebuke Miriam and Aharon for criticizing him), and Ramban paused to wonder how Yirmiyahu 15;1 could mention both Moshe and Shmuel as model prophets—how could Shmuel be mentioned in the same breath as the exceptional Moshe? Since the pair were cited to stress to Yirmiyahu the inevitability of the Jews’ coming punishment—no one could save them, not even Moshe or Shmuel–Ramban says the two were comparable in that way, their defenses of the Jewish people from Hashem’s wrath.

If we add Rambam’s view of prophets as the people who reach the highest level of human development, Ramban seems to see asking Hashem to spare the Jews punishment as part of human perfection.

Aharon gave us one more example of human excellence, during the Korach incident. The verse tells us how Moshe reacted—he heard and fell on his face—but nothing about Aharon. Ramban suggested Aharon did not respond because he was a party to the dispute. His silence was a way to signal his humble agreement with Korach’s group, he was not worthy of the High Priesthood.

The greatest people, Ramban implies, limit their use of the physical, defend the Jewish people, and have the humility to refrain from any self-promotion.

Moshe Wields His Freedom of Choice

Ramban never fully defines human perfection nor the way to get there, but points to broader human discretion than I would have expected. He thought Moshe agreed to send the spies (chapter thirteen) on his own accord, without asking Hashem. Hashem stepped in to adjust the plan, as we’ll discuss later, but Ramban sees nothing wrong in Moshe’s acting without consultation. Spies are a natural part of any conquest, and Moshe made a decision easily within the parameters of how people are allowed/supposed to act.  

Once the experience goes wrong, Hashem says the people deserve annihilation. Moshe prays for them (one of his prophetic functions, as we just saw), 14;18, and addresses Hashem with some but not all the Attributes Hashem taught him at Sinai. Ramban explains how Moshe chose which to invoke, but clearly thought the decision was Moshe’s, who structured his approach to Hashem in the way he thought most likely to succeed.

A final example is also the least explicit in the Torah, the best proof the idea comes more from Ramban himself than what the text forced him to accept. In chapter 21, Moshe sent a peace message to Sichon, but left out the necessary conditions for any accord which lets non-Jews stay in Israel. Ramban therefore suggested Moshe did not need to make an halachic peace with Sichon, because he had decided to conquer and settle the land west of the Jordan first. For then, he could make an unconditional peace with Sichon.

Once Sichon forced war, Moshe still thought the entire people would cross the Jordan, conquer all of Israel, settle the land west of the Jordan, and then come back for Sichon and Og’s land.  Only Reuven and Gad’s request changed the plans.

Ramban thought Moshe could send spies without Hashem’s command, knew which Attributes were appropriate for which situation, had the right to choose when and what to conquer as the Jews took over the Land of Israel, and the two and a half tribes could submit a revised plan. Choices human beings make.

People Shape Their Religious Experience

Beyond Moshe, an exceptional figure, and tribes, collective actors, Ramban explored areas of significant freedom the Torah gave individual Jews on how to shape their relationship with or service of Hashem. For the nazir, itself a freely made choice, the Torah mentioned, 6;21, that the concluding sacrifices the Torah obligated as part of the conclusion of a person’s time as a nazir were aside from what the nazir was able and had vowed to bring.

Ramban explains the Torah’s implication. Each nazir would promise additional sacrifices as part of the original vow (as if the commitment itself were not enough!). Those sacrifices become part of the vow, which is then not released until those sacrifices are brought as well. Within an institution which is itself a choice, the Torah expected a further personal choice, what sacrifice or sacrifices to embed in one’s nezirut.

The whole concept of vows invites people to make their own decisions about the contours of their service of Hashem, sometimes even creating tension with the Jew’s overriding commitment to keep the Torah (since some nedarim can render a mitzvah item prohibited).

Donations are another area of personal choice, and Ramban thought the assumption by Korach’s people that Hashem would accept their incense-pans turned them into klei sharet, sanctified vessels. Despite being offered by non-kohanim in the wrong location and as part of a rebellion against Moshe and Aharon’s authority, their thinking they were doing what Hashem wanted was enough to turn an item into a kli sharet, Ramban thought.

Where Personal Choice Can Hurt Us

With freedom comes poor choices and failure, for which Ramban provides ample examples. Among those exempt from a bringing a Korban Pesach, a Paschal sacrifice, the Torah includes someone who was be-derech rechokah, a far distance. As Ramban understands the halachah, “far” includes any Jew unable to reach Jerusalem, on foot, starting out from the earliest time the sacrifice could be offered (afternoon on the fourteenth of Nisan). Such a person could choose not to make advance efforts to reach Jerusalem, and be fully exempt from all punishment.  

A world of personal choice means we have to worry even the greatest among us might not rise to his best. For Ramban, the daughters of Tzelofechad worried Moshe would refuse to help them if he thought their father had been part of Korach’s rebellion. The personal insults the group had lobbed his way would stop him from giving them his best self, they feared, which was why they assured him he died of his own sin.

The spies give us a more concrete example of the downsides of leaving people to their own devices. For Ramban, the spies doomed themselves only when they made up lies about the Land, and then politicked among the people to convince them of their view. They were motivated by fear, certainty the Canaanites were too strong.

Unfortunately, the fear itself was what Calev meant when begging the people not to rebel against Hashem, 14;9. The spies and people were supposed to understand Hashem’s invincibility.

The members of Korach’s group also fell into the reverse problem, misplaced certainty. At the same time as they challenged Moshe’s authority, they accepted his being the one to define how Hashem would identify who was truly chosen, yet Ramban thought they still sincerely believed they would win, Hashem would accept their incense-pans.

Moshe’s anger at the soldiers who brought captive women back from the war against Midian shows us where people of good will can come to very different conclusions, an aspect of choice which takes people down different paths. Ramban thinks Moshe insisted they should have known better than to spare the women, since halachah requires killing even an animal which became the vehicle of a sexual sin.

He also cited a Sifrei which envisions Pinchas (who had been there) replying on their behalf, “we did what you said.” Ramban thought that technically true—Moshe said take vengeance, and they had, wreaking much destruction. Moshe was sure they should have known nonetheless to kill the women. Because choice leads to differences and disputes, with the best intentions on both sides.

Rewards, Limitations, and Responsibilities of Personal Choice

One value of having choices is the reward we get for making them well. Ramban thought Hashem had Moshe announce the great reward Pinchas receives for killing Zimri, to make people aware of what is to be gained with good choices.

For all his awareness of choice, he also knew of restrictions. Ramban—more forcefully than other commentators and halachic decisors– thought the Torah absolutely obligated each Jew to live in Israel, 33;52-53, regardless of how well-settled the land is, regardless of how secure Jewish control of it.

Choice brings responsibilities as well as limitations. For example, the Torah (30;16) holds a husband liable if he misleads his wife into thinking he had uprooted an oath of hers. Ramban says that’s only where the woman does not know the truth. In such cases, indeed, he bears all the blame; she does not incur even the lower level liability of one who transgresses the Torah be-shogeg, without full knowledge.

Were she to realize what had happened, her husband’s role does not absolve her. With knowledge, the responsibility to choose wisely reverts to her. He was wrong to lie or mislead, but he did not fool her. His only continuing obligation is to try to convince her not to sin.

Attitude Alone Can Count

Ramban also holds people responsible for their attitudes, especially in groups. As the incident with Korach comes to a crescendo, 16;21, Hashem tells Moshe and Aharon to separate themselves from the entire congregation. Ramban wondered why the whole nation was at risk.

Among his answers, he suggested the people had come to agree with Korach, swayed since he had told them he was trying to restore the first-born to their original role as priests. For Ramban, the people were at risk of death for agreeing, whether or not they took action to support him..

He also thought Hashem blamed the people for their attitude when leaving Sinai. One of the incidents which led the Torah to insert a section bracketed by inverted nuns, for Ramban, was the Jews’ fleeing Sinai, to make sure Hashem did not command them anything else.   

The rabbinic explanation he was working with called these incidents pur’anuyot, which most simply means a time of punishment. The Jews did not get punished for fleeing Sinai, but they deserved to, Ramban says. He also thinks their haste made Hashem delay their route to Israel a bit, leaving room for the sin of the spies to trap them in the desert for forty years.

The people’s attitude shaped the content of the Torah itself. In Devarim 9;18, Moshe speaks of times he prayed to save the people, but omits his prayer to save them from destruction for their sins during the incident of the spies. Ramban said Moshe left it out because the people would have said he failed with that prayer, since he did not secure them full forgiveness.

To close on a happier version of how a group’s attitude counts, let’s remember his comment on the Torah’s occasional description of some event as involving kol ha-‘edah, the whole nation. When 20;22 says kol ha-‘edah arrived at Midbar Tzin, Ramban says the phrase usually appears in advance of some sin, to implicate the whole nation for condoning a sin, not just committing it. No sin ensues after verse 22, so he instead says the Torah was highlighting the people’s unity in mourning for Aharon, which Bamidbar Rabbah singled out as a rare time of national unity for a good purpose. 

Counting and Its Complications

The many ramifications of personal choices perhaps shed some light on Ramban’s interest in the ways we count the people. In the first count in Bamidbar, Hashem told Moshe and Aharon tifkedu otam, count them. Ramban picks up on the use of the root pkd, a root the Torah used to describe Hashem’s decision to let Sarah become pregnant at eighty-nine.

Pkd means memory and attention, Ramban says. Moshe and Aharon were being told to go beyond just finding the number of Jews, they were to pay attention to (bepoked) each Jew. The half-shekel made Moshe and Aharon aware of each Jew and his place among the people.

For the Levi’im, the rules got more complicated, and Ramban’s explanation again looks at how individuals combine into groups. He thinks Levi’im were counted between ages twenty-five and fifty because only within that range could members of the family of Kehat perform their central service, carrying the Aron.

Levi’im served beyond age fifty in other ways, even members of the Kehat family, yet because one component of the larger whole stopped their central service then, the enumeration of the tribe, and in some sense its identity, reflected their needs.

Ramban also saw more individuality in people’s portions of the land of Israel then the simplest reading of the Torah might lead us to assume. The Torah says to give more land to the more, often understood (such as by Rashi) as giving a larger part of Israel to more populous tribes and families, so each individual ended up with about the same.

Ramban thinks the split was equal among tribes and clans (only within clans did the division account for larger or smaller subsets), so members of smaller tribes ended up with more land.

Unity with diversity does not lend itself to one-size-fits-all rules, Ramban shows us in his view of counting issues.

David HaMelech and the Census

Counting was one of the occasions where Ramban turned to a similar incident in David’s life, the census for which David was punished (II Shemuel 24). Ramban thinks David put himself in the wrong by counting the people when he had no need. Absent a reason, a census can only be to flatter oneself, to take pride in ruling over such a glorious (and numerous) nation. As Yoav tries to tell David, better to leave Hashem’s blessing uncounted.

Along the same lines, Ramban thinks David was wrong to count from age thirteen, which shows a desire to quantify the nation exactly, where the Torah allowed only quantifying for a specific need, such as how many soldiers were going into battle (to plan strategy and such).

Hashem promised Avraham the Jewish nation would be as stars of the sky, which Ramban takes to mean essentially uncountable. David’s goal—which Yoav subverted by counting only sholef cherev, those who wielded a sword—was to define the demographic contours of the nation. Which Hashem opposes.

David HaMelech and the Mikdash

David’s count came up again in Ramban’s discussion of the Korach story, to much different effect. When Moshe prayed to spare the people the consequences of their actions, Ramban praised David for doing the same with the plague his census brought, asking Hashem to assign all the blame to him.

Ramban thinks David was not the only one at fault, since the people could have insisted on conducting the census as the Torah said, by giving half-shekels, which turns it into a count of the coins rather than the people (and is another example of bystander responsibility—they’re liable for their failure to correct David).

More, though, Ramban thinks (without direct textual evidence) the people were being punished for their longstanding failure to try to build a Beit HaMikdash. David asked and was told not to, but the nation had had centuries beforehand to undertake their responsibility.

For Ramban, David’s census makes us aware of issues in counting Jews, the preference for inexactness and the insistence on a purpose to justify any count, as well as a centuries’-long sin of the people’s, a prime example of where the nation can incur liability for attitudes and omissions, without any active sin.

A Multi-Textured Life

Ramban’s experience of groups and individuals shows us a sense of the multiplicity of life, how there might be more than one answer to a question, such as in the balance between the needs of the many and the needs of the one. We saw two cases where Ramban gives multiple explanations of an event, without preferring any one of them. This, too, seems a function of his awareness of the textures of life.

Right after the first census in Bamidbar, the Torah tells us how the tribes camped and the order in which they traveled. Ramban offers several Midrashic reasons for their placement and order.  The specific ideas are not our concern here; in the aggregate, they remind us Ramban could accept many answers to the same question.

There, one might argue Ramban thought there was one true explanation but presented a few because he did not know which was the one. He’s more fully aware of multiple valid answers when the heads of the tribes present their gifts to celebrate the dedication of the Mishkan. He cites Midrashim which think each brought the same objects with different symbolisms in mind, reminding us one act or item can have many meanings.

A world of personal choice, which brings responsibility for attitudes and affiliations as well as actions, makes how we count people all the more important, and means our actions can be individualized in meaning and intent, no matter how externally similar they appear.

Metaphysical Limits of Human Experience

Pay attention to how far we’ve come in our discussion without much talk of Hashem’s impact or involvement. We know Ramban to have been acutely aware of Hashem’s role in the world—and we are about to see examples—but much of the action in Bamidbar involves people acting on their own, rightly or wrongly.

But Hashem and the metaphysical are there as well. Ramban thought there was no way Bil’am’s donkey saw the angel, for example, since an animal cannot perceive the metaphysical. Nor can most of us.

Bil’am could access the metaphysical, and in doing so gave Ramban room to remind us of a linchpin and lodestar of his worldview. Ki lo nachash be-Ya’akov, 23;23, told Ramban the Jewish people are always governed solely by Hashem, not any metaphysical forces/angels to whom Hashem delegated the rest of the world.  

The Metaphysical Appears Within Ordinary Life

Ramban did not take up an overall discussion of how the metaphysical operates, but did a few times tell us life evinces its impact. The parah adumah ceremony, for example, allows a person who had contact with a corpse to return to ritual purity, to the right to visit the Mishkan/Mikdash. There are many ways to explain the effect of the water mixed with the ashes of the red heifer; Ramban says the water creates a reiach nichoach, a pleasing smell, to counteract the smell of death.

Lest we think he means the physically odious stench of corpses, he tells us he means ‘etyo shel nachash, the lingering effects of the encounter with the serpent in Eden. Since the smell of death started with sin, he assumes the corollary, the fully righteous do not emit such smell nor create ritual impurity in their death. Remember he was making an halachic statement, taking his metaphysics seriously enough to impinge on the human ritual world. Death contaminates because of a long-ago sin.

Ramban quotes R. Yehudah Ha-Levi, who said Tzelofechad’s daughters mentioned their father’s lack of sons because death without male issue was itself evidence of sin. They were proving to Moshe he must have died for a sin other than joining Korach. There’s a more obvious and perfectly serviceable reason to mention the lack of sons, since they would have been the heirs, not the daughters.

Ramban’s choice to cite R. Yehudah Ha-Levi’s metaphysical view (death without sons proves a man had sinned) when he did not need to (and does not do so elsewhere in the commentary) suggests he agreed, another example of the metaphysical peeking out of his largely natural presentation in Bamidbar.

Levi’im as the Representatives of Hashem 

The Levi’im (and their subset, the kohanim) twice also reminded us of the metaphysical. To explain the Levi’im’s conspicuously smaller numbers, Ramban reminded us of Tanchuma’s claim about the explosive growth of the other tribes. For Tanchuma, Hashem was showing the Egyptians the futility of their attempt to depress Jewish numbers by enslaving them. Instead of letting it stop their growth, Hashem accelerated it.

The Levi’im, never enslaved, also never exploded in numbers.  

Once the Jews left Egypt, they became more direct representatives of Hashem than the rest. Ordinary Jews would take a share in the land, a share of spoils of war. Levi’im and kohanim did not; Hashem was their share and portion (as 18;20 and 24 tell us), they lived only from Hashem’s bounty, a living reminder of the underlying forces which guide the seemingly natural.

Making the Metaphysical Known

For all that it mostly stayed in the background in Bamidbar, Ramban’s explanation for what sanctified the incense-pans of Korach’s co-conspirators assumes Hashem wants (as it were) to be known. He thinks Hashem Himself, as it were, sanctified the pans as a sign and reminder to the Jewish people of their error. The pans became kadosh because they were a vehicle of proving Hashem’s involvement in the world.  

Bil’am also incidentally gives us a sense of Hashem’s interest (as it were) in being known. Bil’am said, 24;14, he was going to give Balak advice, but then shared a vision of the distant Messianic future (about which Balak could do little). Ramban says it’s advice in the sense that Bil’am was going to reveal Hashem’s ‘etzah, the counsel and conclusions Hashem has reached. Being told of Hashem’s plans makes Balak a no’atz, a recipient of sage advice.

The Kindness of the Divine

Besides wanting to be known, as it were, Ramban saw several examples of Hashem’s kindness. He thinks Moshe doubted Hashem’s ability to provide food to the entire people, 11;23, because he knew it could not be miraculous. Miracles always come either out of kindness or to fully punish evildoers. Since neither was going to be true of the meat incident, Moshe did not understand how Hashem could naturally provide meat for the entire people.

In the case of the spies, Ramban thought Hashem stepped in, uninvited and unconsulted, to tell Moshe to send twelve rather than two, in the hopes more of them would stand up for the right attitude upon returning from Israel.

A third kindness led to the Pesach Sheini, the second Pesach sacrifice, which Ramban thought was open to anyone who did not offer the first, whatever the reason. The rule the husband had to supply a sotah’s barley-offering stemmed from a similarly kind approach. For all she brought the test upon herself by letting herself be secluded with a man about whom she had been warned, Hashem did not want to also require her to supply an offering as part of the ceremony which might lead to her being outed as an adulteress (and then poisoned).

The Pinchas Story Brings Our Strands to the Fore

I am always tempted to wrangle all the comments I discussed into whatever framework I find (and you may think I’ve already done a bit of wrangling), but I am leaving out many other comments we saw. For all their inherent interest, they neither fit in this framework nor suggest a different one, so we’ll leave them for another time. Let me close with Ramban’s view of the Pinchas story, since it captures much of what I think we found in Ramban to Bamidbar.

Ramban thought Hashem told Moshe to have the judges kill all Jews who succumbed to sexual temptation and then worshipped Pe’or. Human action would stop the raging plague which, left unchecked, would kill many Jews besides those directly involved in the sin.

I suggested the plague would kill only those who bore some guilt for watching fellow Jews fall prey to sin without protesting or resisting, an example of our responsibility beyond acting well. Regardless of whether I was right, Ramban does point to certain groups who failed to understand the events in their fullest terms, who failed to see Hashem’s role.

He thinks the Jews crying around the Ohel Mo’ed were upset about the trials, not realizing human action would avert the broader disaster of plague. More, he thinks the members of the tribe of Shim’on accosted Zimri, blaming him for not taking action to stop the trials.

Zimri did not take on Moshe alone, in Ramban’s view, he was backed by members of his tribe. Pinchas did not take on Zimri one on one, then, he attacked Zimri in full view of the latter’s supporters. Instead of their taking him on, he became the cause for the cessation of the plague.

To me, the story shows Ramban’s view of Bamidbar in a nutshell: human action, with largely hidden divine underpinnings, occasionally yielding to more obvious impingements of the metaphysical. With guilt and reward for those who act well or poorly, as well as for those who watch and support others who act well or poorly.

It’s ultimately Hashem’s world, I think Ramban to Bamidbar taught us, but we have more of a say than we realize, in action and just when we support others. And we’re better off for knowing and realizing the implications, ramifications, and consequences of what we do, say, or approve.

Ramban to Mas’ei: Living Spaces

The last parsha of Bamidbar opens by listing the places the Jews had encamped along their forty-year journey. Rashi here and Rambam in the Guide for the Perplexed (3;50) offer reasons for the choice to include the whole list [in brief, Rashi thought the list shows Hashem’s compassion while administering the punishment of forty years of wandering, and Rambam thought the list would verify the miracles of Hashem providing us food and water, since the places named are not near human habitation].

Ramban thinks Rashi and Rambam’s explanations are fine possibilities, but assumes there easily could have been other reasons, still held secret by tradition.

The comment reminded me of a talk my late teacher, R. Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l, gave on one of his trips to the US soon after my time in Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush). He spoke about the parah adumah, the red heifer, as the paradigm of a commandment whose full reasons we will never know, and pointed to a Midrash which said the Torah specifically included such mitzvot to remind us to ground our observance in acceptance of the Divine command, not in attachment to whatever reasons explain the mitzvot to us.

It seems to me Ramban is offering a similar point: the list has some reason, whether Rashi’s, Rambam’s, or some other. But the reason matters less than our consistent and insistent certainty we need to read it as part of Hashem’s Torah, all dictated by Hashem to Moshe, for whatever reasons Hashem decides.

A Mitzvah to Live in Israel

Bamidbar 33;53 tells the Jews to conquer the Land and live in it, since Hashem has given it to us. Ramban says (as he also did in his glosses on Rambam’sSefer Ha-Mitzvot) the verse establishes a Biblical obligation to live in Israel.

[I have a close friend, whom I admire greatly, who made ‘aliyah in his forties. Before he went, he rarely spoke about the importance of living in Israel, because he could not urge others to do anything he had not fulfilled himself. Once he went, he refused to speak about it, for fear of sounding holier-than-thou.

As I languish in exile, for reasons I make no pretense of thinking of as sufficient to justify myself before the Heavenly Court when my time comes, I still allow myself to review such sources publicly, to help those of us stuck outside of Israel retain the discomfort of knowing we are failing to live up to the commands or hopes of simple sources of tradition. Our current Ramban is a prime example].

Hashem’s reference to having given us the Land tells Ramban a choice to leave and live elsewhere constitutes a rejection of Hashem’s Land and inheritance, as would the choice to conquer some other land and take it over.

He reminds us of Ketubbot 110b (and the next few pages), which makes striking comments about the obligation to live in Israel, the prohibition to leave, an idea to which the Gemara gave halachic teeth when it said a spouse who wished to move to Israel could force the other to join (or to divorce with financial prejudice—the woman could require her husband to divorce her and pay a ketubbah, the man could divorce his wife without paying her ketubbah. The issue of whether to push ‘aliyah regardless of consequences, and of how the finances would work, is more complicated in practice, but the theoretical right to force ‘aliyah makes Ramban’s point).

When the Land Makes Us Do It

Back in Parshat Korach, I noted how Ramban seemed to equate all forty-eight cities given to the Levi’im as places of refuge for unwitting murderers. In 35;14, he does it again, more egregiously. The Torah tells us of three cities of refuge east of the Jordan, and Rashi noted Chazal’s surprise at there being an equal number of such cities for the two and a half tribes as there would for the nine and a half on the west of the Jordan.

To explain, Abbaye on Makkot 9b cites Hoshe’a 6;8’s characterization of Gilead as a place filled with evildoers, soaked in blood. Ramban questions the relevance of the source, since cities of refuge absorb only unwitting murderers. He says Abbaye meant deliberate murderers will pretend to have done so unwittingly, increasing the case load of Gilead’s cities of refuge.

Abbaye seems to see the Torah as legislating the number of cities of refuge based on the future tendencies of the inhabitants (which raises questions of freewill). Ramban suggests instead Abbaye read Hoshe’a to be telling us an inherent quality of Gilead, something in the air which made people more likely to commit murder (he does not go further with this very important issue, how geography shapes people’s character, in minor or extreme ways).

Ramban’s Blurring of ‘Arei Miklat, ‘Arei Levi’im

He eventually turns to size, says cities of refuge were apportioned according to land mass (which makes sense, since the point was for an unwitting murderer to be able to reach the city before the goel ha-dam, the blood-avenging relative, caught up), and the land of the two and a half tribes was as large as the land of the nine and a half.

But the reason I noticed the comment enough to include it was Ramban’s first reaction to Rashi and the Gemara, confusion. True, there were three cities of refuge on each side, but there were forty-eight Levitical cities in total, each of which could serve as a city of refuge. Forty-eight translates into four per tribe, so what bothered the Gemara?  

As I said, he offers an answer to the original question, but he again shows his certainty all the cities of the Levi’im were fundamentally the same, despite the Torah’s calling only six of them ‘arei miklat. He’s right about the ability of the non-miklat cities to offer a very similar refuge, but seems to have dismissed differences among them.

On Mas’ei, on the verge of entering Israel, we found comments about where we live and how: on the road in the desert, in Israel, and for some of us in cities of the Levi’im, where we can find refuge.

Ramban to Matot: Making Rules and Misusing Them

Parshat Matot opens with rules of vows, and Ramban lays out some central differences between a vow (the common translation for neder) and an oath (shevu’ah; as with all translations, the exact meaning matters less than ensuring we know the full connotations of the word in the original language, which Ramban is about to tell us).

Creating Rules for Objects

Nedarim 2b tells us a neder affects the item, which excludes a vow on the intangible. A vow not to speak with someone, for example, can only work if the person implicates his/her lips (“let my lips be prohibited from speaking with you”) or some other physical item. The rule means most vows will prohibit something, since it’s hard to obligate an item to act in a certain way.

The Gemara does speak of a neder to offer sacrifices (which is a positive act), but Ramban thinks the exception stems from another principle, amirato le-gavoha ke-mesirato le-hedyot, the promise to give an item to the Temple takes effect as if it was already given (literally, as if he had given it to an ordinary person). A person’s announced intent of a sacrifice immediately renders some (not yet identified) animal in his possession (or the money to buy such an animal) already donated. [Ramban does not say it, but it sounds like he thinks this is an example of bererah, later events revealing what choice was made at an earlier time, on a Biblical level. We do not usually say that]. So the neder has affected the item, as Ramban thought it must.

The neder’s addressing the object shows how a Jew could make it halachically impossible to fulfill a mitzvah. Were a person to vow not to sit in a sukkah, the vow would take effect on the structure; the Jew has a personal obligation to sit in a sukkah, but any sukkah he would enter is prohibited to him by virtue of the vow. Since they affect two different actors (the person and the sukkah), both can be halachically true.

A neder cannot, however, require a person to act in a way prohibited by the Torah, since there’s no way to create an obligation on an item which would override the Jew’s pre-existing obligation to follow Hashem’s laws.

Shaping Our Personal Obligations with Our Words

Shevu’ot, oaths, are commitments taken by a person. They cannot address pre-existing mitzvot, either to violate or to fulfill, since Jews already and eternally committed at Sinai to keeping the Torah. Any further oaths would be adding to an existing one, and cannot work.

His dismissal of oaths to fulfill a mitzvah force him to read Nedarim 8a a particular way. The Gemara specifically allows oaths to fulfill a mitzvah, based on Tehillim 119;106, “I have sworn, and I will fulfill it, to observe your righteous laws.” The Gemara said such an oath would be le-ziruzei nafshei, to motivate oneself.

Ramban thinks the phrase tells us the oath has no technical validity, it’s a motivational tool (one who then neglected the mitzvah would still only have failed to observe a mitzvah, but would not have violated an oath).

To me, the whole idea Hashem gave us the right to manufacture Biblical obligations, endlessly fascinates. Ramban here reminds us of the basic differences between two versions of our right to shape the world.

Cause and Effect and Guilt

Among the rules of oaths, a husband may uproot some of his wife’s oaths on the day he hears of them. 30;16 discusses where the husband says he did so when in fact he waited too long, so his uprooting was ineffective. Should she then violate the oath, the verse says “ve-nasa et ‘avonah, he will bear her sin.”

Ramban thinks her freedom from liability depends on her ignorance. Where she had been told (and believed) he had uprooted her oath, he bears all the liability; she does not even count as a shogeget, someone who unwittingly sinned (a reminder shogeg differs from “by accident,” since a shogeg, always had some way to avoid the sin. Misled by her husband, she is not involved at all, he gets all the blame/guilt).

On the other hand, if she knew the truth, and the relevant halachot, and chose to violate the oath anyway, she’s in the wrong. Her husband would have to seek to dissuade her from her conduct, but would only be responsible for his failure to effectively remonstrate. She cannot offload her guilt to him because he tried to mislead her, only if he truly did.

Reasonable and Unreasonable Misunderstandings of Vengeance

In the beginning of chapter 31, Moshe sends an army to take revenge on the Midianites. They incur his ire by taking captives, especially of women who were likely participants in the precipitating incident of the war, seducing Jewish men. As preface to his explanations for how they got their mission so wrong, in 31;6, let’s note his view of the men sent to war.

Moshe sent a thousand men from each tribe, which strikes Ramban as a small number for an invasion. He first says Moshe had little choice, since any Jew who sinned with a Moabite woman was disqualified from partaking of Hashem’s vengeance. [I think he means they would not be qualified to enact Hashem’s vengeance even after they repented. Repentance might absolve us, but it does not give us the moral superiority to punish others for their role in the same sin.]

The thousand from each tribe were sin-free and well-known, good representatives for the whole. But in this version, if they were so good, how did they go so wrong?

Ramban thinks Moshe assumed they would understand vengeance to mean to eradicate the Midianites, as had been the rule in other cases, such as the Amalekites and Canaanites. He was particularly incensed about the women, Ramban thinks, since they should have extrapolated from the Torah’s requirement to kill animals whom people used as sexual objects (Vayikra 20;15). All the more so a human being.

When a Strafing Becomes a Conquest

Alternatively, perhaps Moshe never intended to invade Midian. In 25;17, Hashem said tzaror, attack, and smite them. Perhaps the small army was sent to attack vulnerable sites such as unwalled cities, knock down their best trees, seal up their springs, put stones in all their fields. He sent them to create annoyances and problems,  not destruction.

Hashem instead handed them an overall victory, but they had no instructions about how to handle it. Moshe thought killing the women should have been obvious, and added the male children as a further form of vengeance.

He thinks Moshe’s certainty the soldiers should have known better also serves as the background to a Sifrei which says Pinchas responded to Moshe’s rebuke, “we did what you said.” Ramban first points out Moshe did not address Pinchas, out of respect for Hashem’s high regard of him, Hashem’s having given him a berit shalom, a covenant of peace.

But how could Pinchas claim they did what Moshe said, when he didn’t say what to do? Moshe did say, “take revenge,” and Pinchas said they had in fact taken great revenge. Although not the revenge Moshe meant or thought should have been clear.

Different people understand the world differently, even with the best of intentions on all sides, even where one of those sides, Moshe Rabbeinu, thinks his intention should have been clear.

Like the vows and oaths we started with, another example of why our words matter, the care we should take in our speech, to arrive at the results we want.

Speaking Truth to Power

Last time, we saw Ramban argue Pinchas helped the Jews by stopping the plague. Hashem had wanted the judges to calm the divine wrath which was fueling the plague by trying and punishing the demonstrably guilty, but Zimri interfered. Once the judges were prevented from doing their job, the plague would have killed less discriminately, including those not obviously guilty. Pinchas stopped it when he killed Zimri.

At the beginning of this week’s parsha, 25;12-13, Hashem rewards Pinchas for his zeal regarding Hashem’s honor, which saved many Jews from destruction.  

[The verse refers to va-yechaper ‘al Benei Yisrael, which we normally translate as “he atoned for the Children of Israel.” Ramban’s reading puts a new spin on va-yechaper, the verb to atone. As we saw last time, Ramban thought Hashem did eventually punish those who worshipped Pe’or, before they reached Israel. Pinchas only delayed their deaths; he saved people the judges would not have killed but who would have died in the plague.

Many understand Chazal’s idea of “once the Destroyer is given the right to destroy, he does not differentiate,” to mean plagues kill even the completely innocent; if so, Pinchas’ action shouldn’t be thought of as atonement, since they had done nothing wrong.  

Possibly, Ramban would say “atone” here means “protect from punishment,” but then we would have to wonder where else the word has such a limited meaning. Does Yom Kippur, repentance, etc. only protect from punishment? It is a valid question in those contexts, and Ramban may be hinting in that direction as well. But I don’t think so.  

The Space Between Guilty and Innocent

I think Ramban more likely ascribed some guilt to the people as a whole. Not enough to incur the plague, but to require atonement before they could be immune to it. Those who really did nothing wrong—had no involvement with the intermarriage and eventual idol worship in the plains of Shittim– would never have been affected, I think he might say.

Aside from how it explains va-yechaper more smoothly, the underlying idea in Chazal becomes more palatable as well. Instead of their claiming Hashem releases plagues to hit randomly,  this view would say plagues also strike people who bear some guilt, although not enough to initiate divine punishment. Once the punishment is out there, it will affect such people as well.]

Back to what Ramban says explicitly. Hashem wants Moshe to make a point of telling the people of Pinchas’ reward, the priesthood, so they know great actions bring great reward. The verse also names the people he killed to emphasize their prominence, so we realize the risk he took as he attacked a leader of a tribe and the daughter of a king.

We’ve known it works out well for him for so long, we can become inured to the challenge involved. Ramban thinks the Torah wants us to pay attention. Faced with an affront to Hashem’s honor, Pinchas had the fortitude to take a real risk, to shatter real social mores, in the name of Hashem’s honor.

Not an Equal Split

Chapter twenty-six lists the families who would take a share in the Land. Ramban to 26;5 says all tribes received equal shares, a small tribe such as Shim’on getting the same as the large tribe of Yehudah. The Torah lists the families because the land was also divided equally within a tribe, each of the families named here receiving a portion of equal size.

The Torah does command the Jews (26;54) to give more to the greater populations, less to the lesser. Ramban says the obligation came into play only at the level of households within family clans. Each tribe received the same; within a tribe, each beit av , father’s group, received the same. Within a beit av, more populated families received more.

He sees the rule as a reason Yehoshu’a stresses the land was given to families, since families were the unit with differences in overall share. He throws in another option, the families all lived in one place together (at least at the start).

He does not elaborate either of the interesting ideas he’s raised: the starting point of Jewish habitation of Israel was not equal, in terms of land-ownership (a member of a small tribe, with only a few batei av, would receive much more land than members of a large tribe with many households); and they were supposed to live near their extended relatives, in their area of Israel, generation after generation.

The Sin of Chefer

The daughters of Tzelofechad make their famous pitch in chapter 27 of Bamidbar, asking for their father’s share in Israel, to preserve his name within the Jewish people. As part of their presentation, they say he died for his own sin, and (27;3) did not take part in Korach’s rebellion. Rashi thought they had to mention Korach since the sin was so recent and so (relatively) common a reason to have died.

Ramban does not see why. The daughters could have said, “our father died in the desert without sons.” [Death in the desert did not have to imply any sin other than crying over the spies’ report.] He understands Rashi was reflecting Baba Batra 118b, which says both Korach’s group and the mitlonenim, the complainers (whom Rashi had mentioned), lost their share in the Land of Israel.  The daughters of Tzlofechad needed to make clear their father was not one of those because they were looking for his share in Israel.

Worrying About Moshe’s Ego

Ramban thinks the simpler reading has the women worried about Moshe’s reaction. Korach attacked Moshe’s leadership, accused him of a personal power grab, for himself and his brother, unauthorized by Hashem. The daughters of Tzelofechad feared Moshe would be unsympathetic to any plea by any relative of Korach’s group.   

They therefore reassured him their father had not been part of the uprising, had died peacefully in bed, one of the many whose sins meant they would not make it to Israel.   

Ramban then mentions R. Yehudah Ha-Levi’s reading of the text (an uncommon event for Ramban; also of note, he refers to him as ha-meshorer,  the poet. Today, he’s more known for his Kuzari, a philosophical work, a reminder of how people’s reputations and historical images shift over time). R. Yehudah Ha-Levi thought they described their father as having died for his own sin as prelude to their mention of his lack of heirs. Death without male issue was evidence of sin, R. Yehudah Ha-Levi’ assumed.

The daughters of Tzelofechad either want to reassure Moshe their father still deserved a share in Israel; was not one of those who had cast doubt on Moshe’s choice of Aharon; or meant only to bemoan the sin which led to his death without male heirs.

Our random walk through Ramban to Pinchas gave us examples of unexpected workings of power. Pinchas stood up to powerful forces, and earned power (or authority). Smaller tribes’ larger shares of Israel gave them power, and Tzelofechad’s daughters reassured Moshe their father had not attacked his power, as they sought his help.

[Parshat Balak is unusual in its largely taking place outside the purview of the Jewish people. Unless the Moabite women they slept with told them (or they read about it in the Torah), the Jewish people would never have known what happened between Balak and Bil’am.

To me, it’s a reminder of how we little we know about which events really matter to our futures. It also makes the people’s failure at the end of the parsha sadder—here Hashem has just helped them avoid Bil’am’s curses, and they cannot resist the enticements of the Moabite women, first physical but then expanding into the idolatrous).

Donkeys Do Not See Angels

Bil’am accedes to Balak’s invitation to curse the Jews happily, as soon as Hashem gives what Bil’am should have known was grudging permission.

When he goes despite the signals not to, Hashem sends a sword-wielding angel to block his way. Verse 22;23 tells us Bil’am’s donkey saw the angel (and turned away).

Ramban rejects the literal text, since angels are completely nonphysical, and therefore fully inaccessible to a donkey’s senses. When a prophet or other people “see” angels in Scripture, Ramban thinks their intellects perceive the angel, literally impossible for an animal to achieve.

The verse must mean the donkey sensed a presence, like Kohelet (1;16) said he had seen much wisdom and knowledge. Just as no one sees wisdom, they perceive it, Ramban thinks the donkey sensed a threatening presence (the sword as well as the angel; Ramban says she had the fear she would have were she to see a person or animal coming to kill her).

Otherwise, when Hashem finally opened the donkey’s mouth, verse thirty, the donkey should have said, “there’s an angel, right there, that’s why I’ve been acting this way!” Instead, the donkey says, “is this how I’ve ever acted before?” Because the donkey herself did not know.

Ramban thinks the episode was to remind Bil’am Hashem is the source of voice (the donkey speaks) and can obviously silence whomsoever Hashem chooses. To help Bil’am keep in mind—although he seems to have missed it—he will not be saying anything other than what Hashem wants.

Immunity to Witchcraft

In his second speech, 23;23, Bil’am says “ki lo nachash be-Ya’akov ve-lo kesem be-Yisra’el, no spells can affect Ya’akov nor sorcery on Israel.” Ramban thinks Hashem is having Bil’am point out to Balak the error in having sent for him, since Bil’am’s whole métier is sorcerer, to which the Jewish people are immune. Precisely how Bil’am helped others is impossible for him to do for Balak, since the Jewish people are directly and solely governed by Hashem.

We’ve seen his perspective before, but since he deems it worth repeating, we will as well: for Ramban, as a matter of physics and metaphysics, most of the world is governed by subordinate forces (not, chas ve-shalom, in any way which excludes Hashem, or permits worshipping those forces). In all areas where that’s true, sorcery can have actual impact. It was not a mistake to think Bil’am helped certain nations win wars, because he did.

The mistake was thinking any of his previous successes implied any power regarding the Jewish people, who are always under the direct, unmediated Providence of Hashem.

Telling the Future as a Form of Counsel

After Bil’am realizes Hashem will not be letting him curse the Jews, he tells Balak (24;14) lecha i’atzecha what the Jews will do to you at the end of days. I’atzechacomes from the root of ‘etzah, which seems to mean he plans to dispense advice. Except his topic is the End of Days, when there’s not much Balak can do about it anymore.

Ramban thinks Bil’am means he is going to tell Balak of Hashem’s decisions about the future (‘etzah in the sense of Hashem having “taken counsel.” as it were, and decided on the best course of action for the Jewish people at the end of history). To be told of someone else’s ‘etzah is to be a no’atz, one who has received counsel, says Ramban. [He does not go further, but I think means Balak should be better advised on how to conduct himself and his people’s lives, knowing the necessary direction of history. If we’ve never been told where history is headed, we can plead ignorance when we turn out to be on the wrong side of it; when we’re told ahead of time and decide to act counter to it, we’ve set the petard by which we will be hoisted].

Progressing Further Into the Future

In the continuation of his comment, Ramban tells us these words of Bil’am’s address the days of Mashiach. In his reading, each of Bil’am’s prophecies moved a step forward in time. The first referred to the Jews as chelek Hashem ve-nachalato, Hashem’s share and inheritance (he does not give the exact meaning of the phrase fromHa’azinu, but he means to say Bil’am’s first speech describes the Jews as they are right then, a people in whom Hashem is invested, as it were, forestalling his ability to curse them).

Bil’am’s second speech spoke of the Jews’ upcoming conquest, how they would kill all the land’s mighty kings (he again does not cite specific verses). The third envisioned the Jews’ residence in the land, fruitfully and successfully, their appointing a king to defeat the Amalekites (personified by their king, Agag), and then of David and his successes.

Now, in the fourth prophecy, Bil’am sees Messianic times, which is why he stresses the distance of the vision, er’enu ve-lo ‘atah, I see and not for now, different from the previous prophecies. [Ramban does not explain why the first three would discuss eras of history relatively close to Bil’am’s own time and then jump all the way to Mashiach. The easiest option is this was the last speech, so Hashem conveyed the most important information.

Alternatively (perhaps additionally), after the start of Davidic kingship, the next important marker of history is the eventual arrival of Mashiach. All the rest is a winding path to where we could and should have gotten long ago.]

Court Administered Justice for Worshipping Pe’or

When the Jews are seduced by the Moabite women, Hashem tells Moshe (25;5) to have the leaders each kill their men. Rashi says there were tens of thousands of “leaders,” i.e. judges. Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 10;2 largely echoes Rashi, and puts the number of those killed at over 150,000 (judges of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, means there were over 75,000 judges).

Aside from the sudden population growth those numbers imply (since, after this incident, there are still around 600,000 Jewish men), Ramban does not think the text indicates such a large amount of death (although he will come back to the Yerushalmi, to suggest a possible reading, an example of his dedication to the meaningfulness of  Rabbinic texts).

Multiple Paths to Divine Justice

He prefers to read verse five as a way to mitigate verse three, where the Torah tells us Hashem’s wrath waxed against the Jewish people for their worship of Pe’or. To save them from the Divinely administered plague they deserved, Hashem in His mercy tells Moshe to have the judges try those who tipped over into worship, kill them for their idolatry, and hang them.

The mercy lies in the saving effect of a public declaration of the nation’s rejection of these people’s sins. Once the nation’s representatives decry the idolatry by punishing its perpetrators, the plague will not spread; barring such actions, the plague will strike the innocent as well as the guilty.

[We can forget the important point: Hashem’s justice administered as plague spills over to affect people not implicated by the original sin. Ramban does not discuss why Hashem chose to operate that way.] He does reminds us we might not always recognize the more compassionate path: in this instance, courts’ trying and killing tens of thousands of criminals would save many others who might find themselves sick and dying with plague.

The tribe of Shim’on got in the way. In Ramban’s reading, the judges were starting on their mission, the people were gathered around the Mishkan for the first trials (with the plague still raging), when Zimri stepped forward to challenge Moshe. Ramban tells us Zimra was a great leader, had many to help him. Like Korach, Zimri reminds us Moshe Rabbeinu had to cope with other power centers among the people!

Nor was Zimri the sole initiator. Sanhedrin 82a thinks his tribe egged him on, accusing him of watching passively as they were being judged and killed.

Pinchas’ Third Path

Ramban’s reading enriches our understanding of why Moshe and the people cried in reaction to Zimri’s challenge. They had hoped to stop the plague by following Hashem’s command, and here was Zimri getting in the way. All he could see was Jews being killed and he saving them, when the judges and others they knew he had just doomed many more, guilty and not, to death by plague!

Pinchas’ zealotry saved the day, and stopped the plague. Ramban infers the effect of killing Zimri from Hashem’s saying Pinchas had removed Hashem’s wrath, which is what the court trials were said to accomplish.

But Yerushalmi said 150,000+ Jews were killed! Ramban thinks the number tells us how many sinners deserved to be killed, and who were later killed by Hashem before the Jews’ crossed the Jordan (since Devarim 4;3-4 says Hashem had destroyed from the people’s midst anyone who followed Pe’or).

If so, how did Pinchas help? Ramban does not say it explicitly, but I think he wants us to understand only the Pe’or worshippers got killed later by Hashem; because of Pinchas, Hashem chose a more targeted way of removing those evildoers from among the people.

We start with Balak and Bil’am trying to force Hashem’s hand, and end with Pinchas helping Hashem bring only the necessary justice and punishment to the world.  

The Nature of the Impurity of Death

My temerity in thinking I can communicate Ramban’s ideas briefly and accessibly depends on my selection process, where I often leave out deep and important claims of Ramban’s I do not know how to convey. To stretch myself a bit, let’s discuss his understanding of 19;2, where the Torah introduces the idea of a parah adumah, a sacrifice whose ashes would be used to remove the ritual impurity associated with contact with the deceased.

Rashi, here as elsewhere, thinks chukkah refers to a commandment Satan and non-Jews would attack us for observing, since they see it as meaningless. Ramban thought there was more to the challenge of the parah adumah, just as was true of the scapegoat sent to die as part of the Yom Kippur service (Vayikra 16;8). Here as there, he thinks the sacrifice’s location, its being offered off-site, gives the possible impression we are serving some power other than Hashem.

To explain the red heifer under current discussion, he says the sacrifice removes the smell of tum’ah, of impurity, by creating a reiach nichoach, a pleasing smell. He does not elaborate, but he seems to see death as creating some kind of actual smell (although not one human beings notice), and the burning of the red heifer creates a counter-smell, so sprinkling some of those ashes on a person counteracts the smell.

I don’t want to ascribe to him anything he did not say, but I do want to stress he means this literally (altbeit metaphysically). To me, only such a reading can explain his next words, where he attributes the ritual impurity associated with death to ‘etyo shel nachash, the aftereffects of humanity’s interaction with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

The righteous who passed away be-neshikah, with a Divine kiss as it were, do not create ritual impurity (as a matter of halachah, Ramban stresses, which is why the righteous do not (Akeydat Yitzchak, the work I hope to work on next in this space, sources the idea to Berachot 18a, which says only the righteous are called alive even after their passing. [I emphasize the halachic nature of Ramban’s views here, regardless of their roots in his metaphysics. He is not speaking metaphorically or allegorically when he links the ritual impurity of death to the incident in Eden—or if he is, it’s a metaphor or allegory important enough to leave an imprint on the halachot of ritual impurity.

Death, for Ramban, has a bad smell, the bad smell of our having yielded to the serpent’s blandishments which, aside from losing us Eden, left us with the wrong kind of death. The righteous, who have freed themselves of that, still pass away, but without the need to remove any smell].

The Sword is Not Quite Like the Corpse

Continuing with laws related to death (because Ramban carves out another halachic exception we might not know), 19;16 speaks of a challal cherev, someone killed by the sword, leading Nazir 53b to understand the Torah to equate the sword to the corpse: both are avi avot ha-tumah, primary sources of ritual impurity, able to cause seven-day corpse impurity to people and objects.

Ramban says the Gemara means the impurity created by contact or carrying, but does not mention ohel, impurity a corpse causes to people or items within its same halachic space. He thinks perhaps since the Torah stressed adam ki yamut be-ohel, when a person passes away in a space, the Gemara understood the rules to be limited to the deceased, not swords. A page later, the Gemara seems also to understand the Torah to require sprinkling of parah adumah water on the third and seventh day only for contact with actual corpses, not swords.

Swords create a unique impurity, seven days of impurity due to contact with death (but only contact, not occupation of a joint space), and removable purely by immersion in mikveh at the end. There’s much to say, but Ramban says none of it, so we will leave it here, more aware of the complications of our halachic response to death.

Proper and Improper Unity

Chapter twenty starts by telling us the Children of Israel, the entire nation, arrived at Midbar Tzin. Since the Torah repeats the idea of kol ha-‘edah, the whole nation, in verse 22 (when they get to Hor HaHar), and did so several times in Shemot, Ramban cannot accept Rashi and Ibn Ezra’s reading the phrase to mean the group who arrived in the desert of Tzin were the complete complement who would enter the Land, after the passing of all those doomed to die in the desert.

In most of those cases, the Torah then related an incident in which the Jews sinned, rebelled, or otherwise acted wrongly. For Ramban, the Torah tells us the whole nation was there so we know they all partook of the misdeed, to forestall our thinking some subset brought trouble on the nation as a whole.

His explanation does not work for verse 22, however, since nothing bad happened at Hor HaHar. There, he thinks the Torah wanted to signal the unity of the Jewish people regarding the mourning over Aharon HaKohen, a unity for the good. In fact, Bamidbar Rabbah referred only to the Hor HaHar incident as the whole nation, since only there was the unity for a good purpose.

Picking Our Conquests

The Torah tells us the Jews sent to Sichon asking to pass through his land, 21;1-2, without any apparent command from Hashem. According to Rashi, the Jews indeed initiated the idea of a peace overture on their own. Ramban tells us he will elaborate elsewhere on what he sees as a requirement to offer peace terms before war (in Devarim 20;10),.Here, he agrees with Rashi, since Sichon was an Emori. For Sichon, peace could only come if he and his people accepted mas ve-shi’abud, financial and physical servitude, which the Jews do not mention here in their offer to pass through without war. The peace overture they are making cannot have been the one Hashem would have wanted them to make, since they do not set the right rules.

Ramban advances what seems to me a daring explanation. Were the Jews planning to conquer Sichon or Og’s land, they would indeed have laid out the limited options. However, since Moshe knew the Jews were not going to right then conquer all ten nations (the seven Canaanite ones plus Keni, Kenizi, and Kadmoni, as mentioned in Rashi, Bereshit 15;19), he preferred focusing his efforts on the other side of the Jordan.

If all they conquered was west of the Jordan, the tribes would live near each other, in the land described as zavat chalav u-devash, flowing with milk and honey. Moshe therefore could honestly say the Jews would leave Sichon alone (for now) if he let them pass through. After they forced war, Ramban thinks Moshe still planned to leave it uninhabited, had Reuven and Menasheh not requested it as their share.

Sifrei Tavo 299 supports Ramban’s reading. When the Torah speaks of the Land on the other side of the Jordan as what Hashem planned to give to us, latet lanu (Devarim 26;3), Sifrei sees an implied distinction from the land they took on their own. Too, Bamidbar Rabbah 7;8 says east of the Jordan was not sanctified enough to support a Beit HaMikdash or to serve as a site for the Shechinah, the concentrated Presence.

He does not go further (the rest of the comment explains the Jews did not send a message to Og, since he had seen what happened to Sichon and attacked them anyway), but he has assumed Moshe had the right to choose the order in which the people took over the Land. His interest in national cohesiveness justified his plan to ignore the land east of the Jordan (as we continue to do), and focus on the more sanctified parts of Israel, where all the tribes could reside together.

Until Sichon forced his hand

The rebellion of Korach and ensuing events take up most of Pinchas. Since the rebellion itself has garnered much valuable and insightful discussion, I have chosen places where Ramban discussed ancillary aspects, to tread ground not overly overrun with others’ steps.

Aharon’s Silence

Korach and his group issue their challenge to both Moshe and Aharon, but 16;4 says Moshe heard them and fell on his face.  Ramban thinks Aharon purposely did not respond, an example of his elevated character and sanctity.

Since he was an interested party, any defense he gave for his right to his status would have necessarily sounded self-serving. His silence conveyed an admission of Korach and his group’s greatness, of the legitimacy of their view that all apparent measuring sticks should have put them in the High Priest’s role, of his having taken the position only because Moshe told him Hashem commanded it.

[Ramban does not make clear whether he thinks Aharon believed he was less worthy than they, or stayed silent to avoid giving any other impression. I raise the question because it impacts the version of humility we are best advised to cultivate: I can easily imagine Aharon properly being daunted by the prospect of serving as Kohen Gadol, should have seen himself as unworthy, since no human being should fool him/herself into thinking s/he is worthy of standing as the people’s representative for atonement from Hashem nor as Hashem’s representative to the people. Unless Hashem designates him.

But does humility require us to see others as more suited for a particular task when they’re not? Does Ramban think Korach and his people actually were more worthy, seen only through human eyes? Or does he think humility led Aharon to a false conclusion? He does not say, but I find that version of humility difficult to understand.

Ramban’s idea about Aharon’s silence reminds me of Aharon’s praised silence after Hashem kills Nadav and Avihu. Ramban does not relate the two, but there seems to be a dvar Torah there, an illuminating insight into the power of holding back from speaking].

The Problematic People

When Hashem tells Moshe and Aharon to separate from the congregation, Ramban wonders why the people as a whole were at risk, since they had not joined Korach and his party. Two parts of his answer particularly appeal to me. First, the people originally were firmly on Moshe’s side, but Korach told them he was fighting on their behalf, working to restore the service to the bechorim, the first-born.

Once they saw their stake in his side, they joined him.

(I know I said I’d highlight two points, but let me briefly throw in Ramban’s assigning capital liability to the people for agreeing with Korach, which counted as being meharher acharei rabam, questioning their teacher).

Because Moshe nonetheless intervenes on the people’s behalf, Ramban broadens his perspective to others who did so, such as David, who took responsibility for the idea to count the people (which led to a plague).  Ramban himself refuses to let the people off the hook, because they could have insisted on being counted the right way, by giving shekalim.

More, Ramban thinks the plague really punished them for their centuries’ long indifference to building the Beit HaMikdash. David was forbidden from doing so when he had the idea, but Ramban thinks it could have been built in the time of the Judges or of Shaul. The people showed no interest, so it did not get done, and then had to wait for Shelomo. The plague which we know to be a reaction to their being counted actually also punished their laxity.

In both instances, Ramban sees liability where the verse does not make it explicit, in the one for joining an unjust cause, in the other for failing to take on an important task.

How Items Become Sanctified

After Korach’s crew are burned by the fire from the machtot (fire-pans) they offered, Hashem (Bamidbar 17;2, although non-Jewish translations continue chapter sixteen until the story of Aharon’s staff) has Moshe tell El’azar to take those pans for the Mishkan, ki kadeshu, for they have become sanctified.

Rashi thought the “sanctity” stemmed from their having become klei sharet, items used in a service to Hashem, and thus were assurim be-hana’ah, prohibited for others’ benefit. Ramban disagrees, since each of the aspects of this event disqualified it from creating a kli sharet—the people offering the incense were not priests, they were doing so outside the Mishkan, and it was only offering incense, not a sacrifice.

Ramban’s first answer shows how Rashi’s view could work, in a way which tells us much about how sanctity happens, as well as about how we can delude ourselves. First, since Hashem commanded them to bring these pans, they become items of kedushah (while ordinarily a non-kohen’s incense pan has no special sanctity, one offered in obedience to a divine command does).

More, the people involved dedicated the pans le-shem Shamayim, for the sake of Heaven, since they thought Hashem would answer them with fire, the pans would in fact become items of service, forever. In the face of Moshe’s denials, even as they followed his orders about how to settle the dispute, they were so sure they were right, they expected the pans to become vehicles for Heavenly fire, and then take their place among the items of the Mishkan. I am repeatedly sobered by such comments, warnings to all of us to step carefully and hesitantly, to be always aware of the powers of self-deception.

The Value of an Education

Ramban then offers his own view (ha-nachon be-‘einai, what seems correct in my eyes). Verse three records Hashem’s explanation, “for they offered them before Hashem, and they became sanctified and were a sign for the Jewish people.” Ramban thinks the verse tells us Hashem sanctified the pans from the moment they were brought, to be a sign for the Jewish people.

Teaching the Jewish people a lesson, even if unfortunately through the sin and death of other people, sanctifies items as well. Ramban does not specifically invoke kiddush Hashem, but the points seem related: the challengers to Aharon offered their pans, and Hashem used them as vehicles of reminder for the rest of the people, a sign to them of how they may and may not worship Hashem.

Learning the lesson of proper service (as we are also taught by people who act ‘al kiddush Hashem, who act in ways that sanctify the Name, including giving their lives) creates kedushah, as with these incense-pans.

Sacrifices in the Holy of Holies

In chapter eighteen, Hashem informs Aharon of gifts he and his descendants will receive from the Jewish people, among them certain parts of some sacrifices. In 18;10, Hashem says to eat those “be-kodesh hakodashim,” which Rashi reads as telling us they had to eat the gifts in the ‘Azarah, the courtyard of the Temple.

Ramban dislikes the reading, since the courtyard is not in fact kodesh hakodashim, the Holy of Holies, and Vayikra 6;19 specifically speaks of eating these parts of sacrifices in a makom kadosh, a sanctified place, but not kodesh kodashim, the most holy place. No one ate or drank in the Holy of Holies, where the Aron sat, and it was in fact entered only once a year, when the Kohen Gadol performed the Yom Kippur service.

R. Yehudah b. Beteira partially addressed the issue in Sifrei. He inferred from our verse the permissibility of eating sacrifices within the building of the Beit HaMikdash should there be no alternative (he offered the example of non-Jews having surrounded the Temple. While he obviously sought an extreme to illustrate a theoretical situation, his idea presents a remarkable image: non-Jews surround the Temple, to conquer or destroy it, and kohanim will still seek a place to eat their parts of the sacrifices!].

For his point to work best, Ramban notes, R. Yehudah b. Beteira should have said even when non-Jews are already in the Heichal, the first room of the Beit HaMikdash, kohanim could eat in the Holy of Holies. Which would make the image even starker, kohanim working to eat sacrifices properly as non-Jews advance into the building itself!

Sanctity of Place or Body

Without disagreeing with Sifrei, Ramban thinks the words literally speak of a kind of sanctity rather than a specific place of it. “Kodesh kodashim” tells the kohanim to treat these sacrifices with the highest form of kedushah (which have been laid out elsewhere).

He justifies his claim by interrogating the meaning of the letter bet in the phrase “be-kodesh hakodashim.” While it does most often translate as “in,” which would mean they were being commanded to eat their gifts in a certain place, the bet can also indicate “in the manner of,” as in Bereshit 3;17, be-‘itzavon tochalena, in sadness shall you eat it (Hashem’s words to Adam after the Fall, about the bread he would work hard to reap).

Here, too, be-kodesh hakodashim means “in the most holy way” you would eat sacrifices.

The Excluded Priests

Verse twenty of chapter eighteen tells the priests they may not take nachalah, a portion of land, in Israel (The doubling of the verse—the kohanim not to take nachalah nor to have any chelek, part, warns against any share, however small, says Ramban).  Of course, they did have part of the Land, since they (and the broader tribe of Levi, who receive a similar warning in verse twenty-four) were given the cities of refuge.

Those cities were given to the Levi’im for the benefit of the rest of the people, however. He seems to mean the cities were not really the Levites’, since they were for haven for unwitting murderers.  He phrasing equates all forty-eight cities, where halachah differentiates between the six designated as ‘arei miklat, cities of refuge, and the forty-two ‘arei Levi’im, cities of Levites.

However he would have resolved the issue, he then quotes Sifrei (Korach 45), which doubles down on the general point. Sifrei takes the word chelek in the verse, any part of Israel, to add a prohibition against kohanim taking bizah, spoils of war. The verse’s conclusion, “Ani chelkecha  ve-nachalatecha, I am your share and your inheritance,” reminds Sifrei of “’al shulchani atah ochel, you eat at My table.”

I am a Levi, as it happens, so the idea strikes me each time I see it. The tribe set aside to serve/represent Hashem was removed from ordinary life, the ordinary life which had been the focus of Hashem’s promises to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Ya’akov. Unless we see Hashem as having promised them the unimportant, which seems odd, the Torah seems to set this tribe on a different path. Not better or more ideal, different, to weave a specific section of the tapestry of the Jewish people.