Blessing for the Torah:
Bar’chu et YHVH
ha-m’vorach, Baruch YHVH ha-m’vorach l’O’lam va-ed!
Baruch ata YHVH Eloheinu
melech ha-olam
asher bachar banu m’kol
ha-amim, v’na-tan lanu eht Torah-to.
Baruch atah YHVH, noteyn ha-Torah. Ameyn.”
(Bless YHVH the blessed
One; Blessed is YHVH,
the blessed One for all eternity. Blessed are you, YHVH,
our Elohim,
King of the Universe, you have selected us
from among all the
peoples and have given us your Torah.)
two issues – the cities of
refuge and the inheritance of the daughters of Tzelophad.
The Cities of Refuge were towns in the Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah in which the perpetrators of manslaughter could claim the right of asylum; outside of these cities, blood vengeance against such perpetrators was allowed by law. The Torah names just six cities as being cities of refuge: Golan, Ramoth, and Bosor, on the east of the Jordan River, and Kedesh, Shechem, and Hebron on the western side.
The concept of a prison
system appears nowhere in Judaism. Indeed, while sentencing options as diverse
as financial penalties, atonement offerings, corporal punishment, capital
punishment and even death directly by the hand of YHVH are found in the Torah,
the punishment of "incarceration" as we know it is nowhere to be
found in traditional Torah-based Jewish law. Today it is estimated that there
are more than 10 million prisoners worldwide and our societies seem to be less
safe than ever before.
That is not to say that
Jewish law did not condone restrictions on liberty. The Scripture itself
provides for servitude (involuntary, imposed by the court), as a reparative
form of incarceration. Under certain circumstances, the court could order that
a perpetrator who caused another party loss and could not repay his debt or was
found guilty of theft be "sold" for a period of time (not to exceed
six years) in order to raise the funds necessary to make restitution. Yet such
court-imposed servitude could not degenerate into cruel slave labor. The
"bondsman" was entitled by law to good nutrition, proper clothing,
productive work and food and shelter for his wife and children. Restitution,
not punishment, was the goal.
Let us consider a spiritual application
concerning cities of refuge - Charles Spurgeon.
"The
manslayer left his house, his wife, his children, everything, to flee away to
the city of refuge. That is just what a man does when he resolves to be saved
by grace: he leaves everything he calls his own, renounces all the rights and
privileges which he thought he possessed by nature; yea, he confesses to having
lost his own natural right to live, and he flees for life to the grace of YHVH
in Yahshua. The manslayer had no right to live except that he was in the city
of refuge, no right to anything except that he was YHVH’s guest within those
enclosing walls. And so we relinquish, heartily and thoroughly, once and
forever, all ideas arising out of our supposed merits; we hasten away from self
that Messiah may be all in all to us. Fleeing for refuge implies that a man
flees from his sin. He sees it and
repents of it"
Our Torah portion for this week:
Num 35:9 And יהוה spoke to
Mosheh, saying,
Num 35:10 “Speak
to the children of Yisra’ĕl, and say to them, ‘When you pass over the Yardĕn
into the land of Kenaʽan,
Num 35:11 then you
shall choose cities to be cities of refuge for you, that the one who
accidentally killed someone shall flee there.