The Hebrew name for the Book of Numbers is B’MIDBAR (בְּמִדְבַּר‎) and it literally means “in the wilderness“. Honestly, given that the majority of the content in this fourth book of the Torah doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with numerical symbols, don’t you think “In the Wilderness” would have been a much better title than “Numbers“? […]

Let me ask you a question and I want you give me an honest answer. When you hear the word “numbers”, what comes to mind? The first thing that pops into my mind is a boring list of accounting records. For me, numbers represent a kind of cold objective reality I don’t want to deal […]

When studying the Torah, it is important to keep in mind that there are three aspects to God’s HOLY instructions we need to keep in mind. First, there is no doubt that the teachings of the TORAH reflect a divine utopia, the way things should be if we lived in a PERFECT world and the […]

In my last post, I reviewed the major events of Israel’s life leading up to the Book of Numbers. I pointed out that after nearly four centuries of slavery in Egypt, your average Hebrew probably had little hope their dire circumstances would ever change. Even when Moses showed up, the response of the weary Israelites […]

From today we begin our study of the truly mind-blowing awesome Book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Torah. I think the title “Numbers” is quite misleading. It imparts the idea that we’re going to be bombarded with a bunch of population censuses and genealogies. While we will encounter some of that kind of […]