God pre-emptively avoids challenges over property, and possible civil war, by discussing the boundaries of Israel, how the land is divided among the tribes, and the cities of refuge. He also cautions the Israelites that if they do not expunge, in one way or another, the inhabitants of the Land along with their idols, those people will be a thorn in the side of Israel. This lesson will be lost throughout Jewish history, and will repeat itself many times over the course of three millennia.

Along the vein of removing people from the land, this portion discusses how to deal with someone who has inadvertently taken another’s life.

The Israelites are commanded to create six cities of refuge, places where an individual must live if they accidentally kill somebody, and must remain until the death of the serving High Priest. (The killer was technically free to leave, but by risk of the victim’s kin given the right to hunt them down.)

It seems a particularly arbitrary length of a sentence -- but it is precisely the randomness of his punishment that fits the crime. Someone’s life was cut short in a random way (random, at least, to our limited, human perception). The victim just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It stands to reason that the killer’s fate would be determined by chance too.

A good question that comes up is whether it would be less just if the accidental killing took place when the high priest was old, presumably with fewer years left to live. What if the killer were sentenced a day before the death of the High Priest? There is a certain leap of faith here: in the same way that the High Priest is the Earthly representative of the spirit of God, the symbolism reminds us that life and death are ultimately in the hands of God, and His judgments are innately good, even if we perceive them to be unfair.

So too, the High Priest is the community's pipeline of atonement, as through his actions in the Temple that a person's sins, or the community's sins, are wiped clean. The Priest, the ultimate symbol of atonement, is aptly used.

In this parsha, too, God is unequivocal about the death penalty for murder – the only imperative in the Torah that is repeated in each of the five books.

After parceling out the land and the cities of refuge, the Israelites stand across the Jordan, ready to enter the Promised Land. Moshe describes an overview of some of the trek through the desert, a journey fraught with war, plagues, complaints, rebellion, an attempted coup, lack of water, and countless demonstrations of God’s power. It’s as if to say to Bene Israel: “You’ve come this far, so let’s not lose sight of our collective experiences, and what this is all for!”

Rashi writes that the Israelites needed to be reminded of the good and the bad that had happened to them so that they will have perspective when they reach the Promised Land. It is a strange paradox: they saw firsthand miracles and God’s powers. Yet, they often strayed, and needed to be reminded from whence they came.

This is in contrast to the pre-Exodus Israelites. They were able to maintain their peoplehood and faith so successfully while slaves in Egypt, and onward, by three key things: keeping their Hebrew language, their Hebrew names, and keeping true to their customs. They worked incredibly hard to sustain their identities in the harshest of conditions. This, perhaps, is an answer to the age-old question of why today we don’t see “major” miracles. The Israelites who did see God’s greatest miracles became jaded, rebellious, and spoiled.


For Bracha