From Chabad.org: Matot-Masei in a Nutshell
Numbers 30:2–36:13
The name of the Parshah, “Matot,” means “Tribes,” andthe name of the Parshah, “Masei,” means “Journeys,”.
Moses conveys the laws governing the annulment of vows to the heads of the tribes of Israel. War is waged against Midian for their role in plotting the moral destruction of Israel, and the Torah gives a detailed account of the war spoils and how they were allocated amongst the people, the warriors, the Levites and the high priest.
The tribes of Reuben and Gad (later joined by half of the tribe of Manasseh) ask for the lands east of the Jordan as their portion in the Promised Land, these being prime pastureland for their cattle. Moses is initially angered by the request, but subsequently agrees on the condition that they first join, and lead, in Israel’s conquest of the lands west of the Jordan.
The forty-two journeys and encampments of Israel are listed, from the Exodus to their encampment on the plains of Moab across the river from the land of Canaan. The boundaries of the Promised Land are given, and cities of refuge are designated as havens and places of exile for inadvertent murderers. The daughters of Tzelafchad marry within their own tribe of Manasseh, so that the estate which they inherit from their father should not pass to the province of another tribe.
From the bizarre under Sinai
Business is now booming for Phaedrus The apothecary. It turns out that war is the best thing that could ever happen to a medicine man. He now found himself a landowner with slaves literally making sure that production of particular types of cures went on constantly. Literally, the state legalized marijuana and his job was to cultivate a field of it.
Today he was visited by Hillel the scribe And the two of them sat comfortably on pillows sharing a hookah of Phaedrus’ Phinest, a black label variant he set aside only for clients of the highest social cast.
1
Tough day at the office, Hi?
You don’t want to know, Phae.
We heard. What the hell does a stonemason know about living in a house with a teenage girl?
When Papa has some money and a 16-year-old daughter, there is a great reason to make a giant problem of this If you are Joshua.
Corruption has a face I think. I think you can look at someone and know how ridiculously her up they are. How in the hell does the stonemason get away with it?
If I live to be a thousand years I will never know.
But I mean, come on Hillel, He was only paying attention because of the girl.
I don’t know why you berate me with the truth.
I mean, don’t you ever just want to throw the quill down and throw over the table and start screaming about the ridiculous hypocrisy of warrior governments?
I do. We do. I’m still writing. I’m still keeping the thought of a Utopian society alive.
I’m sorry. I don’t think we are ever going back. We had 40 good years and now it’s over.
I know it. I know it. I’m just being maudlin. You know, he can’t do anything anymore. The stone Mason and Eva are basically running everything.
I figured Eva had something to do with it. There’s way too much sex going on right now.
I guess that’s the problem with being a guy. It’s not particularly a problem with me. Maybe it’s meat?
I think it’s meat. Joshua is big time into barbecue. Everyone knows that. It’s all he wants.
I know it. But the truth is that it was eventually meat that took down Moses.
You don’t say? Everybody thinks he’s in charge.
Oh no no no. A few weeks ago when he left in the middle of that meeting. This is when it happened. Maybe it was God or maybe it was the fact that he was too old to be putting out that much energy. You just can’t go to an all meat diet directly from a sedentary life and not expect some problems. We found out that he left because his left arm had horrible shooting pains and his heart was on fire. He fell into a deep sleep and then came out of it and there wasn’t really much left of him. It’s like everything got broken inside of him and he’s just breathing and eating soup if someone will feed him. He’s not even supposed to be alive I guess but he has that relationship with God. He’s not killable.
So that’s it. Joshua and Eva are running the whole show.
I’m just there for my bag of gold as always. Apparently I make all of this official. Because it’s me, the traditional scribe, the scribe from the golden era of book writing. It makes everything all the more legitimate. It’s such a lie. My whole life is a lie. My whole life has been stolen from me.
Well, why don’t we pick up a pair of Midianite women. They will make you feel better. Hell, you’re rich. Bring home a whole Midianite family for yourself. God knows we’ve displaced enough of them. I’m not sure if this is war or the sanctioned rape of a region. Any excuse. We are horrible butchers. Consequently, young beautiful women are cheap on the market. What do you say? My treat.
Sometimes I wonder why I talk to you.
I’m the apothecary. I’m all you have sometimes.
From your mouth to God’s ears.
2
Well, it’s official. I’m a whore.
How much do they actually give you?
I have 100 acres of land and five bags of gold.
Wow. You’re almost as rich as me.
It was equal to all the money I’ve ever made in my life. They knew how much money I had been paid. They knew I wanted no part of it. They threatened me. They believe me. They threatened to kill my friends. Either I write what they tell me to write and put my name on this as officially a part of the Torah or they would punish me in a way I would never forget.
They can’t kill you.
That was the whole negotiation. They can’t fake it.
They are faking it. All of this is fake. We are just on a woman hunt right now. We are the most ridiculous people in the entire world. We’re just professional rapists. There are no rules to live by. There is no civilization in us. We don’t try to live well together. If we see something we like we take it and then we steal everything in the house. We’re the worst criminals in the world.
And either I put the words down with my hand or they are not legitimate.
Yeah but you wrote it.
Yes I did. I got every word correct. I truly professional job. We even had an accounting. That was for me by the way. Just so we all understood each other as clearly as possible.
Yeah, I guess that’s kind of ironic if you think about it. You married Eva and you kind of became you when she openly sold herself for money. She is the most well-known prostitute in the land. And you were always on the other side of things. You were not about making foolish decisions on street corners when you were frustrated. You were always a clear head. And politically, you’re the publisher of the news papyrus. We have always trusted you.
Yeah, thank you for the resume. Like I said, a lifetime of integrity shot to shit.
Stone Masons are crazy.
Tell me about it.
3
Has there ever been such a black day?
I know it. The desecration goes on and on and on. Is there no end for their appetite for destruction?
They are going to use the holy Land for grazing.
The grapes. The pomegranates. The land was so perfect.
And the ganja.
Oh do you remember the first time we met some of them and we exchanged smokes?
I think that was when my own relationship with God was solidified.
Oh what was growing in the holy Land. They were the best distributors. Forget the distributors. They were the best friends we had. It was really our deal with them while we were in the desert that made everything okay. We could do quite a few things well and we were clever. But they did trade with us because they always had more food than they needed. They were happy to feed us. They were just foodies like us but they had this limitless fertility there. Truly the hand of God. You remember how we got a lot of unbelievably good food from them. Why are we killing them and grazing their land?
It is something about meat. I am trying to get this straight in my head What happens to people who give themselves over to eating meat all the time. I have a very cool head. I see things very clearly in front of me. I can formulate language easily enough.
And you have good penmanship.
That’s not what I’m talking about. You and I, we don’t use animals.
Well I do sometimes. Sometimes I have a bite for business.
Do you really? What’s it like?
Like I’m eating a friend for money. I am also a whore. I take flesh into my mouth for money. It’s easy enough to understand.
Do you think this little psychosexual thought is relevant in the problem?
I don’t know, man. I always think of it as a carnivore needs to smother and choke it’s victim. It doesn’t have spears or arrows or swords or knives. It has to wrestle its prey to death and then either bleed it out or grab it by the throat. This is a carnivore being a carnivore. When we don’t eat carnivore meat, we go back more towards the species we really are.
We are monkeys.
For sure we are monkeys.
I feel much better when I live like a monkey.
I know. And it’s so much more fun.
Phaedrus, despite how woke everyone is because of our connection to the Midianite population, no matter how kinky you want to be, there’s a big difference between making love and raping someone while choking them to death. These are two vastly different thoughts in my mind.
You don’t equate sex with violence?
At my age?
No, philosophically. You truly do not see violence as being a part of sex?
No.
Well what about males fighting each other over females? We do that. We are jealous. Men wish to possess women.
Good luck with that. I never felt that way. I just came across a few women who were very interested in having me in their bed. They liked being with me very much and they like taking care of me. That’s how I met Eva. She was from that time. It just happened. I didn’t have to chase anybody. They just chose me and I don’t know what to tell you.
Hillel, I’ve always meant to say this to you. Do you think it was because you were charming or because you were the scribe writing the Torah? You don’t think your celebrity had something to do with how easy it was to find women who liked you?
I thought it was because I didn’t eat meat.
Oh come on.
Well, maybe we can consider it like a business of yours. People need an apothecary and so they come. Do they get what they wanted? Were you trustworthy? Was it a good trip and were you now trusted? You can put up a sign and it will attract some business. But you have to be good at what you do to really be successful.
Do you brag because you are vegan or because you are a Jew?
Do you remember that line in the Torah about a two-edged sword?
Of course. It was absolutely a work of art that day. You really hit one out of the park with that one.
I was referring to using both sides of a wooden pen.
You were dipping it in the inkwell.
I am a scribe. I require a lot of ink.
Oh. Scribe, you have made my day.
Cheers. We might as well smile as we go down with the ship.
4
42.
Really? That was the number? 42?
Yeah, we moved that bloody tent 42 times.
You know, Hillel, I’ve been thinking a lot lately.
You do say?
Yes. I’ve been thinking about it now that I am a landowner.
Ah. You have freedom to choose where you live?
Sure. I how’s a tent towards the edge of my fields. I am out there alone except for some friends who visit. I’m beginning to understand the difference between living closely together with people and being a bit more spread out from each other.
I know what you mean. I bought a house up on the side of the hill with all the rich people in the meat district. The smell of burning meat is oddly pleasurable but I have no desire to eat it. But it’s true that there’s more fresh air between our houses and the more fresh air, the cleaner I feel.
And the quiet, yes? And the quiet when you do not have to speak or be clever or deal with problems.
Yes, when we are alone we are not at war.
This is what I’m talking about, Hillel. It’s all of this violent behavior. It’s from mass living. Mass living is bad. We need space between us. We need space in order to grow and develop and become who we are. You have to be able to have a moment to take a breath of fresh air.
You are kind of preaching to the choir because technically I wrote a book where that was the theme for getting us out of Egypt.
Right. But it’s not getting out of Egypt. It’s getting out of a similar living situation.
We are little Egypt, right?
That is kind of the point. Like, a few families got a chance to go and make a way for themselves. But that was because they had a big group of people. You get it, and then they would go and live in close proximity to each other and argue and fight and eat meat. This sort of group living thing is the problem.
The human animal is not really capable of living in the wild.
I’m aware of that. I’m aware of it but what I’m saying is we need at least enough space for genuine agriculture between each person.
Wait a minute. Are you saying there’s an alternative lifestyle possible?
Okay, you’re being sarcastic. But there’s a big difference between stuffing everyone into the ghetto and giving everyone an acre to play in and visit each other from. There is a lot of fresh air and autonomy with that much space between people. There’s a lot of freedom and a lot of quiet.
We never did that when we were out in the desert. But then again, we didn’t really have to. Once we stopped eating meat, everyone calmed down. Nobody needed to snuff the life out of another person. Nobody was hysterical. We just let food be the economy and people gravitated away from meat because it was just too costly to the happiness of our society.
So you’re saying this is a ridiculous dream, yeah? Like we should do something instead of parceling off the holy Land for its grazing rights, literally creating pockets of human disease and filth. They are just going to destroy the holy Land instead of caretaking and then they are planning their escape by having other desecrated places to run to.
No. It’s a wonderful dream. Everything we’ve done has all been a wonderful dream. It’s filth. The filth won. They just couldn’t stop themselves from ruining everything. It’s just so much fun using up all the resources for a party and then looking for more parties. It’s drugs. Meat is drugs. Eating meat for a human monkey is literally taking the craziest drugs on the planet Earth and believing it’s food.
Yeah I know what you mean. You can’t have animals in a garden really. Unless you know you rotate and I guess you can keep a few chickens and let them destroy an area and then when they are finished, you come in and plant behind them and it’s a pretty successful garden.
Just don’t eat the chickens.
Or the eggs, I guess. I like eggs though.
You’re not vegan anymore, are you?
Now that you mention it, I’m a hypocrite who explains my failures away as if they are humorous. When the hell did that happen?
When we compromised with the filth, apothecary. When we compromised and made a deal with the filth.
Then they got us both?
Let me know what a heart attack feels like. I’m staying vegan.
5
Well, Hillel, what did you get?
I have publishing rights for all of the new cities. I have the right to set up offices and keep the news going in all of the communities.
With editorial comment?
Yes. I will have the rights to the journal but it will be a compromised journal. Although I myself can have best intentions and can promote ideas of living together well, I am equally obligated to speak of the military and remind people of their obligation.
So you’re in the pocket.
I am sold out. How about you?
I am a franchise. I’m free to take my model that I have and build it in all of these new cities. I am technically a millionaire. It’s pretty weird to be a millionaire. It’s pretty weird for a guy like me to find out he’s a millionaire. Hello. My name is Phaedrus and I’m a millionaire. I don’t know. It seems I used to have better looking girlfriends when I was just an apothecary in a tent.
Yeah, those were the days. Those were the days when we were young and believed that all we had to do was be good people and we could build for ourselves everything we needed. We believed we had God on our side because we believed that Moses was really on our side. Maybe building up the military and all and making us violent and scary to others is what allowed us to have that 40 years in the desert. People treated us with respect even though there really wasn’t a lot to eat for a long time.
But we got better.
Yeah. We got better.
Why couldn’t they have left everything alone?
It’s meat. I can’t look at this problem anymore and see anything else but that. If you’re going to live like a carnivore, you have to hunt and kill. If you live like a herbivore, he just need your food land available. We just need to be very careful and cultivate the land we use to grow our food. We just need to keep the fertility going and will be fine.
It’s nice having water.
Yeah. Irrigation helps.
Our heroes took a brief pause and put something in the hookah and shared a few deep puffs of this new mystical material.
I think the book is kind of a duality. On the one hand you have this well-meaning philosophy of independence and how to act well and get along well as a society. But then as a nation we do these other things for a while. So I think it’s almost like a report card. It says that we are mostly bad but a little good. Do you think that’s true?
You’re saying that the entire concept of this religious morality we are embracing nose in advance that we will fail?
I think they are setting impossible bars. Look at the priesthood and all of the clothing and all of the costumeing. All of the pageantry. It’s what it looks like. It’s a visual thing. They just make a picture that a common person could never possibly concoct up on their own. It’s the grandeur of groupthink. I think it’s supposed to inspire awe.
Amongst the illiterate. Amongst the rabble. What about educated people? What about people who admire a decent philosophy of life to help them negotiate the challenges before them. What about the honest people? What about the people who are not trying to steal and get everything they can for themselves? What about those of us who prefer to live in a non-criminal society?
You are such an elitist.
Oh, I’m not an elitist. I’m a realist. I was here. We did all of the gardening. We solved all the problems. Sometimes it took us a decade or more but we fixed the problems because we looked at it and we could see right before our very eyes how the world was trying to be green but the world had not allowed it to be this way.
Normal people would not have thought agriculture possible in the desert.
We did it. We did it honestly. We didn’t rape and Rob and kill. We didn’t set up criminal networks between ourselves. We didn’t agree to have murder be the currency of conversation of the whole world. We just got along together in our little common purpose of eating. We were stuck here, Moses was busy with Miriam and nobody wanted war. So we made the desert bloom and it was beautiful and now we are this again. I don’t know what you’re trying to say.
I’m trying to say that maybe being Jewish is accepting the compromise.
No. I don’t think being Jewish has anything to do with it. It has to do with how close to the ideal you wish to live and why you might wish to live closer to the ideal. The big difference is I did not start eating meat. I have. I was exactly like you back in the day and sometimes there was nothing I could do about it but smile. But I didn’t allow myself to say it was food and I guess you have. Now the way you speak about things is very meaty. It’s not the same conversation anymore and I don’t think it really has anything to do with the money.
I’m consuming, aren’t I.
Yeah, maybe you should just cut out the meat for a while. I think it’ll change your whole outlook.
6
Why are we bachelors?
Because it’s better this way.
You don’t really believe that, do you?
Okay, apothecary, let me think for you for a moment. Back in the Golden Days of the simple tent and you would hand grind your herbs and create your cures. You had no family because you had fallen in love long ago with the cures. But at the same time, a constant flow of females was available to you because cures are a thing well of need in all difficult situations.
Fair enough. But if it is my turn. After Eva finally let you go, Why didn’t you just settle down with a family? What was so important about publishing. Why didn’t you take a wife? Or several for that matter.
What do you want me to say? Do you really want me to say that I’m gay? I’m not gay.
You’re pretty gay.
No, it’s like I’m gay but I’m not gay. I really wanted to be with my family. But I never had an opportunity to really have a family. I mean, I had these relationships and they were like having a family but everything was always in transition. There was no home to come home to. Maybe minutes. Always on the run. Maybe Eva was right. When in Egypt, live like an Egyptian. She lives. She thrives. The world is perfect for her now. But for me, if I couldn’t have a wife, I wasn’t really interested in whatever second place was. Sometimes I found women I liked but it just never worked out.
Your argument is that you’re not gay but you’re picky, is this correct?
Is that how it comes out?
Dude, you’re gay as fuck.
Shut the fuck up. This is a religious text.
It’s a desecration. It’s a land grab. It’s like a disease that is spreading.
And you know the worst of this? God forbid someone reads the book now. I’m talking about some king somewhere who just happens to be literate. If they read the book now, it means the decision is that you are a carnivore nation or you are eaten by carnivore nations and there’s no other way to the world. The way the book ended, the way the book was supposed to end, was that we were human beings with free choices and that there was a definite connection between the uncleanliness of dead human bodies and how similar it is to animal flesh. Don’t eat meat means don’t cannibalize. And with these rules, we did our 40 years.
The blessed 40 years of peace. The 40 years without war and the 40 years of agriculture in the desert and friendship with all the surrounding kingdoms.
Arts. We had arts.
Festivals. Can we talk about the festivals?
My God what we had in our hookahs!
And men and women were friends.
Friendly. Yeah, we were very friendly for 40 years.
The 40 years of friendliness.
Yes, those were friendly times. But now…
Yeah, we did not appreciate it when we had it. Maybe this is a good reminder.
That what? That we be prepared for war? If we didn’t start any wars, we never had any wars. We had 300,000 healthy men who worked every day very hard and we’re not foolish. We weren’t drunken fools. We were not illiterate slaves. We were free people worshiping God exactly as we were promised.
Yeah. We were living in the holy Land.
That’s the promised land.
Will the Promised Land was supposed to be the holy Land. But now it’s not the holy Land anymore because we have parceled off and sold it piece by piece. Literally, we have guaranteed that by demanding our arrogant and wasteful and harmful presence in a territory like that, and including grazing rights, whatever wonderfulness about this great valley there ever was will never be there again. Whatever that place was before we got there will never be like that for us. Not the war people. They are just going to turn that place into a desert.
You really believe that there is no enlightenment in the world?
I don’t know, buddy. I don’t know what to tell you.
7
Hillel.
Yes, Phaedrus?
Explain to me please what an accidental murder is.
An accidental murder is when you murder someone but you really didn’t mean to do it.
What does this mean? I wanted to kill someone else but I killed this other person by mistake? Is that what you mean?
No. It’s not a loophole for psychopaths. It’s the idea of causing a death when it’s not your intention to do so.
Okay. You got it. Give me an example.
Okay. Let’s say I asked you to help me build my house.
Do you want me to do some work around your house?
Well, I was thinking if you were free on the weekends but that was not what I was thinking of here.
Your example of accidental murder just happened to include doing work on your house. Do you have to be any more obvious than that?
Okay, fine. Let’s say while you are there helping me graciously as any great friend would but you slip and fall from the roof and that’s it. Kaput. No more nothing. The eternal null and void.
You know it would be a good thing if someone were to put something around the edge of the roof so that people should not fall off it so easily.
Is that what you want me to do?
No. The point is that I wasn’t trying to murder you. It’s just that I facilitated your death accidentally.
Were you trying to kill me?
Do you mean when I pushed you when you were up on the roof? Absolutely.
Well, it was a good thing we built that guardrail or neither of us would be here to talk about it.
Say no more. How do you accidentally kill someone?
I think it has something to do with going to a bar and drinking alcohol and eating meat and then getting into a fight afterwards and people dying from this.
So we are genuinely going all in for the ghetto life, yeah? We are going to be pure slavery until the end of time.
That’s what it looks like to me. Drunken fights, violent emotions, sickness, poverty, crime, status and all of those forgotten people who can’t find favor in the money river. We are going all in for urban sprawl. We’re voting no to health. We are voting no to individuality. We are voting no to any kind of ideal society. We are going all in in the meat business and that’s all there is to it.
And that’s what’s going in the book.
Yep.
Does it bother you that I’m going to get rich from all of this human misery?
Are we friends or am I a celebrity?
Both?
That’s what I’m saying. We can do much better than this and I don’t believe putting this in writing was a good idea at all. They should have left the book alone. It was about meat or not eating meat and Moses chose not to eat meat anymore and there was peace. The fact that we did not get to write about our 40 years here is lunacy. Why didn’t we? Why didn’t I do it?
You can.
No, I don’t control the book.
But you did.
Yeah. Maybe I should have asked. Maybe I should have published in the Torah all of the good things that the children of Israel did out in the desert for those glorious 40 years. Because now they’ve not only broken a book that makes a very clear case of why killing is bad and massing armies together to wage war is bad and massing anything together is bad and that meat is behind everything And now they’ve changed it into complete agreement that war is beneficial and profitable. It’s egregious. It’s horrific. It’s the worst possible thing I could possibly be doing.
How bad is it?
I’m thinking about it. Can you give me something, apothecary? Can you give me something painless and quick if there should come a day that I cannot answer the bell and play?
People occasionally ask me for the ultimate cure. You have never asked me before. In all of the years we have been friends, you have never ever asked me about this.
Yeah, it just occurred to me that it was pretty handy having you be an apothecary and me thinking about not wanting to do this anymore.
It’s bad.
Yes, my friend. It’s really bad. The repercussions of what I have written is going to be very very bad for a very very long time.
