Summary of the Parasha

“These are the journeys (Masei) of the children of Israel”: the Torah lists the 42 stages of the journey, from Ramses to the plains of Moab across from Jericho. Rashi compares this list to a king bringing his son home from a long journey after an illness and recalling each place: “Here we slept, here you were cold, here you had a headache”. Kabbalistic tradition links these 42 stages to the 42-letter Divine Name (Ana bekoach): every stage of a person’s life is a passage toward his redemption. Along the way the parasha mentions the death of Aaron on the 1st of Av at Mount Hor.

God commands Israel to dispossess the inhabitants of the land and destroy their idols, and sets the borders of the land of Canaan, from the wilderness of Zin to Mount Hor in the north, from the sea to the Jordan. He names the princes who will divide the land among the tribes. The Levites will receive 48 cities with their pastures, including six cities of refuge, three on each side of the Jordan.

Then come the laws of murder and accidental killing: one who killed without intent flees to a city of refuge to escape the blood avenger and stays there until the death of the High Priest; a deliberate murderer, judged on the testimony of two witnesses, cannot ransom his life. “You shall not defile the land in which you live, for I dwell among the children of Israel.”

Finally, the leaders of the tribe of Manasseh are concerned: if the daughters of Tzelofchad marry men of other tribes, their inheritance will leave the tribe. They marry their cousins, and the land stays within the tribe. So ends the book of Numbers: “Chazak, chazak venitchazek”.

Summary of the Haftara

“Shim’u D’var Hashem” (“Hear the word of Hashem”)
Text in Jeremiah 2:4–28 and 4:1–2 for Sephardim, 2:4–28 and 3:4 for Ashkenazim

The second haftara of rebuke of the three weeks. God asks: “What wrong did your fathers find in Me that they went far from Me?” He recalls that He led them through the desert, “a land of wastes and pits”, to a land of orchards, and that they defiled it. “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, to dig for themselves broken cisterns that hold no water”. The Sephardi reading ends with the call: “If you return, O Israel… return to Me”.

Parasha-Haftara Connection

The parasha retraces the stages of the desert where God guided His people; Jeremiah rebukes Israel for forgetting that same desert: “They did not say: Where is Hashem who brought us up from Egypt and led us through the desert?” The journey does not end on entering the land: one must still remain faithful there.