"A Fact Finding Mission?"

I was blessed to call Aaron Bulman - of blessed memory -my friend. Aaron had a thing about Torah. He walked to more than one local (Washington Heights) shiur a week, held chavrutot, and tutored in and around his home. Then there was the daily halacha at mincha, the rabbi's drashot, and at the pinnacle - the parsha. He'd hold court on the parsha from the head seat of his family friend filled table.

Aaron used to talk on the parsha for maybe a half hour at his meal. Maybe more. It largely depended on the length of the inevitable left turns. In his memory, and because I feel like it, I'm going to digress a bit at this point.

One of the things Aaron had about Torah was that when his kids brought home school parsha sheets he wouldn't let them read aloud and call it a Dvar Torah. As young as they may have been that rule stood in place. His daughter who today teaches young children passes on this legacy, telling her students to get the idea inside themselves and share it in a natural way, rather than reading by rote.

(My public speaking students don't love my impression of a typical kid giving a Dvar Torah. Maybe it hits a raw nerve? Roughly, it goes like this: "In this weeks pa-ra-sha/pa-ra-shat She-lach/we read about the me-rag-lim/the spies..." If it's a bar/bat mitzvah then there are added lines to the affect of "I am indeed a very lucky girl/boy to have such a wonderful family. I would like to to thank my parents, my brother X, and my sister Y...")

I will forever cherish Aaron's organic relationship with Torah. Many a year he would find a new Torah hero. Sometimes it was a favorite from the rotating Breuer's shiur (Rabbi Feivel Schachter), or a rishon (the Ramban) or an old classic parshanut person(Nechama Leibowitz), or a newfangled parshanut persnolity (Rabbi Menachem Leibtag) or an even more creative, literary and dense parshanut person for our time (Aviva Zorenberg).

I remember well the time that Rabbi Leibtag was writing new essays every week and Aaron was gobbling them up with the excitement of a kid following a comic serial. He was enamored and awe inspired (although he could have lived without chiastic structures).

I am grateful and wistful toward Aaron for so many things (hosting me, befriending me, mentoring me as a poet, respecting me). One of the many things I'll recall always is his love of Torah. In particular I'll recall his "getting" Rabbi Leibtag long before it became de rigour for schools like mine to bring him on board .

I decided this week - after having heard Rabbi Leibtag as scholar in residence on Shavuot and the day after Shavuot in my school - to take a look at his online words on this week's parsha. It is an act of chessed that his articles are available free on line.

Rabbi Leibtag raises basic questions ("What was so terrible about the sin of the "meraglim?" After all, they were instructed to report the facts, and that's exactly what they did! Furthermore, even if we consider their report as deliberately slanted, why should the entire nation be punished for being misled by a small group? Finally, even if the people's initial reaction was improper, immediately afterward they repent by declaring their willingness to take the challenge of conquering the Land! Why then is Dor HaMidbar punished so severely? Why must they wander for forty years until they perish?")

Then he says that before addressing those questions he needed to turn to nomenclature. I looked it up. It's "a set of names or terms, like those used in a particular science or art, by an individual or community." Then he does a great job of mapping out the issue. I recommend you take a look.