Chevre, this week’s parsha is פִּינְחָס (Pinchas). At the end of last week, we saw that Pinchas took a spear and killed a Jew and a Midianite woman he was having relations with in a tent. THE Tent was the tent of meeting or the Mishkan. For Pinchas’s Bias for Action, he was rewarded with being a Cohen. Even though he was the son of Elazar, who was a Cohen, Pinchas was born before Elazar was made a Cohen and it was not yet a family passed position. We see here that even though Baalam and Balak appeared to fail last week, they were successful in stiring problems inside Am Yisrael. Similar to how a system can repulse a DDOS, but still be impacted even if it isn’t noticed externally.

Next Am Yisrael does a COE (Correction of Error) evaluation. They needed to know how many folks they had left after the Midianite incident. Next we learn about the laws of inheritance, since there were now folks that needed to inherit and the specific request by the Zelophehad Daughters who had no brothers to inherit their father. And given we are talking about folks being no more, Moshe asks for a successor and Yehoshua ben Nun is declared the successor. We then have the Tamid offering and a listing of the holidays.

So we see that all of these things in the parsha are connected because of the Midianite DDOS from outside. Shabbat Shalom.

Folks should know that in addition to being able to find me on Twitter (@dubrowin) and Mastodon (@dubrowin@awscommunity.social), you can now also find me and my weekly Divrei Torah on BlueSky (@dubrowin.bsky.social). The Lambda that pulls from Mastodon to BlueSky is working, but has some bugs I’m still working out.