By Sarah Kravinsky

This week’s parshat is called Naso // נָשֹׂא // Numbers 4:21-7.89. Naso means “to lift up”. Sounds promising, right? But I read this parsha with the sinking feeling that it was the kind of parsha a 13-year old would be bummed about having (their only solace being able to give away platform shoes that say, “I got lifted up at Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah”).

Why, you ask? While this week’s parsha is full of detail, it is mostly about:

how to take a census of the Israelites responsible for carrying the Tabernacle

how to perform a magical test to see if a woman has committed adultery

and how to become a Nazirite, a holy ascetic who “shall allow the growth of the hair of his head to grow wild” and who is even purer than the Kohanim.

I know that I am not alone in feeling excluded from texts about purity, bureaucracy, and establishing ownership over women’s bodies. But I also know that there is value in choosing to struggle with these texts. And so I chose to focus on the idea of the Nazirite’s holy purity, and to see how it intersects with the dilemmas we face as a movement.

In Naso, we find instructions on how to become a holy Nazirite, an ultra-holy person who is even more separated from society than the priestly Kohanim. The instructions in this week’s parshat are mostly focused on ways for the Nazirite to avoid contamination with a profane world, like not eating grapes or wine, not touching dead bodies, not cutting one’s hair, etc. By following these instructions, the Nazirite is secluded from the dirty parts of human life, and brought one step closer to God.

At ma’apilim seminar, we talked about the model of a movement that makes itself pure by completely sealing itself off, creating

its own world in opposition to the unjust and oppressive world outside of it.

This movement is able to establish a “pure” ideological consensus that would be threatened by engaging in the external world. This kind of movement is deeply exclusive, without points of entry to members who did not grow up in this movement or who actively struggle with movement ideology.

I don’t think that describes Habonim. But I do think that we as a movement continue to struggle with what it would look like to fully place ourselves in a world whose unjustness overwhelms us. What would it mean to become fluent partners in dialogue with other Jewish institutions, and to stand in solidarity with broader struggles? I personally believe that the structure of the ken, and of local community in general, holds many of the answers we seek as we try to model for our chanichim a life where ideology and reality are continuously reshaped by each other.

I know that these questions are not new. Movement members have probably struggled with these questions for as long as they have seen how deeply oppressive our world can be. But these questions feel even more relevant as we prepare to create seven of our own separate worlds this summer, and I hope that they will help us build pathways outward from our summertime utopias into our broader realities.