Dvar Pinchas

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the concise, relevant Weekly Dvar. Although the following Dvar sounds like I'm pushing people to donate to Lelamed so they can get a free copy of my good, that's really not my intention (although I'll be more than happy to oblige). It applies to any book that you'll surely enjoy...

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Parshat Pinchas relates a story (27:1-12) about the daughters of Tzlafchad, descendants of Yosef (Joseph). These daughters wanted and loved the Land of Israel so much that they wanted a piece of it. As Rav Moshe Feinstein asks, why do they have to have a claim in the land, just because they love it? Wouldn't entering or living in the land be fulfilling enough?

Rav Moshe thus concludes that if a person truly loves something, they'd want it to be theirs, and no one else's. This is why the daughters wanted to actually own a piece of the land, rather than simply living in it. This logic applies to marriages, as well as the Torah's preference that every Jew writes their own Torah (or a portion of it). In our terms, it's not enough to borrow and read Jewish books. We need to love the Torah we read SO much that we feel the need to own it! As this week's Parsha urges, we should not only seek, read and enjoy words of Torah, but we should OWN those books, and live those words!