“Nasi” – The Offerings of the Tribal Princes of Israel
One year after the Exodus, on the first of Nissan, the dedication of the portable Sanctuary began. The dedication lasted twelve days, during which offerings were brought daily to the Mishkan, delivered by the prince of one of the twelve tribes of Israel.
In memory of this, it is customary during the days of the month of Nissan preceding Pesach to read daily the passage from the Torah describing the offerings of the prince of a different tribe.
Our website provides the text of the prayers from the Siddur “Tehillat Hashem” published by “F.R.E.E. Publishing House.”
5 Nissan
Today is the day of the tribe of Shimon, whose name indicates the quality of hearing and understanding. Hearing is clearly inferior to sight both in the persuasiveness of information and in its volume, yet it allows us to break through into the world of abstraction, fundamentally inaccessible to sight.
This quality perceives its distance from what is being grasped, but it is precisely for this reason that knowledge can be such that it transforms the one who knows. Hearing cannot precede either Yehudah (“we will do and then we will understand”) or Reuven, sight. Yet this is the ultimate goal of the Torah – the refinement of creation.
