“When a person articulates a vow, pledging to give the value of lives to God” (Leviticus 27:2)
Fourth Reading: Sweetening the Curses
The laws of Valuations (Arakhin, in Hebrew) appears immediately after the blessings and curses, indicating that the valuation of a person serves as a rectification and sweetening of the curses.
In the Ba’al HaTurim it is written:
In the portion of Arakhin, there are 50 shekels, 30 shekels, 20 shekels, 10 shekels, 5 shekels, 3 shekels, 15 shekels, and 10 shekels between male and female, which together total 143 shekels, to atone for the 45 curses in the Torah of the Kohanim and the 98 in Deuteronomy, which together total 143. Therefore, Arakhin is placed next to the curses.
Typically, it is said that there are 49 curses in the Torah of the Kohanim, as Rashi explains "seven times seven," but in Midrash Tadshe, it states that there are 45.
In this portion, beginning with the law of the valuation of a person, there are seven (ז) positive commandments and five (ה) negative commandments, a clear hint to the prophecy of "This is the thing" (זה הדבר) of Moses our teacher. The positive commandments are connected to the blessings, and the negative commandments are connected to the curses, and Moses attained his prophecy through the combination of the blessings and the curses.
In the valuation of a person, there is a clear allusion to the Mashiach: the values of the female are 3, 10, 30, and 10, whose sum is 53, the value of the word, “rejoice” (גילי), the first word in the verse, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your king comes to you; he is righteous and having salvation, lowly and riding upon a donkey, even upon a colt, the foal of a donkey” (זכריה ט:ט). In the verse, it speaks about a female, "daughter of Zion... daughter of Jerusalem," who, in her feminine intuition, feels the redemption (as the righteous women did in the Exodus from Egypt and as they do today). The values of the male are 5, 20, 50, and 15, whose sum is "king" (מלך), also the topic of this same verse, "behold, your king comes to you." The highest value...
