As you may have guessed from the title of this portion, it's a special holiday reading rather than the normal parsha; instead of continuing with Numbers, we skipped ahead to read some Deuteronomy for Shavuot, which is on the 25th this year.
A lot of this portion is a reiteration of the commandments regarding festivals, as well as the travelling and tithes for the festival of weeks. The most interesting part of the portion, as well as our discussion, is a section of Deuteronomy 15 that sets a broad mandate to support the needy; to give generously and materially; and to never stop so long as there are needy people in the land. There's some complication here since a lot of it is oriented towards other jews, but there's also a lot to be said about the focus on helping the people around you, and making it so that they can support themselves and not simply depend on you indefinitely. There's also some discussion in the commentaries about resolving a contradiction in the text:
The best solution to this imo was that of Ramban, who argued that the contradiction exists because 1) g-d wouldn't give us a mitzvah that we would always be transgressing, but 2) in the future, there are people who may not be observing the commands, and so 3) we are obliged to help the needy in all habitable places, i.e. everywhere within and without Israel. As a bunch of leftwards gays, this broad directive towards justice with a focus on material support has a appeal and was something we sat with a decent amount of time.
We also went through the haftarah tonight, which was the third chapter of Habakkuk, by which I mean we went and read the entire book of Habakkuk because it's only three chapters and it's kinda metal. Written during the First Temple and the Babylonian conquest, it opens with Habakkuk challenging G-d to explain why the wicked prospered and justice wasn't being done; the second chapter contains G-d's response, followed by the third chapter (and haftarah this week) in which the prophet praises G-d, describes how sick and terrifying they are, and also might be trying to apologize for the earlier callout post against Hashem. In addition to just being a fun read, it's also one of the books that deals with the question of suffering and the inadequacies of divine justice, albeit in a more straightforward way than the poster child of this topic, Job.
Anyways to close this off, here's Ibn Ezra talking about G-d blasting things
