[Avodah] Exchange of the Levi'im for the bechorim in last week's parsha.

[hankman]

I am trying to understand the procedures involved in last weeks parsha regarding the exchange of the levi’im for the bechorim. Is it possible to understand this al pi teva or must we invoke the idea that this could only have happened al pi nes. As this occurred reasonably close to the equinox we can assume that the daylight was approx. 12 X 60 X 60 = 43,200 seconds. I further assume this all happened in one day.

1) Did each of 600,000 Yisraelim have to do semicha on each of the 22,000 Levi’im (all numbers approx.) or was it enough that some Yisroel was someich on some Levi?

2) Then there were the 22,000 tenufos by Aharon Hacohen. (time and strength)

3) Then there were 22,000 semichos by the Levi’im on the two parim (I assume there was but one such pair for all the Levi’im).

4) Then there were another 22,000 tenufos by Moshe Rabbeinu.

Anyone see some discussion of this?

I have a similar problem with the first korban Pesach of the 2nd year bamidbar. You have approx. 3,000,000 people who were mechuyav in the korban divided by however many you assume per chabura, will still leave you with an number in 5 or 6 digits for the number of korbanos Pesach plus all the Chagigos etc. But you only had 3 kohanim to do all this avoda (even if shechita was done bezor, they still had to do all the kabala and zerika). Again, I imagine this all had to be done bederech nes. (Without getting into the issue of enough space as chazal already told us this was one of the nissim in the Bais HaMikdash and I would assume this would apply to the Mishkan as well).

Kol Tuv

Chaim Manaster

PS:
I discussed this (Levi’im) with someone at the local kollel who told me that R. Chaim Shmulevitz discusses this and quotes a Chezkuni that this was all all pi nes.
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