In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Behaalotecha ('When You Set Up', Numbers 8:1-12:16) covers the kindling of the menorah, the dedication of the Levites, a second Passover for the ritually unready, the silver trumpets, the cloud that guided the march, the people's craving for meat, and Miriam's slander of Moses and her affliction.
Miriam's affliction with tzaraat after speaking against Moses regarding his Cushite wife (Numbers 12:1-15) is read by rabbinic commentary as the Torah's own narrative demonstration of the connection, developed at length elsewhere in Leviticus, between slanderous speech and this particular affliction, and the text's own aside that Moses was 'very humble, more than any man on the face of the earth' (Numbers 12:3), inserted immediately before God's rebuke of Miriam and Aaron, is read as explaining why Moses himself did not respond to the slander directly. The people's craving for meat, complaining that they remember the fish, cucumbers and garlic of Egypt (Numbers 11:4-6), is read by commentators as marking a decisive shift in the wilderness narrative from earlier justified complaints about water and food scarcity to a comparative nostalgia for slavery's diet, a craving satisfied by an overwhelming quantity of quail that the text describes as followed immediately by plague, read as punishment for the complaint's underlying ingratitude.