Parshat Pinchas

Last week’s parshah ended with the incident in which an Israelite man and a Moabite woman publicly sinned in the site of the whole community; Pinchas, a grandson of Aaron and of the priestly family, seeing this, takes a spear in hand and kills them both. This week’s parshah, called Pinchas, picks up where that one left off, with God rewarding Pinchas for his actions:

God spoke to Moses saying, Pinchas son of Eleazar son of Aaron the priest has turned back my wrath from the Israelites by displaying among them his passion for me… Say, therefore, “I grant him my pact of friendship. It shall be for him and his descendants after him a pact of priesthood for all time, because he took impassioned action for his God, thus making expiation for the Israelites.” (Num. 25:10-13)

I don’t mind telling you I find this disturbing – not only the action that Pinchas took, but the fact that God is portrayed by Torah as showering it with such approval – the priesthood for all time! You couldn’t get any farther, I would think, than the idea that Aaron was rewarded with the priesthood because of his reputation as a peacemaker.

The rabbis were also uncomfortable with this seeming approval, speculating that rather than being a reward, the priesthood may have been a way to channel Pinchas’ aggressive tendencies into a constricted, public role. But that strikes me a little like making Bernie Madoff chair of the SEC and claiming that’s the way to keep him on the straight and narrow. I’m also concerned about the model Pinchas provides because one can imagine that Dr. Tiller’s (alleged) murderer saw himself as being in the Pinchas mold, righteous distributor of God’s justice and all that.

The Etz Chayim chumash points out that in the Torah scroll, the letter yud in Pinchas’ name in v. 11 is written smaller than the other letters, indicating that when we use violence to solve problems, the godly aspect within us (represented by the yud) is diminished. In addition, that the vav in the word shalom in v.12 has a break in the stem: “This is interpreted homiletically to suggest that the sort of peace one achieves by destroying one’s opponent will inevitably be a flawed, incomplete peace.”

Another possibility is that, like the person struck down for picking up sticks on Shabbat, the way that these infractions are treated in the Bible, when the laws are new and the People is just being formed, is altogether more harsh than they would be treated later, by the rabbis or by us, when the circumstances are different and the identity of the People is not so fragile.

In any case, the paradox is resolved by the rabbis with the judgment, “The law may permit it, but we don’t follow that law” (or in another version: “it may be permissible, but we don’t teach it that way”). They are quarantining that act, or as the Supreme Court sometimes says, We rule this way in this particular case, but it’s not to be used as a precedent. This may be a place where we have to acknowledge, as Rabbi Wernick puts it, that Judaism is not a biblical religion, but a rabbinic one.

All of which is to say, despite how the Torah might portray this incident, this kind of vigilante justice is not acceptable or admirable, to Jewish tradition or to us.

Shabbat shalom.