July 23/05 - Shabbat Pinchas: Time Changes Everything

Commentary by Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker

“Time changes everything.” The homily seems the height of triteness, yet there are times when it’s important to remember that it applies even to what we believe are “eternal truths.”

Take the story of Pinchas in this week’s Torah portion. The story began at the end of last week’s reading. Pinchas, the grandson of Aaron, the High Priest, kills Zimri and Cozbi, an Israelite prince and a Moabite woman who has seduced him, as they defy a Divine ban on sexual relations between the two peoples. For his act of zealous violence, Pinchas is rewarded by God:

… And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Pinchas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned my anger away from the people of Israel by being zealous for My sake among them—so that I did not consume the people Israel in my anger.

Therefore I say, Behold, I give to him my covenant of peace; and he and his descendants after him shall have it: the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God, and made atonement for the people of Israel.

God vindicates the act of killing two people on the grounds that, had Pinchas not done this, God would have brought even greater devastation upon the people for their rejection of the limits God placed on their sexual activity.

But before you think that this notion of divine justification for violence is an absolute license for religiously-motivated killing, take note of the history of this idea. It has a peculiar life within Judaism. Some of our ancient commentators celebrate the notion that some of our people are truly impassioned about God and about their fellow Jews living up to Jewish ideas—even at the risk of doing harm to other Jews. Still others, however, offer criticism of Pinchas’ zeal. Some midrashim say that God gives Pinchas the blessing of "peace" not as a reward but as a corrective to his murderous zeal—that the act shocked even God, who turns away from committing a similar act because of the horror of Pinchas’ deed.

Many years ago, Prof. Moshe Greenberg observed that "The Bible and the Torah are multi-faceted and of evolving applicability. Each generation, beginning with the Talmudic rabbis, emphasized those aspects [of Torah] which they found necessary, and lost or ignored those aspects which were not relevant [to their purposes]." As each of us reads any text, we enter the commentary process that affirms, challenges, and clarifies Jewish beliefs and values for our time.

There is a tragic, chilling example of this from our own very recent history. For years, the weekly Torah commentary on Parashat Pinchas from Israel’s National Religious Party praised Pinchas’ zealousness without reservation. They celebrate God’s sanctioning of murder in order to rid Israel of evil-doers, and hail Pinchas for having learned how to be zealous from those very evil-doers.

That changed in 1996, when the National Religious Party’s commentary on Pinchas began with an essay explaining that God gave Pinchas the gift of a permanent place in the priesthood in order to divert his murderous zeal into the routines of religious ritual. Other commentaries declared that Jewish tradition overwhelmingly opposed violent religious zealotry as an impractical means for creating a society devoted to God because zealotry is seductive, manipulative, and easily corrupted—and can lead to mass murder and endless war both within society and between societies.

What led to this change in outlook? Tragically, the watershed event was the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

The use of tradition, then, is not a matter of citing a few quotations—no matter how clear they may seem. We are warned not to make poor choices in what we quote to justify our actions. Every time we seek instruction from the great wisdom of the past, we need to remember that its power to influence us and change things derives from us. We have to use our past responsibly. And the past can never take away our obligation to think for ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom.