Rabbi Anderson's Divrei Torah

Shabbat shalom! This week the most, uh, striking figure in our Torah portion is its namesake Pinchas. At the very end of last week’s parsha, Pinchas stops a plague of God’s wrath against the Israelites by impaling the Israelite leader Zimri ben Salu together with his Midianite girlfriend. In this week’s parsha, we are reminded that Pinchas is Aaron’s grandson and Eleazar’s son, and that he is rewarded for his actions with perpetual priesthood for his descendants. The story is followed by another census – this is why we’re in the book of “Numbers” – and that’s where our triennial reading runs out. If we continued to the full kriyah, we’d get the story of the daughters of Tzlafchad, the appointment of Yehoshua bin Nun as Moses’ successor, and an exhaustive list of sacrifices for weekdays, Shabbat, and holidays.

But Pinchas is definitely the part of the parsha that bothers not just me, but the entire rabbinic tradition. In the last days of the Second Temple, the Pharisees, precedessors of rabbinic Judaism, often opposed another Jewish sect that called themselves Zealots. Of course, “zeal” is the Greek translation of Pinchas’ identifying virtue at the beginning of the parsha. B’kano et-kinati b’tocham, by the zealotry Pinchas displayed among the Israelites, God tells us, he has averted God’s own kinah (25:11).

So, not surprisingly, the Zealots really liked Pinchas. But everyone else writing at the end of the Second Temple had a more complicated take – the famous Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, for instance, rewrites Pinchas’s act[1] to be a strategic military decision, a surgical strike rather than spontaneous vigilante justice. Josephus was also a military commander – perhaps he wanted Pinchas to be a better model for his own path.

Meanwhile, the rabbis wanted Pinchas to be more rabbinic. Or, more precisely, they wanted him to have higher standards for halakhic decision-making. Rabbinic texts assume that all the characters of the Torah and Hebrew Bible are actually rabbinic Jews, arguing about halakhah and sitting on rabbinic courts: Pinchas and his contemporaries were no exception. In the rabbinic imagination, Pinchas is a student of his rabbi, Moses, and one of the junior students at that. How could he possibly act without his teacher’s explicit permission? And how could he act in a way completely at odds with the rabbinic laws governing capital punishment? They require a panel of judges, multiple witnesses, forewarning, and innumerable minor safeguards to prevent a summary execution, which is exactly what the Torah describes Pinchas as doing. They also permit killing in self-defense of oneself or someone else, which means Pinchas’s action was incredibly risky: Zimri or any of the 22,000 Shimonites could have justifiably killed him. 

In the Torah, however, God clearly approves of Pinchas’s actions. This meant that the rabbis wanted to explain what he did within their own halakhic system. They located a mishnah[2] permitting summary executions in some extremely specific circumstances, which Zimri could possibly fit into, but they also wanted to step back from enabling vigilante justice in their own time. First, they established that if nobody executes the wrongdoer, he – yes, this is a “he” – will be punished at the hands of Heaven, by not having descendants who are Torah scholars.[3] Next, they explain that if anyone asks a court if it is permitted to kill another Jew on the basis of this mishnah, “they do not instruct him” – ein morin lo. That is, it is better for the rabbis to cease their rabbinic function than for them to share halakhot that would allow Jews to suddenly kill one another. Finally, they construct a dramatic scenario in which Zimri confronts Moses, pointing out that Moses himself has a Midianite wife, and sending the entire Sanhedrin (of course there’s a Sanhedrin) into fits of weeping. Pinchas’ contribution, they imagine, is actually to remind Moses about the halakhah that he had forgotten, and then Moses authorizes Pinchas to act as the court’s agent.[4] Problem solved: Pinchas is a good guy, rabbinically speaking.

But I want to go back to ein morin lo, to the idea that there are some halakhot – a very, very few of them – that one does not teach, even if asked. In fact, several rabbis agree, one could even deny their existence! That seems antithetical to our tradition, where teaching and learning are paramount obligations. And the idea of “secret halakhah” certainly provides unfortunate fuel for anti-Semitic fantasies in both the past and the present. At the same time, I think the Talmud is onto something here. We all select which parts of Judaism we teach our children, our students, our Facebook friends, or our curious non-Jewish coworkers. We all decide to emphasize some things and, well, gloss over some others. Sometimes the glossed-over parts are harmless but inconvenient, as in the case where you’re trying to take off work for Shemini Atzeret. Sometimes, though, there are parts of the tradition that could really hurt people, or place them in serious danger.

I’m not going to pretend that rabbinic Judaism doesn’t have its fair share of prejudice against non-Jews, but I’m also not going to amplify that message. Similarly, I’m not going to dwell on the negative things Jewish tradition says about women, or its engagement with slavery, or its dismissal of the deaf, unless I need to construct a convincing argument about why those elements aren’t actually representative of “traditional” Judaism. I’m especially reluctant to share those elements with my children, because I want them to grow up loving Judaism and seeing the best in it.

In the rabbis’ reconstruction of Pinchas’s approach to Moses, they imagine Pinchas respectfully addressing Moses as achi avi abba, “brother of my father’s father.” But even the Torah reminds us that Pinchas is Aaron’s grandson. I find it easy to imagine Moses as a beloved uncle and great-uncle to Aaron’s increasingly large family, especially after Aaron’s death. At the end of Parshat Pinchas, he is still effectively responsible for teaching all the priests about their priestly duties. Would he prefer to “forget” a halakhah that put his great-nephew in harm’s way? Maybe so.

My takeaway from the story of Pinchas, and especially from its rabbinic retelling, is not that it’s OK to execute people under incredibly specific conditions. It’s that it’s OK to select which messages about the Jewish tradition to publicize and which ones to pass on to our children – under incredibly specific conditions. We don’t want to ignore inconvenient parts of our tradition at will, but there’s a lot of “tradition,” and some parts of it are in direct opposition to other parts. What do we pass down? The parts we want to keep. Each of us,

God tells Pinchas, not to keep up the killing, but that he is receiving “a covenant of peace” and that he and his descendants should always remain in service to God. Each of us, like Moses, like Pinchas, and like the daughters of Tzlofchad, can make choices which will affect halakhah – and each of us is responsible for maintaining and shaping a Jewish way of life for our entire community.