16 July 2011 | 14 Tammuz 5771 | Numbers 25:10-30:11

Do you recall Walter Cronkite’s series of brief historical vignettes, “You Are There?”  Well, you are there!  You are the priest Pinchas, so zealous for God and God’s Name that when you see Zimri, an Israelite man, and Cozbi, a Midianite woman, in the midst of the Israelite community you immediately grab your spear and summarily execute the couple!  

How are you feeling now about what you have done?  Are you having any second thoughts?  Do you have any remorse?  Or are you pleased with and proud of what you have just done and how you have “sanctified” God’s Name?  

In case you are having any doubts, consider this talmudic quotation and, especially, the words of Yuda ben Pazzi based on the verse (25:13) “It shall be for him (Pinchas) and his descendants after him a pact of priesthood for all time…”

If one cohabits with an Aramite woman, the zealous strike him.  It was taught: But the sages do not look with favor upon this.  Now was Pinchas regarded unfavorably by the sages?  Rabbi Yuda ben Pazzi said: They were ready to excommunicate him had the Holy Spirit not “sprung forward” and said: “And it shall be for him and for his seed after him a covenant of everlasting priesthood.” (Talmud Yerushalmi, Sanhedrin 9:7)

This source only reinforces the natural uneasiness most of us feel as we read the narrative that begins at the conclusion of last week’s parasha and continues at the beginning of this week’s parasha.  The Rabbis were not ambivalent about Pinchas’s actions and their implications.  They believed that such zealotry gone wild was completely beyond the pale.  The only response could be to excise the perpetrator from the community.  Yet, for reasons the Talmud never expounds upon, the Rabbis step back from such action only because of a divine decree that served to raise up Pinchas, the memory of his zealous actions and the place of his descendants in the community as Kohanim in perpetuity.

In light of this story in our parasha and the midrashic tradition attached to it, can any act on behalf of the God of Israel and the Divine Name be called into question?  Of course, the answer, as we used to say in Minnesota, is, “You betcha!”  Not every act on behalf of God that “hallows” the Divine Name is, in fact, an act of sanctification.  Countless numbers of people have been despicably killed “…in the name of God.”  So why was Pinchas’ zealous act memorialized in such positive terms?  What distinguishes between “zealotry for the sake of heaven” and zealotry that leads only to profaning God’s Name?  It’s a very fine line…

Shabbat Shalom.