Pinchas 5773
Did you ever have a conversation with someone and their response was so different than what you expected that you began to wonder what was actually driving that comment, because the conversation itself couldn’t have been the reason? This is how I felt when I looked at this week’s parsha, Pinchas.Pinchas, as you may remember is a Jewish zealot. At the end of last week’s portion, when the Israelites come in contact with the Midianites, the people succumbed to the cult prostitution of the Midianite people and with it, the worship of Ba’al. In the frenzy that followed, Moses proved himself to be an ineffectual leader. And it was Pinchas that stemmed this horrible moment and the danger of God’s response by killing an Israelite and the Midianite cult prostitute.
In this week’s parsha, named for Pinchas, God awards him with a Brit Shalom - a covenant of peace. The rabbis in their commentary say that Pinchas and Elijah are the same person. It’s a strange comment, there’s no support for it in the text. While Elijah, like Pinchas, is zealous, they live 100 of years apart. The rabbis clearly know this, so why would they connect these two personalities? What is driving this comment? I want to suggest to you that there were historical concerns for the rabbis. Before the destruction of the Second Temple, the driving force for the revolt against the Romans came from a group called the Sucari, named for the dagger that many of them carried in the folds of their robes so that if there were Israelites that did not want to participate in this revolution, they were seen as traders and they were killed with the daggers. In this spirit of zealotry, a revolt was created and in the end, the temple was destroyed.
Perhaps the rabbis were concerned about such zealots and did not want to see them put in a position of honor with a Brit Shalom, but rather understood the Brit Shalom as God’s way of taking Pinchas, and with him Elijah, off the grid - making them no longer part of the normal society, as if to say to each of us that zealotry is never the right answer. Yes, there are occasions when zealots lead us to the proper place, but as a mode of operation for society, it is never the Jewish path. Hence, the rabbis made a comparison between Elijah and Pinchas. Did they actually believe they were the same person, or were they simply sending us a message? Pinchas may have saved us in one age and Elijah in another, but they are anomalies in Jewish history and there are paths to create the covenant of peace other than the ones they chose through their acts of zealotry.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Michael Siegel
