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D'var Torah by Rod Wade
Numbers 25:10 - 30:1

Our Torah portion this week is Pinchas, the Book of Numbers Chapter 25, verse 10 through Chapter 30, verse 1. We are in the 40th year after our people have left Egypt and are about to embark on our journey into the Promised Land.

At this time, a plague is upon us. God is deeply angered by the behavior of certain of our people. At Shittim, many Israelite men have gone astray from the word of God and the teachings of Moses and our priests. They have been engaged in immoral and idolatrous acts. Among these, inappropriate relationships with Moabite woman are among the more visible and troubling acts being engaged in by certain Israelite men, but just as troubling are acts of idolatry and participation in pagan rites.

At the end of the prior sidrah we learn of the act of one Israelite to confront transgressions of this type. Pinchas, son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron, and chief of the sanctuary guard enraged at an immoral act between an Israelite nobleman (Zimri, son of Salu) and a Moabite woman (Cozbi, daughter of Zur) in the presence of Moses and the people Israel, takes God's command to Moses "Take all the ringleaders and have them publicly impaled before the Eternal, so that the Eternal's wrath may turn away from Israel" and does indeed simultaneously impale both Zimri and Cozbi and thereby ends the plague upon our people.

Our Torah portion then describes the reward bestowed by God upon Pinchas and his family Ð that they will thereafter be among the priests of Israel. Further, our Torah portion goes on to provide descriptions of another census taken in preparation for the journey to, and settlement of the Promised Land, of rules bestowing certain property rights to women, the succession from Moses to Yehoshua (Joshua) as leader of our people and additional laws regarding sacrifice.

And while the significance of many parts of the Torah portion, notably the succession from Moses to Joshua which is quite a profound event to me (as we know, Moses will soon pass and never enter the Promised Land), our Torah portion is inextricably tied to the precedent act of Pinchas, to the resultant concepts of reward and punishment and to what we can glean from that act and GodÕs reward for that act. It is understandable that the name of this Torah portion is "Pinchas."

While not to be considered either as allegory or anecdotal by its descriptions in our Torah, Pinchas's act to kill an Israelite noble and a Moabite woman might seem harsh by most reasonable, current-day standards. Taken in context of God's command to Moses to do exactly as Pinchas does, his act is a righteous one and he is rewarded by the Eternal for his commitment to God's command, to the sanctuary of God and to the people Israel.

So what do we glean from the story of Pinchas and how does that apply to the Jewish people? Do we understand Pinchas's act in the context of our own lives as Jews, or is the severity of that act beyond our understanding of what we might consider appropriate punishment and commensurate reward?

In today's world, who among us is not incensed at atrocities we see inflicted upon innocent people, some that even occur in our own community? Punishment in such cases is meted out as prescribed by the rule of judicial law. But it is another kind of deep emotion we feel when what we consider sacred, beyond human life, is defiled or destroyed. How do we as Jews connect to such emotions evoked over the millennium Ð do we understand the deep emotive connection to acts such as the repeated destruction of our sacred Temple, the burning of our Torahs, the murder of our innocent men, women and children at the hands of those who would deny us our faith, our community or our very existence?

At some point we may all feel the depth of these emotions, but here we have acts that evoke such emotions attributed to our own people Ð those Israelites who defiled the sacred Temple and God's commandments and flaunted their acts of immorality for all to see. In that context, perhaps we better understand the anger attributed to God in his directive to Moses which is then acted upon by Pinchas and for which act Pinchas and his family are rewarded by God.

The tougher question to ask ourselves is not how we are like Pinchas, how we may embody the sincere anger that would move us to murder others in the name of God, but how are we like those Israelites who lost their way, whose acts of immorality and sacrilege were arrived at over a period of time presumably as a culmination of smaller, perhaps less immoral acts. We know this lesson all too well when it comes to the acts of others Ð the growth, like a cancer of anti-Semitism to a level we could not imagine had we not witnessed it perpetrated upon us.

But how do we see these trends manifest among and between the Jewish people? Do we suffer among ourselves from the same political divisions we see throughout our country, throughout the world? Do we take sides among us to judge the beliefs or acts of others within our Jewish community and how do we behave and feel when we struggle to understand these beliefs or acts? And when that is taken to extremes, where do we find ourselves as a Jewish community?

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by another Jew who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords and believed he was saving Israel from a dire fate, did that assassin imagine himself as Pinchas, saving Israel from the immorality he believed was manifest either in Prime Minister Rabin himself or in Rabin's efforts in the Oslo process?

That act ushered in a difficult period of introspection for Jews everywhere. And while that may be an outrageous example of filial discord taken to disastrous extremes, is it not the culmination of an environment that allows those differences to fester and breed extremism.

Ultimately, what should we take away from our exploration of our Torah portion? There is certainly a unifying comfort in Torah, in our faith in God and ultimately in each other as manifest in our shared identity and beliefs. Despite the differences that exist within the Jewish community, we represent an unbroken chain longer than any other in shared human history. And we have achieved that through our abiding faith in God and Torah.

We may not be sure in our present-day context that a reward associated with the taking of human life is at all palatable, but we must look deeper when we consider what the consequences of such an act mean when taken in the context of the continuity of our people, of the teachings of Torah and of our commitment to the laws of God. And still, we should be rightly troubled when we see these divisions grow among Jews and recognize that the lesson of our Torah portion is not so much about the punishment inflicted by Pinchas, nor the reward for his actions, but how we as a people found ourselves in Shittim behaving against God's law in a relatively short time after our Exodus out of Egypt.

It is this lesson we must learn from Pinchas, that if the course we take as Jews strays from the path of Torah as delivered to us by Moses and prescribed by God, we may find ourselves again in Shittim and on the wrong side of the Eternal.

And it is through Torah that we learn the lessons necessary to assure that we, our children and their children follow the path of that unbroken chain and to live the lives we have committed ourselves to, to honor God and all of the people Israel who have come before us and who are yet to come.