Parshah Commentary
At the end of last week’s parshah, Aaron’s grandson Pinchas witnessed an Israelite man having sex with a Moabite woman, contrary to the Torah’s prohibition on Moabites being “admitted into the congregation of God.” Rather than appealing to God or to any established legal structure, Pinchas took his spear and killed the couple. This week’s parshah, named after Pinchas, begins with God rewarding him for his murderous fanaticism by granting him and his descendants “a covenant of peace,” which ensures them the priesthood for all time. Contemporary readers are right to find this honor a horrifying endorsement of vigilante violence, especially as Pinchas is explicitly invoked as an inspiration for extremist ethnonationalism in Israel/Palestine today.
But we are not the first readers to find the valorization of Pinchas disturbing, or to seek alternative interpretations. The 19th-century Polish Hasidic rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, for example, asked why the story of Pinchas comes just before Moses names Joshua as his successor. The Kotzker answers that before this incident, Moses had considered Pinchas his likely replacement, but Pinchas’s violence forced him to reconsider. “A zealot cannot be the leader of Israel,” the Kotzker imagines Moses thinking, before asking God to name someone else instead.
When Moses turns to God with this request, the language he uses is unusual: “Let God, Source of the breath of all flesh, appoint someone over the community.” The medieval commentator Rashi wonders why Moses describes God with this atypical nomenclature and answers that Moses’s use of the phrase “Source of the breath” emphasizes the individual spirit of all living creatures, to gesture toward a desired leadership model that is responsive to the unique needs and concerns of every individual. Citing an ancient interpretative tradition, Rashi glosses Moses’s appeal as: “Lord, the personality of each person is revealed to you, and no two are alike. Appoint over the nation a leader who will tolerate each person according to their individual character.”
This parshah, then, can be seen as presenting two competing models of political and religious leadership. One model, embodied in Pinchas and rejected by Moses, is based on violent enforcement of rigid legal interpretations. The second model, embodied in Moses’s appeal to God, demands religious and communal leadership that can be attuned to the needs of every community member, inspired by the divine capacity to respond to each person.
Following this second model, our parshah provides us with an example of what the divine capacity to meet individual needs looks like in the context of human society’s flawed and oppressive hierarchies. Not long after Pinchas receives his covenant of peace, the Israelites prepare to divide the land of Israel into allotments based on tribal affiliation. But these allotments are based on a patriarchal social structure in which women have no inheritance rights. In response, five sisters—Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah—approach Moses directly, explaining that their father Tzlofchad has died without any sons. They argue that it is unjust for them to be kept from an inheritance and for their father’s land to be lost to his tribe simply because they are women. “Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!” they demand.
Rather than invoking his authority, insisting on the primacy of the Torah’s laws and refusing to brook any dissent, as a Pinchas-style leader may have done, Moses immediately brings their case to God, who agrees that their cause is just and announces that the Torah’s property allotment structure will be changed in order to more equitably include women like Tzlophchad’s daughters. One classical midrash imagines these women deciding to appeal to divine justice, because it will recognize claims human societies do not: “God’s compassion is not like the compassion of humanity,” the sisters explain. “Humanity favors men over women. God is different, and God’s compassion extends to men and women alike.” Even when human social structures are unjust, this commentary suggests, a divine ideal of justice persists that can be invoked and appealed to.
Pinchas the man treats the laws of the Torah as unimpeachable and unilaterally enforces them with violence, while Pinchas the parshah subverts this autocratic vigilantism, upholding a political structure in which the marginalized can dissent to God’s law, appealing directly to a divine morality that transcends the biases and injustices of human society. The man and woman whom Pinchas kills are the passive victims of the law, but Moses understands the need for a different type of leadership, one that enables the dispossessed daughters of Tzlofchad to dissent to Moses and to God—and to have the righteousness of their dissent canonized in Jewish law.
Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.
