Parshah Commentary

Parshat Pinchas

Last week’s parshah concludes with a vigilante murder. The Israelite men had begun having sexual relationships with local Moabite women in the desert and subsequently started to offer sacrifices to the Moabite deity, Ba’al Peor. God, infuriated, commands Moses to round up the instigators for public execution—but Pinchas, Aaron’s grandson, decides to take matters into his own hands. When he sees an Israelite man, Zimri, bringing a Midianite woman, Cozbi, into his tent, he is overcome with zealousness and stabs them with a spear.

The incident and all that surrounds it is violent, misogynistic, and xenophobic. To make matters worse, the Torah unequivocally celebrates Pinchas’s behavior, idolizing the rage-killing as a sacred act performed on God’s behalf. Our parshah, which is named for Pinchas, opens with God’s praise for his actions:

Pinchas, son of Elazar son of Aaron the Priest, has turned my wrath away from the Israelites through avenging my vengeance, and so, despite my vengefulness, I did not put an end to the Israelite people. Therefore, say that I will grant him my pact of peace, and it will be for him and his descendents, that they will be priests forever, because he was zealous for his God, and made expiation for the Israelites.

Both Pinchas’s behavior and his reward have been the subject of much commentary, very little of which directly condemns or even confronts these actions. But left unchecked, this text is dangerous. It has been used by settlers, fundamentalists, and violent Jewish supremacists—such as the infamous far-right, anti-Arab Israeli leader Meir Kahane—to justify violent zealotry.

Fortunately, there are a few essential voices, particularly among the rabbis of the Talmud and early midrash, who complicate the biblical account. In the Talmudic tractate of Sanhedrin, the rabbis suggest that if Zimri had retaliated and killed Pinchas in self-defense, he would have been justified. Elsewhere, the rabbis claim that the Israelite elders condemned Pinchas’s actions and attempted to excommunicate him; God granted him and his descendants the priesthood in perpetuity to enable him to continue living among the people.

The late 19th-century Lithuanian commentator Rabbi Baruch HaLevi Epstein goes further, citing this passage as evidence that enacting vigilante justice on God’s behalf is never permitted, because there is no way to determine that it truly stems from pure motivations. In his reading, the line between acting passionately for God and acting passionately to prop up our own egos is so imperceptibly thin that we are forbidden from acting violently, even in the case of the most seemingly righteous impulse. While the rabbis of the Talmud suggest that Pinchas should never have acted as he did, Rabbi Epstein emphasizes that we shouldn’t either.

Rabbi Epstein’s interpretive work on Parshat Pinchas thus preemptively anticipates an appeal from the feminist theologian and scholar Judith Plaskow to confront the most challenging texts of our tradition in order to root out their impact. We must continue to heed Plaskow’s call. The legacy of Pinchas’s violence lives on—in war-mongering and Jewish supremacy in Israel/Palestine, in our communities, and likely in each of us, in ways both obvious and inconspicuous. Through confronting the story of Pinchas, we can continue to interrupt and uproot the habits of mind that this story has sustained over millennia.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.