A Zealous Wholeness or a Broken Peace?

Thoughts on Pinchas

Phinehas slaying Zimri and Kozbi by Jeremias van Winghe

This past Shabbat was parshat Pinchas. Our rabbi is recovering from surgery, so she asked me to present a drash on her behalf. This is what I delivered.

---

This week’s parshah is called Pinchas. But the story of Pinchas, the man after whom the parshah is named, actually straddles two parashiyot.

Pinchas’s actions are recounted at the end of last week’s parshah, Balak. After Bilam has uttered his final prophecy, the Israelites “whore after” the daughters of Moab, “joining themselves” to Ba’al-Peor, which is to say, the local version of the Canaanite god Ba’al who dwells in Peor. This triggers divine wrath, and Moses commands the judges to slay every one of their men who has joined himself to Ba’al-Peor. Pinchas, a grandson of Aaron, appears to take this command upon himself. Seeing an Israelite take a Midianite woman in the sight of the congregation, Pinchas takes a spear and runs the couple through, killing them both, and thereby stemming a plague that had already killed twenty four thousand people.

In this week’s parshah, the one named after Pinchas, we learn how God responds to those actions. God says that, because Pinchas was jealous on His behalf, God did not act on His own jealousy by consuming the people of Israel entirely. Therefore, Pinchas is granted a covenant of peace, and a covenant of everlasting priesthood. We learn something about the victims of Pinchas’s zealous behavior—the Israelite was Zimri, a prince from the tribe of Shim'on, and the Midianite woman was Cozbi, the daughter of a Midianite prince. The Israelites are commanded to smite the Midianites for their perfidious enticements, and then the parshah moves on to other matters: a census, the petition by the daughters of Zelophehad for their inheritance, Joshua’s smicha, and the order of holiday sacrifices.

So what is the story of this man, Pinchas, about?

The pshat, the plain meaning, strikes me as extremely straightforward, if not particularly comfortable to contemporary ears in a liberal shul. The sin of Ba’al-Peor is that the Israelites proposed to join themselves to the Midianites (or the Moabites—text confusingly shifts halfway through from the latter to the former), to marry with them and to worship their local god. The word liznot, “to whore after,” is a charge of infidelity, sexual language frequently used to refer to idolatry. Zimri and Cozbi are both from princely families, and their behavior suggests to me that they intended to consummate a marriage and an alliance. This is what enrages God, and what incites Pinchas to slaughter on God’s behalf. The whole episode can therefore be read as a gloss on Bilam’s prophecy about Israel—hen am levadad yishkon uvagoyim lo yitchashav, “they are a people who dwell apart and are not counted among the nations.” Israel is not to mingle with other peoples, for fear of becoming idolatrous, and not only may this separation be enforced by violence, but a vigilante who takes it upon himself to enforce it in that way will be rewarded with a covenant of peace and an eternal share in the priesthood.

Like I said: not the most comfortable story! So what are we supposed to do with it? The answer, I think, is to look closer, at the subtle and fascinating ways in which the tradition itself directs us to ask whether the pshat is the end of the story, and does so by means that are embodied in the text itself.

First of all, as I noted at the beginning, Pinchas’s story itself is broken. The name, “Pinchas” isn’t attached to his actions, which take place in the previous parshah, but only to God’s response to those actions. And in God’s response, there is no direct mention of what Pinchas’s actions were. God speaks of Pinchas’s motives, that he was jealous on God’s behalf, and He speaks of the purpose of his actions, to make atonement for the people for the sin of Ba’al-Peor. But the text speaks of the killing of Zimri and Cozbi only in the passive voice—they were slain—without ever explicitly saying who slew them. If you read the text without regard to the parshah breaks, you might not notice this. But in shul, at the formal reading, you would end one story with violence and plague, and begin another story hours later—or, if you don’t attend Shabbat mincha services, days later—with a story of peace and atonement.

This is a choice. The numeric chapters that you can see in your chumash are a medieval Christian scheme and do not correspond to the antique Jewish division of the text into paragraphs, nor to the named parashiyot that we read weekly. In that numeric scheme, both parts of Pinchas’s story are in the same chapter. So the fact that we break in the middle of Pinchas’s story means something, telling us to look for that meaning.

So what is that meaning? Is the text drawing a veil over Pinchas’s violence, and suggesting that we do likewise—reward zealotry, but pretend after the fact that it wasn’t as bloody as it really was at the time? Maybe so. I note that when Psalm 106 refers to Pinchas’s actions in this parshah, it veils his violence as judgement or maybe even prayer. Or maybe it’s saying something very different—that the covenants of peace and eternal priesthood aren’t rewards at all, but a meliorative response aimed at Pinchas himself, perhaps to heal him from the psychic impact his actions had on him, or even to help him escape his own impulse to zealous violence. Regardless of the interpretation, the pause, the break, compels us to ask and debate a question that the surface meaning of the story, viewed whole, might not have raised.

In fact, the text is even more direct in drawing our attention to the idea of a meaningful break. Here’s something truly unique about parshat Pinchas: it is the only parshah to contain a letter that is deliberately broken when written by the sofer. Normally, if even a single letter of a Torah scroll is broken, it renders the entire scroll non-kosher until that letter is repaired. But there is one word in Pinchas that has a letter that, according to tradition, must be broken, on purpose. The letter is a vav, and the word is shalom—the “peace” that Pinchas is promised is intentionally cracked.

The breaking of this one vav is a very old tradition. It first shows up in a discussion in the Talmud, in Kiddushin 66b, in a digression from an apparently unrelated topic, which is very typical of the Talmud. Rava explains why you do not rely on a single witness in matters of forbidden sexual relations by reference to a debate between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon about a mikvah. This mikvah was thought to be full of the necessary amount of water to render those immersed purified, and was used on that assumption for some time, but then it was measured and determined not to have the requisite capacity. Are the people who immersed themselves before it was measured still ritually pure or not? Rabbi Tarfon says yes, but Rabbi Akiva says no, and they debate the question by analogy. Is this analogous to a priest who, after he performs sacrifices, is discovered to be the son of a divorced woman? Or is it better compared to a priest who, after he performs sacrifices, is discovered to have a blemish? Either revelation would render the priest ineligible to perform sacrifices going forward, but in the first case the halacha is that the services performed before the discovery are still valid, and in the latter case they are retroactively invalid.

Rabbi Akiva wins this debate—the details are interesting but not germane to this discussion—and then the Gemara goes on to discuss the textual basis for this differential halacha. Why is the past service of a priest discovered to be the son of a divorced woman still considered valid, while that of a blemished priest is retroactively invalid? The substantive difference is that a blemish is inherent to the priest while his descent is not—but what is the proof text to justify making this distinction? As it happens, both proof texts happen to come from the beginning of Pinchas. The first, cited by Rev Yehuda in the name of Shmuel, comes from the covenant of eternal priesthood, which is granted to Pinchas and all his seed (zar’o acharav). The covenant doesn’t qualify which seed, therefore both fit and unfit are included. Two further proof texts are also adduced to reaffirm that even the service of a priest subsequently deemed unfit is not retroactively disqualified.

But what about the priest who is discovered to have a blemish? His service is retroactively disqualified. This is where the broken vav comes in. Rav Yehuda again cites Shmuel citing a verse in Pinchas: when God gives Pinchas a “covenant of peace” (shalom) it means that he receives the covenant only when he is “whole” (shalem) and not when he is blemished. How can he read shalem instead of shalom? Because, Rav Nahman explains, the vav of shalom is broken (ketiyah) and therefore can be read as shalem. This is the first mention, historically, of the tradition of the broken vav in Pinchas, though the tradition is clearly older than that since it is not established here, but is already extant and is being interpreted here to justify a proof text for another question.

There are so many threads I could grab in this Talmudic discussion. It seems resonant to me that the broken vav turns up in a discussion originally about forbidden sexual relations, which then turns into a discussion about the validity of the past service of a priest determined to be unfit. Pinchas’s own zealotry involved the extreme policing of improper relations. And if we deem Pinchas’s zealotry to have been a blemish, does that render Pinchas’s own service retroactively invalid? The fact that verses from this parshah related to the covenant with Pinchas are cited as proof texts both for the validity of one kind of unwittingly unfit priest’s service and the invalidity of another kind strikes me as yet another subject that one could easily drash on, as it relates to our own defects, or to Pinchas’s.

As for the vav itself, what does its brokenness signify? Is the peace that Pinchas is granted broken? Is the tradition saying that this covenant of peace isn’t all that it appears to be, since it was founded on violence (violence that is itself obscured by the break between the parshiyot)? Or are we, like Rav Nahman, to read the word as shalem rather than shalom? Does that mean Pinchas is granted a covenant of wholeness rather than of peace? What kind of wholeness, though, rests entirely on a broken vav? Regardless of the larger meaning we derive, there’s a potent irony there in the idea that the brokenness of a letter is what enables us to read the word itself to mean wholeness.

Or perhaps the tradition is making a connection between wholeness and zealotry. In the course of my research, I learned that Rabbi Yehuda Leib Eiger of Lublin, cited by the Iturei Torah, says that a zealous person like Pinchas must be absolutely pure in their motives. There can be no blemish or break in their intentions or their actions. So does the brokenness of the vav suggest that Pinchas didn’t actually meet that standard? Or, conversely, is the tradition suggesting that while he did, we might not, so if we cannot be certain that we would we had better not imitate Pinchas?

There’s a drash on yet another text, the provenance of which I sadly cannot find, that this last possibility reminds me of. In the first book of Samuel, Saul has the kingship taken away from him because he failed to follow God’s command to obliterate Amalek: he spared their king, Agag, and their cattle, intending to offer a portion as sacrifices. But what was the crime for which Saul was punished? Was it the crime of not slaughtering Agag and the cattle along with the rest of the nation? No, says the darshan—it was the crime of mass murder and genocide. How can that be? Wasn’t Saul commanded to do those things? Yes, but by deviating even slightly from that command in sparing Agag and the cattle, Saul made it impossible to use that command to justify the killings he did commit. So the full weight of that guilt landed squarely on his head, making him unfit for the kingship. Similarly, perhaps Pinchas earned perpetual priesthood because he was genuinely shalem, but we, were we to imitate him, would only reveal the imperfection of our own intentions, and thereby shatter shalom by the violence we commit.

That’s a lot of potential meaning to pack into a broken vav. But that, ultimately, is my point: not any particular meaning, or any particular drash, but their multiplicity, and the way, in this case, that multiplicity springs from a deliberately introduced imperfection. The pshat has an apparent shleimut, an apparent wholeness to it. The story is simple, and its meaning is apparent. Yet into this surface wholeness, tradition introduces a break. A crack.

Why? Because that’s how the light gets in.

Shabbat shalom.