Image: A woman’s hand held up as if to ward off a blow. (ninocare/pixabay)
What are we to do with the violent stories in Torah?
Parshiot Balak and Pinchas bring us yet another disturbing story. After Balaam blesses the camp of Israel against his will, Moabite women visit the Israelites as they are camped at Shittim. They engage the men in “whoring” (there’s really no other way to translate liznot) and then invite them to the sacrifices to their god, Ba’al-peor. The men join in and the God of Israel is incensed, commanding Moses to have the ringleaders among the Israelites impaled. Moses makes the order, when a prince of the tribe of Simeon, Zimri, brings a Midianite princess, Cozbi, to the camp right in front of him.
Aaron’s grandson, Pinchas, follows Zimri and Cozbi into Zimri’s “chamber”, and impales the two of them with one thrust of his spear. And in the following portion, titled “Pinchas,” he is rewarded by God, who says that the line of the High Priest will come from his descendants.
Most modern liberal readers go into shock at about this point. What? He’s rewarded for such awful violence, coming upon a couple in a vulnerable moment of privacy and running them through with a spear? And God commanded this, and rewarded it? Oy!
One interpretation of this story is that it is a warning against intermarriage. Hilary Lipka points out that first Zimri introduces Cozbi to his kin, which doesn’t look like “worshipping idols.” Secondly he takes her to his kubbah, a word that appears nowhere else in Torah, but which many translators interpret as “chamber.” She argues that this isn’t about idolatry, it’s about intermarriage. She also points out that it reflects a different point of view on intermarriage than another place in the Torah: Moses marries Zipporah, the daughter of a Midianite priest, and she’s a righteous woman! So perhaps this is an early example of the argument about intermarriage in Jewish tradition.
Another interpretation is that when God rewards Pinchas, he does so by giving his decendants an honor that will also be a burden. God recognizes the passion of Pinchas as matching the passion of God, and promptly gives Pinchas an outlet for that passion that will serve both to focus it and contain it. Being High Priest was a tremendous responsibility, because there were sacred duties that only the High Priest could do. He could not allow himself to be distracted from those duties, and he had to practice a high degree of self-control to carry them out. The descendants of Pinchas would not have the luxury of vigilantism, because they would have their hands full policing themselves.
Perhaps this story is a recognition that there are always going to be those among us who get carried away – maybe violently carried away – by their passion for God, and that it’s important to contain those passions. If the individual can’t do it for himself, maybe he needs to be given a job that will do it.
We are living in a passionate time, when many people seem driven to extremism and zealotry. I wonder if there are ways that those passions could be channeled into good?
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