Are There Good Fanatics?

Are There Good Fanatics?

Parashat Pinchas

Adas Israel

July 12, 2014

Shabbat Shalom. Several months ago, when Rabbi Feinberg asked me to speak at services today, I thought a drash on Pinchas would be a good opportunity to explore the concept of fanaticism, including extremism within our own people. Are there mitigating factors, extenuating circumstances, justifiable reasons for precipitous acts of violence? In short, are there ever good fanatics? But after the terrible events of the last two weeks in Israel, I am tempted to simply answer the question with a resounding NO and sit down.

Still, I promised a drash... and this has been one of the harder ones to prepare. Perhaps you thought that coming to shul today would take your mind off the crisis, elevate your spirits, reconnect with optimism and holiness... No such luck. Our Torah portion is Pinchas, and so this Shabbas we Jews get to talk about fanaticism, about extra-judicial killings, about vengeance and faith. Just like we have all week.

Shabbat Shalom. This week's Torah portion (as Rabbi Feinberg mentioned earlier) represents the aftermath of an incident that occurred in last week's parashah. The Israelites had engaged in one of the prime sins of the wilderness period, the sin of Baal Peor, considered in some ancient midrash as more serious even than the sin of the Golden Calf. In their 40th year, encamped near the steppes of Moab across the river from Jericho, Israelite men took up with Moabite women and succumbed to the practice of idolatry.

In an angry reaction, God told Moses to execute the ringleaders; Moses turned around and told his officials to kill everyone involved with Baal Peor. What happened next we don't know, because just then, with extraordinarily bad timing, unfortunate timing, an Israelite man named Zimri showed up in the camp with a Midianite woman, Cozbi. Infuriated, Pinchas, the son of the high priest, took a spear in hand and stabbed the two offenders, in flagrante delicto.. Somehow Pinchas' shocking action managed to stop a plague that had already felled 24,000 Israelites.

Several months ago, when Rabbi Feinberg asked me to speak at services today, I thought a drash on Pinchas would be a good opportunity to explore the concept of fanaticism, including extremism within our own people. Are there mitigating factors, extenuating circumstances, justifiable reasons for precipitous acts of violence? In short, are there ever good fanatics? But after the terrible events of the last two weeks in Israel, I am tempted to simply answer the question with a resounding NO and sit down.

Actually, there is so much killing in this story of Baal Peor that it’s hard to know why we focus our attention only on Pinchas; why not on Moses, or even on God? Perhaps it’s because of the striking visual image – Pinchas slaying the couple in the midst of the sexual act, stabbing them through their genitals, as the midrash tells us. Visual images have an enormous power over our minds. Or perhaps it’s because we know Pinchas and, particularly, his victims’ names; We have learned these last few weeks yet again, how strongly we feel toward victims when we know them by name.

So ... How does the Torah view this act of vigilantism LANTism??

Well, we had to wait until this week for the answer. Many of us would be much happier if God had condemned Pinchas. But it's not so. In this week’s parashah God seems positively grateful to Pinchas – as if God could not snap out of the angry fit he was in, on his own; a sort of “Stop me before I kill again.” [D1]And God proceeds to reward Pinchas with a pact of peace or friendship – a brit shalom – and the gift of the priesthood in perpetuity. In case you don’t think you heard right, listen to the words of Psalm 106 as it retells the story:

But Pinchas stood up and intervened, and the plague was checked.

This was credited to him as righteousness for endless generations to come.

Well, this makes me squirm. And it makes a lot of commentators uncomfortable, through the ages. One focus of their concern is on this And yet, one thing that we might take away from this passage is God’s choice of reward for Pinchas – the brit shalom/ covenant of peace. Perhaps it's not a reward? What does the term mean? Interpretations range from a divine amnesty for his behavior so that a court could not charge Pinchas with murder, to respite from the guilt or madness that the murder might necessarily engender in him, to a deterrent against any more vigilantism in the future. One 19th century commentator, the Netsiv, [Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin] suggests that the covenant of peace was intended to keep Pinchas from killing a second or third time and becoming accustomed to violence.

And perhaps the covenant worked. Later on, in the Book of Joshua, when we meet Pinchas once again, it is as a diplomat and peacemaker. An incident has arisen between the tribes of Reuben and Gad, one side building an unauthorized altar that seems like grounds for going to war. Pinchas and the chieftains go out to read them the riot act. Indeed, they remind them, “Is the sin of Peor, which brought a plague upon the community of the Lord, such a small thing to us?” But Pinchas does not launch an attack or invoke God’s wrath upon the tribes. He asks what their intention was, and he listens closely to the answer. And in the end, he can live with their answer; what might have led to war dissolves into a closer unity among the tribes. Pinchas has overcome his impulsiveness and tendency to violence.

Some hundreds of years later, though, Pinchas makes another appearance, perhaps -- in the guise of Elijah the Prophet (our tradition likes to identify the two zealots as one and the same). The haftorah about Elijah that we read today -- and by the way, because of the way the calendar works, we won't be reading that haftorah again until the year 2035 -- is also the aftermath of a slaying, where Elijah has put to the sword 400 prophets of Baal. But here there is no similar approval from God, no reward, no covenant of peace.

“Kano kineiti l’Adonai, says Elijah. I’m filled with zeal for You, God of Hosts. The people of Israel have broken Your covenant... and I am the only one left.” Though God sends him a mighty wind, an earthquake, a fire, and finally, God’s still, small voice, Elijah remains stuck in his mochin d’katnut, small mind, and God promptly relieves Elijah of his duties. Was there a difference between Pinchas and Elijah’s acts to prompt God to react so differently? They both killed in God’s name. But God's ways are not known to us, God's assessment may be quite different from ours.

Characteristic of the zealot mind is that he alone knows what needs to be done; he alone knows what God wants, he alone is responsible for taking action; and that action must be violent and absolute. The zealot believes he acts for a vengeful God. But as Elijah discovered, that wasn't necessarily so. Pinchas was luckier; God, it appears, did consider the Midianite women an existential threat to the Israelites. But these judgments, the Bible seems to say, are reserved to God.

Our history has seen its share of zealots and fanatics. In the second century BCE, Pinchas became a model for Mattathias, the father of Judah the Maccabee, who slaughtered a Jew sacrificing at a pagan altar. The Book of Maccabees compares Mattathias to Pinchas, favorably.

But a few hundred years later, the rabbis felt differently about zealotry. By then they had experienced the full measure of damage wrought by the party of Zealots in the war against Rome, forcing the Jews into military action, blocking any avenues of compromise, and costing us our homeland. Our rabbis saw then what is true today as well -- that fanatics and extremists can push you into war, bringing huge destruction in their wake.

So, reflecting on Pinchas, our ancient rabbis wrote midrash to circumscribe his actions. They imagined the whole Pinchas scene as if he were deliberating with a council of elders on what to do. Pinchas assures them that he knows the law, that the death penalty is called for, and that he himself will volunteer to carry it out himself. The rabbis then enumerate 12 miracles that assisted Pinchas in his task -- like the uncanny strength of his arm that was able to impale both Cozbi and Zimri on his spear. What might seem like rabbinic vindication, though, on a deeper level is a caution and warning; the rabbis are drawing a line around Pinchas, insisting that his one-time act of violence was justified only because of divine inspiration, never to be repeated.

Let's face it: be honest: our tradition has both peace and violence in it, as do most of the great ancient religions. There is no single mple reading of our scriptures. But there is also no simple reading of our Bible. We read Tanakh with the weight of 2500 years of commentary, and But for much of that for time 2000 years our rabbinic tradition has consistently circumscribed the excesses of the Bible and moderated the starkness of its stories, softening the anger of God and those who would promote violence.. They made Pinchas into a one-off affair, and they went after Elijah too! The man who insulted Israel, saying it had abandoned its covenant with God -- the rabbis assigned him the task of visiting every Seder on Passover and every brit milah, in perpetuity. The prophet who was ready to give up on the future -- the rabbis made him the harbinger of hope and the coming of the messiah. For our rabbis, There is always there is always the possibility of peace and redemption, say our rabbis; there is always hope. In the curious formulation of the Talmud: The descendants of Haman learned Torah in Bnei Brak. It is our duty to avoid despair, and to perpetuate a divine covenant of peace.

So -- no, no good fanatics, if there ever were any. The notion that we extirpate evil by killing the wicked is challenged in the Talmud that instructs us to root out evil, not evil-doers. Which is why the multiple and widespread calls for revenge that we heard in Israel over the last few weeks -- and the steady rise in fanaticism, in "price tag" acts of vandalism and terror, in the depth of hatred for Arabs -- all this is deeply disturbing.

Jewish extremists have been thriving, and they continue to use Pinchas as a model. The infamous Rabbi Meir Kahane titled a piece about Pinchas, "Peace through Vengeance." His contemporary followers online bemoan the "distortion of the concept of revenge," QUOTE: "as if revenge were negative and evil by nature. The very opposite is true! No trait is more justified than revenge in the right time and place. G-d, Himself, is called Nokem, Avenger." Unquote. (1)

I am reminded of the teaching of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, that when the Torah says, (Deut. 32:35), that vengeance is the Lord's, it means it is ONLY the Lord's, not ours -- "Vengeance is removed from human calculation. It is G-d, not man, who is entitled to exercise it... It must not be practiced by human beings in the name of

G-d." (2) I would add, our watchword should come from a quite different source: Justice, justice shall you pursue.

[D2]And indeed, in all the bitter acrimony over the events of the last few weeks, if there is one thing most of us can probably agree on, it is that violent vigilantes, whether Israeli Jewish or Palestinian, must be brought to justice. In the words of Alan Dershowitz, “Now the time has come for both leaders to take action against their own citizens who try to take the law into their own bloody hands.” One wonders, if Israel had earlier done so with its settlers, and Hamas had done so with its rogue elements, whether we would be in this terrible situation. (3)

Let's be honest: our tradition has both peace and violence in it, as do most of the great ancient religions. There is no simple reading of our scriptures. But for 2000 years our rabbinic tradition has circumscribed the excesses of the Bible and moderated the starkness of its stories. There is always the possibility of peace and redemption, say our rabbis; there is always hope. In the curious formulation of the Talmud: The descendants of Haman learned Torah in Bnei Brak. It is our duty to avoid despair, and to perpetuate a divine covenant of peace.

I'd like to close my remarks today by honoring the his memory of a man who was the antithesis of Pinchas, a man .I know of no one who who spent his life seeking a true peace -- Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, alav ha-shalom, more closely embodied the seeking of peace, and the expanded consciousness that we call mochin d’gadlut, than the extraordinary rebbe who passed away last week at the age of 89, the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, alav ha-shalom. I'd like to close my remarks today by honoring his memory. Reb Zalman was the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement; he brought us the rainbow tallit as a symbol of inclusivity within the Jewish people; pioneered concepts such as , spiritual eldering , concepts such and as psycho-halachah, and the notion of a post-triumphalist Judaism, a Judaism open to, and in conversation with all the spiritual wisdom of the world. Reb Zalman saw every religion, every people, as a vital organ of the planet. In adding “Shalomi” to his name, he underscored his commitment to the pursuit of peace -- a peace of shleimut that encompasses all parts in balance. Reb Zalman once wrote, “I do believe there is more good in the world than evil,” he said, “but not by much. The task of each person is to help tip the scale."

May his memory be a blessing, and may his teachings of peace fortify us and inspire us to work for peace and spread peace and tolerance in the world. Shabbat shalom.

Notes:

(1)

(2)

(3)

[D1]I don’t think I quite understand this. Edit out?

[D2]I’m not convinced this paragraph should stay in.