Parshat Pinchas

A number of months ago I attended an interfaith clergy meeting and experienced my worst nightmare. I came with an open heart and open mind. I came for dialogue and with the hopes of building bridges. As the meeting went on, somehow the subject changed to college campuses and to Israel and the conflict. I took a deep breath and got ready for what would come next. Finally, I said “this is getting uncomfortable” out of exasperation and that had no impact on the room. After I held up the white flag, one of the ministers in the room explained that her friend works in Gaza at a hospital where “Hamas ‘supposedly’ hides.” Another minister explained he took classes on this in seminary and that a rabbi and teacher in the seminary explained that “the creation of the State of Israel made the Jewish people a violent people.” He also told me originally religious-minded Jews were not in favor of the creation of the modern state of Israel. Thankfully, the meeting ended shortly after. I stood my ground the entire meeting and never gave them an inch. Before leaving, they asked me if I would be open to coming back and I said the following: “so long as you agree that the Jewish people have the right to a nation on their ancestral homeland then perhaps I will…”. Unfortunately, they didn’t answer my question.

Something that’s come back time and time again when I recall that meeting is the false charge that Israel made the Jewish people violent. I’ll give them a bit of ground on that charge, but not for their intended reason. Prior to 1948, the Jewish people were perpetually without defense. The Jewish people were the great eternal wanderers and had no place to call home. Prior to 1948, we were susceptible to expulsions, inquisitions, crusades, pogroms, othering, genocide and so much more. Prior to 1948, we had no means to defend ourselves and so the image of the helpless Jew was the predominant way we were seen throughout the world. When we began to return to our homeland, we built means of self defense in the form of militias, namely the Irgun and the Haganah. These two groups differed in tactics and in philosophy but at the core was a deep conviction that we needed to defend ourselves. In May of 1948 when the State of Israel came into creation, these militias were merged to form צה”ל/TzaHaL/the IDF. We chose the name IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, to assert that our army existed for the sole purpose of defense and not to make war. One can assert that this is propaganda, but when we dig deep into history, we find few if any cases of Israel and the IDF initiating wars with its enemies. The IDF has always maintained a defensive posture and it’s for this reason that Israeli soldiers have never been deployed anywhere other than in their own neighborhood of the Middle East. We’re not an army that makes war but rather one that ends them with the sacred act of defending our people.

I’m rehashing this conversation right now in response to this week’s פרשה/parsha/portion: פינחס/Pinchas. It’s one of the few פרשה’s to be named for a person, in this case פינחס. But it’s a bit troubling to understand the praise of פינחס because his action was one of violence. At the end of last week’s פרשה we find this episode of rebellion of our people. The details don’t matter but what does matter is that פינחס acted as a zealot and put an end to the rebellion through violently killing. The question that needs to be addressed is why does God commend him at the beginning of this week’s פרשה? In the תלמוד/Talmud we find the rabbis had issues with this as he took matters into his own hands. They question the greatness because the people he killed could have killed him in self-defense and they wouldn’t have been guilty of anything. It asserts that a בית דין/Beit Din/Court would not have permitted this.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained in his book Morality that this was a case of morality and national need being in conflict. פינחס acted on our national need and cast morality to the side. God seemed to not take notice of this when God gave פינחס the ברית שלום/Brit Shalom/Covenant of Peace in this week’s פרשה. God seems to be praising the actions rather than condemning them but perhaps that’s not right. Perhaps God saw that this action prevented worse things from happening. Perhaps we need to look at the word שלום as being the specific covenant that was being made. פינחס needed something to counteract his rage. He needed something to assert that this is just not how a society can be run. We need to act with a court without zealotry. Perhaps the ברית שלום was to teach פינחס, and the rest of us, that we all need to pursue the peaceful course at any time that we can.

Where does this leave us with regards to the meeting I attended, and the charges lobbed against Israel and us? Many of us have posed for pictures with Israeli Soldiers. Many of us have IDF shirts and hats we proudly wear. At our summer camps we do army activities where we do “basic training” for the IDF. Many of us of send money to help Israeli soldiers and their work. Is this us glorifying violence? Is this us being a violent people? The answer is a resounding no. We don’t wear this clothing and show this support because we want the army to harm other people. We don’t have this affinity because of some violent urge within ourselves. We have this love and adoration for the sole reason that we know our history of being defenseless and we know what it means to be Jewish in the world today. We know we have no choice but to defend ourselves. Today we take pride in knowing we don’t seek war and don’t want war but we’ll be able to hold our own in any war brought our way. Our affinity for the IDF and for Jewish self-defense is not a sign of a violent people but a sign of a people who, like all people, demand the world respect our presence and our existence. We demand that we have the same rights as the rest of humanity, and we’ll defend that right. That’s not a violent declaration but one of resolve and one of love for our people.