Pinchas 5766 – Gilayon #455


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Parshat Balak

THE DAUGHTERS OF ZELOFHAD SON OF HEFER SON OF GILEAD SON OF MACHIR SON OF MENASHEH

SON OF JOSEPH, OF MENASHEH THE SON OF JOSEPH'S FAMILY CAME FORWARD. THE NAMES

OF THE DAUGHTERS WERE MAHLAH, NOAH, HOGLAH, MILCAH, AND TIRZAH. THEY STOOD

BEFORE MOSES, ELAZAR THE PRIEST, THE CHIEFTAINS, AND THE WHOLE ASSEMBLY, AT THE

ENTRANCE OF THE TENT OF MEETING, AND THEY SAID: "OUR FATHER DIED IN THE

WILDERNESS… AND HE HAS LEFT NO SONS. LET NOT OUR FATHER'S NAME BE LOST TO HIS CLAN JUST BECAUSE HE HAD NO SON! GIVE US A

HOLDING AMONG OUR FATHER'S KINSMEN!"

MOSES BROUGHT THEIR CASE BEFORE THE LORD. AND THE LORD SAID

TO MOSES, "THE PLEA OF ZELAFHAD'S DAUGHTERS IS JUST…"

(Bamidbar 27: 1-7)

 

Women and Men of

the Generation of the Wilderness

Of Menasheh the son of Joseph's family – Why does it say this? Did it

not already say son of Menasheh? Rather, it is

in order to tell you: Joseph loved the land, for it is said: and take my

bones up, etc. (Bereishit 50:25), and his daughters loved the

land, for it is said give us a holding (Bamidbar

27:4)..

 

(Rashi Bamidbar 27:1)

 

Then drew near the daughters of Zelofhad (Bamidbar 27:1): In that generation the women built up the

fences which the men broke down. Thus you will find that Aaron told them: Break

off the golden rings, which are in the ears of your wives (Shemot 32:2), but the women refused and checked their

husbands; as is proved by the fact that it says, And all the people broke off the golden rings which were in

their ears (32:3), the women not participating with them in

making the calf. It was the same in the case of the spies, who uttered an evil

report: And the men… when they returned, made all the

congregation to murmur against him (Bamidbar

14:36), and

against this congregation the decree [not to enter the Land] was issued,

because they had said: We are not able to go up (13:31). The women, however, were not with them in

their counsel, as may be inferred from the fact that it is written in an

earlier passage of our section, For the Lord

had said of them: They shall surely die in the wilderness. And there was not

left a man of them, save Kalev the son of Yefuneh (26:65).

Thus the text speaks of a man but not of a woman. This was

because the men had been unwilling to enter the Land. The women, however, drew

near to ask for an inheritance in the Land. Consequently, the present section

was written down next to that dealing with the death of the generation of the

wilderness, for it was there that the men broke down the fences and the women

built them up.

(Bamidbar Rabbah 21, Slotki translation)

 

…this haggadic statement tells us about the distant past, but it may be

so in every generation, and we are witnesses to many situations in which the

men spoil things and the women repair them.

(Y Leibowitz: Sheva Shanim shel

Sihot al Parashat ha'Shavua, pg. 731)

 

 

Pinchas as Pariah

Yair Eldan

The previous parasha ends with

the glorification of Pinchas's impaling Zimri and Kozbi, which stopped

the plague. Our parasha begins with Pinchas receiving a Divine reward in recognition of his act

– a pact of peace. However, the midrash

(Sifrei 131)

offers a reading of this passage which run counter to the biblical narrative:

The Tribe of Simon visited the Tribe of Levi and said: "This

son of Puti's daughter wants to destroy an entire

tribe of Israel,

as if we did not know whose son he is?" When the Omnipresent saw that they

were all starting to denigrate him, He began attributing a flattering pedigree

to him.

Sanhedrin

82b puts it this way:

Since the tribes would denigrate him [by saying], "Did

you see that son of Puti whose father and mother used

to fatten calves for idolatrous worship, how he killed a chieftain of a tribe

in Israel?"

So Scripture came and called him a descendent of Aaron.

The biblical Pinchas is

described as a man of great daring who acted instinctually out of zealousness (and

he sawand he arose – and he took a spear – and

he impaled). One does not have to worry about the mental or physical health

of the biblical Pinchas.

In contrast, the midrashic Pinchas is a man burdened by social – and perhaps even

physical – pressures. He was described as a descendent of Aaron's in order to

quiet the tribes' ridicule of him; we see that that ridicule must have had an

existential importance for him. Why does the author of the midrash overthrow the biblical foundations and suggest

that after Pinchas's deed and the halting of the plague, Pinchas

suffered insults and was subject to threats from the people?

Perhaps the author of the midrash is projecting his own social condition of

ostracism, or the ridicule suffered by the community to which he belongs – perhaps

the author identifies with the idea of receiving a pact of peace with God. The

author reveals the desire for God to address either him or his community with

favor. Consequently, he projects his own loneliness and subjection to ridicule

– or his community's subjection to ostracism and threat – upon Pinchas. A second possibility is that the author of the midrash identifies with Pinchas's deed or

with Pinchas himself; he would like to act as Pinchas did. Accordingly, he attaches the social

consequences that he would suffer himself were he to act like Pinchas to Pinchas. Or, perhaps,

the author would like to be a "biblical Pinchas,"

full of power, daring, and instinct, and so he projects his own social

situation upon Pinchas. In any case, the midrash "broadens the

horizons" of the biblical text. This is expressed, on the one hand, by

loyalty to the text and it sacred status (the midrash focuses on Scripture's words and on the

question – why is the appellation son of Aaron repeated?), and on the

other hand by a feeling of freedom to overturn the biblical narrative. The midrash's ability to interpret the

verses as it does is closely tied to its author's own feelings of exclusion. This

has a double effect on the text: at the level of the story ostracism is

projected upon the biblical account and is read into it – the midrash says that Pinchas was subjected to scoffing. On a more primary level,

the feeling of exclusion itself allows for the opening of the horizons of the

biblical text. The excluded person understands authority's relative nature and

the arbitrariness of the systems of social power; he tries to retreat to a

psychological place which authority cannot reach. The excluded person's relativized conception allows him greater interpretive

freedom. Here, the proper tension between tradition and innovation is actually

achieved with the help of feelings of being ostracized, rather than from the

feeling of power and authority associated with the slogan it is not in heaven.

Hannah Arendt claims that the

feeling of being a pariah is the source of all positive Jewish traits – the

warm Jewish heart, humaneness, humor, independent intellectualism (see her

collection of essays, The Jew as Pariah). Being ostracized gives one a

clear understanding of the relativity of power, status, and wealth and it

emphasizes the importance of things basic to life such as human conversation,

the beauty of nature, and physical health. The pariah's situation is Sisyphean;

he must remain within society so that the process of being ostracized will harm

him and influence him. The fact of his being both "inside" as well as

"outside" allows him to observe the society in which he lives with a

critical eye and measure it by other standards.

Of course, extreme long-term exclusion is a kind of

death – "Mai shamta [what does it mean to

be banned]? Sham mita [there is death]" (Moed Katan

17a). Ignoring someone affects their basic needs – the need for control,

belonging, self-worth, and the need for a meaningful existence. "… Ostracism…

is a poignant metaphor for what life would be like if the target did not exist"

(Kipling D. Williams, Ostracism: the Power of

Silence, pg. 63). That is why the halakhah

requires that a banned person practice the customs of mourning – he mourns for

himself, for his own social death. However, ostracism has some positive

qualities – sharpening of critical faculties, a more existential and less

material order of priorities, the development of

interpretive sensitivity towards the world – including texts. Perhaps some

degree of a feeling of ostracism is an (insufficient) condition for the

interpretation of canonical texts. Rene Girard pointed out that unlike

comparable mythic texts, Scripture is written from the standpoint of the

victim, and that is its greatness. The midrash

about Pinchas sheds light on the importance of one's

possessing some degree of a feeling of ostracism and victimhood

in order to interpret the canon creatively.

Arendt viewed the situation of

the Jews following emancipation as that of pariahs – the Jews lived among the

peoples of Europe while not being accepted socially. After

2,000 years of exile, the Jews main problem was that they "did not have

their feet on the ground," a state referred to by Arendt

as "worldlessness". They "retired"

from the world and did not see themselves as having the ability to influence

their immediate and broader social environments, and they certainly did not

think of themselves as bearing any responsibility for the social environment. According

to Arendt, even while the Jews engaged in widespread

economic activity they did not understand or concern themselves with the

political significance of their activities. That is Zionism's greatest virtue

and challenge – the return of the Jews to history. During a recent visit to the

U.S.A., A. B. Yehoshua lamented the excessive role of involvement with

texts as a constitutive part of Jewish identity. He claimed that life in the

State of Israel offers the only avenue for the full realization of Jewish

identity. He prefers the normalcy of basing identity on language and territory

rather than on the analysis of texts. However, the yearning for a "normal"

Jewish existence in the Land of Israel

forgets the point of departure of the Sages' tradition – their sensitivity to

biblical characters and to the psychological processes those characters

underwent, as well as their sensitivity to state and social issues that springs

from a certain feeling of ostracism. In that sense, the feeling of ostracism is

important both for how we read canonical texts as well as for how we decide to

execute military operations, such as the firing of missiles at cars in which

innocents sit next to terrorists.

Arendt calls the poet Heinrich

Heine "the conscious pariah." She cites his

poem on Judah HaLevy in order to show Heine's humor and the unpretentious way he viewed the world

– through the eyes of a naive schlemiel. In that song Heine rereads the act of zealousness which concludes last

week's parasha:

One day Pinchas saw/ how the

noble Zimri/was making love/ to a Canaanite woman/

and immediately grasped in anger/ his spear and Zimri/

he stabbed to death on the spot – / So it is in the Holy Scriptures/ but from

mouth to mouth is transmitted/ a legend which says/ that Zimri

was not injured/ by Pinchas

and his spear/ rather that blind with anger/ he missed the sinner/ and hit some

innocent/ Shlumiel ["Schlemiel"] ben Tzurishadai/ this Shlumiel was the first/ the father of all Shlumiels/ and we – are descended from/ Shlumiel

ben Tzurishadai. (Hebrew Melodies)

Heine's reading of the

biblical tale lacks the qualities of midrash

– it is not tied to the biblical story and does not reinterpret it from within;

rather, it paves a path parallel from which the story may be viewed. Jewish

creativity that broadens the horizons of the world and of the text depends on

consciousness of ostracism when approaching the text – first from within, and

only afterwards from without.

Yair Eldan is a doctoral

candidate in the program for the Management and Resolution of Conflicts and

Negotiations at Bar Ilan University

 

 

The Leader As A

Shepherd, a Public Servant Who Does Not Exploit His Subjects For His Personal

Needs

Let the Lord,

Source of the breath of all flesh, appoint someone over the community who

shall go out before them and come in before them, and who shall take them out

and bring them in, so the Lord's

community may not be like sheep that have no shepherd.

(Bamidbar 27)

 

Who

shall go out before them – Not like the kings of the nations who sit in

their palaces and send their soldiers to war, but as I did when I fought

against Sichon and Og, as

is written (Bamidbar

21:34), Fear him not. And

as did Joshua, as is written (Joshua 5:13), And Joshua went up to him and said, 'Are

you one of us or one of our enemies?' And similarly with David (I Samuel 18:17), For he

marched at their head – at their head when going out, at their head when

returning…

And

bring them – An alternative explanation: And bring them Do not treat

him as you did me, for I will not bring them you into the land.

(Rashi, Bamidbar 27:17)

 

The Sacrifices – Slaughtering "Sacred

Cows" Within the Framework of the Struggle against Idol Worship

The

ancient Egyptians worshiped the constellation Aries (ram). Therefore they

forbade the slaughter of sheep and despised shepherds… there were also groups

from among the Tzabia who worshiped the demons, and

believed that they bore the shape of goats; therefore they called the demons seirimhairy goats. This belief was very

widespread in the times of our teacher, Moses: They may slaughter no longer

their slaughter-offerings to the hairy goat demons after whom they go whoring.

Therefore these cults also forbade the consumption of goats. Almost most of the

idol worshippers despised the slaughter of cattle. They all greatly honored

that species. Therefore you find that, even until this day, the Hindus do not

slaughter cattle at all, even in a land where other animals are slaughtered.

In

order to eradicate the traces of these erroneous ideas, we were commanded to

offer exactly three kinds of domestic animals: From

the herd and from the flock you may bring your near-offering, so that through that very act which they [the idolaters] considered to

be the epitome of sin, they [the Children of Israel] will come close to God,

and with this act will their sins be atoned for. Thus will the evil ideas be

cured – these ideas being diseases of the human soul – by means of doing the opposite.

(RaMBaM, Guide of The Perplexed

III, 46)

 

Then the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem

shall be pleasing to the Lord

In the future, an abundance of knowledge will spread and will penetrate even

animals. They will not do evil nor will they destroy on the mount of My

holiness, because the earth will be full with knowledge of the Lord and

that offering which will then be the minkha

offering – from the vegetables – shall be pleasant to the Lord as in the days

of yore.

(Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Olat R'A'aYaH p.

282)

 

 

YOEL YOSEF FINE z"l

On the eighth

anniversary of Yoel's passing,

we

will meet for an evening of study in his memory

on

Wednesday, 19.7.06, night of 24 Tammuz, at 20:15

.

Rabbi Dov Berkowitz

"And Moshe

approached the Darkness where God was Hidden

Life as Loss and

Rebirth

Miriam, Jonathan, Devorah, Naomi and Ephraim Fine

Maariv

promptly at 20:15

The session will

take place at the synagogue of Kehillat Yedidyah,

12

Lipschutz Street

(the end of Gad Street

in Baka)

Jerusalem

 

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