Pinchas

Parshat Pinchas perplexes me every year. I simply do not know how to interpret it. For those that need to be updated, Pinchas was a zealous Jew that killed a Jewish man and Midianite woman for desecrating the Torah. Pinchas is seemingly rewarded with the “Covenant of Peace” which always him access to the priesthood. Surely Pinchas did the right thing for he stopped the plague and he stood up for Judaism…however zealotry is not a Jewish value. Never has been or never will be. Hashem and Hashem’s prophets can take decisive measure but giving everyone free reign to do what they feel is Hashem’s will is dangerous. Anyone can see how that could go wrong very quickly. So then WHY is Pinchas venerated?

Well…I read plenty of commentaries out there and they all have their theories but I found precisely none of them even remotely compelling. There is no way to distinguish Pinchas’ behavior from our own. Just the last couple of weeks the Jewish people have suffered at the hands of both Jewish and Muslim zealots. And I’m sure they all felt they were doing Hashem’s work just as Pinchas did. Nowhere else in the Torah do we find recommendations for zealousness so how exactly are we supposed to react to this week’s parshah? How do we explain it to our children? Do we encourage such strong emotional reactions? Condemn them? If we condemn them, how can we explain the reward given to him?

I will continue to search for an answer that is at least a little bit satisfying but for now I have to be content with having questions. I don’t pretend to understand everything and I am fine admitting that I don’t have all the answers which is precisely where I am at right now. Sometimes this is how life is. And by sometimes I mean pretty much all the time. No one has the answer to everything and even collectively we don’t have even 1% of the answers yet we must continue to live our lives. Next week we will move on to the next parsha and we’ll come back to Pinchas next year.

If you have any cool insight into the parsha it would be very welcome!