Our guest author this week is Rabbinic Intern Shawn Weiss, Ziegler Rabbinical School student and Alumni Fellow of the Flesh Family Sinai Temple Israel Center Rabbinical School Fellowship.

It’s hard to like Pinhas. At the end of last week’s parshah, Pinhas, son of Eleazar, grandson of Aaron, takes a spear and kills an Israelite man and his Moabite girlfriend while they are – ahem – in the act of profaning God’s name. Everything we know as modern Jews tells us that extremist acts of violence such as this are anathema to our way of life. And yet, in this week’s parshah, Pinhas is singled out by God with a pact of friendship and even rewarded with a line of priestly descent for all time, for having, as God says, “turned back my wrath from the Israelites by displaying among them his passion for Me.”

What’s going on here? 

How do we make sense of Pinhas’s abhorrent behavior on the one hand and God’s seemingly appreciative response on the other? 

Instead of turning away from Pinhas and distancing ourselves from his deplorable behavior as we sometimes do with those aspects of Torah that do not accord with our contemporary values, what if we seek to understand the expression of Pinhas’s behavior rather than the behavior itself?  Because, clearly, God sees something worthy in Pinhas, something that we too may draw upon. And I’m guessing it’s not the murder. 

What God is honoring in Pinhas is his passion (kin-ah).  Enraged with his fellow Jews who flagrantly disobey God’s command, Pinhas, instilled with a passion for truth, is called to action to stay God’s wrath against the people Israel. The takeaway for us today is not that violence is sometimes acceptable—on this we must condemn Pinhas’s behavior absolutely; it is that God requires not just our rational, habitual response to God’s word, but our total commitment, our passion for truth.  How exactly we do that – without recourse to violence – is for us to decide.