Pinchas: Zealous Intervention for Justice

This week’s parasha, Pinchas, is named for a zealous, violent figure—the priestly descendent of Aaron, Pinchas ben Elazar—who went on a killing spree at the end of last week’s Torah portion. Upon seeing Zimri, an Israelite man, and Kozbi, together, Pinchas followed them into a tent and killed them. The Torah tells us that Pinchas was “zealous with my (God’s) zealous-rage,” (Numbers 25:11, trans. Everett Fox) because he understood Zimri and Kozbi’s connection would inevitably result in idolatry; through his killing spree, Pinchas attempted to take Divine justice into his own hands. In the beginning of our parasha, God affirms Pinchas, granting him an eternal covenant (brit shalom), which some say is a concession to his violence and others say is a reward.

Both Pinchas’s behavior and his reward have been the subject of much commentary, very little of which directly condemns or even confronts these actions, and this story has been used by settlers, fundamentalists, and Jewish supremacists—such as the infamous far-right, anti-Arab Israeli leader Meir Kahane—to justify violent zealotry. As a result, many progressive readers distance ourselves from Pinchas and his zealotry, melding zealotry itself with the violence these instances lead to. 

But through creative reading of Pinchas’s legacy, our tradition offers alternatives to this conflation of zealotry and violence. In Psalm 106, when Pinchas’s behavior is recounted, the Psalmist writes that “Pinchas stepped forward and intervened (va’yifalel). Pinchas’s behavior is described as an intervention, from the Hebrew root p’l’l, “to judge,” or “to intercede.” Notably, this is the same root as the word for prayer, tefillah (or le’hit’palel, “to pray”), a reflexive act of spiritual intervention.  

While in Psalms itself, Pinchas’s intervention is not literally connected to prayer in any substantial way, the Sages use this shared root as an opportunity to tell a new story about Pinchas’s action: in the Talmud (Berachot 26b), the Rabbis suggest that Pinchas is, in fact, praying. We might understand this as intimating that Pinchas's action was itself a prayer, perhaps an inversion of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous declaration that while marching in Selma he felt that “his legs were praying” (a parallel statement of which is also attributed to Fredrick Douglas). Here, acting on behalf of God is akin to praying.

We can also take this rabbinic statement about Pinchas’s intervention being prayer to imply that Pinchas’s action was only prayer, with this reimagined story serving as an attempt to reject the violent outcomes of Pinchas's zealotry, disentangling the passion from the pain it produced. In both of these interpretations, prayer and protest are one—a shared mechanism for demanding Sacred justice.

Following the creative impulse behind the rabbinic interpretation of the Psalmist's retelling provides an opening to read this story against the grain of its apparent violent outcomes. The rabbinic search for peace, even in one of the most violent texts of the Torah, connects us to the essential task of using our ritual lives to embody Divine justice. Inspired by Pinchas’s passionate prayer, we may push ourselves to allow our ritual lives to help us become more zealous for what we know to be God’s true desires: cherishing life and enacting justice.