The beginning of Pinchas is a postscript to the end of last week’s Torah portion, Balak. Zimri, a prince of Israel, is cohabitating with a Midianite princess at the entrance to the Holy Tent of Meeting!
So what does one do in the face of such wickedness? Incredibly, Moses and Aaron fall to the ground, seemingly at a loss for what to do!
Enter Pinchas, Aaron’s grandson; grabbing a spear, he ends this obvious affront to God by literally spearing the offenders on the spot, which was the conclusion of last week’s portion, Balak.
This week’s portion then begins with God’s reaction to Pinchas’ action:
“Pinchas the son of Elazar, the son of Aaron the (high) priest turned back My anger (says God) from the children of Israel… thus do I give him my covenant of peace.”
According to Rashi, the Jewish people are shocked by such an obviously violent and zealous act, so Hashem reminds us that he is the descendant of Aaron, known as the ohev and rodef shalom, the lover and pursuer of peace.
Ohev shalom, a lover of peace, makes a lot of sense here. The term rodef however, a pursuer of peace, is curious terminology. A rodef is a person who is pursuing the killer of a blood relative, determined to kill him as an act of vengeance or justice.
The Torah actually permits and even obligates us to stop this rodef at all costs. So why is this same term of “pursuer” used here to refer to a pursuer of peace?
The Chatam Sofer (Rav Moshe Sofer of Pressburg) suggests that in this instance, Pinchas was actually doing the opposite of “making peace”; he was chasing it away! Sometimes, he suggests, making peace with something will lead to anything but peace, and the real lover of peace in such an instance has to be willing to chase it away by doing the opposite.
Pinchas understood that to stand by and “make peace” with Zimri’s actions, and do nothing while a Jewish leader was causing such an affront to everything Judaism held dear, would actually allow God’s wrath and the resulting plague to continue to decimate thousands of Jewish lives.
Just as in 1938, Chamberlain’s desire to “make peace” with Adolf Hitler and overlook his horrendous human rights abuses and antisemitism, actually encouraged a tyrant and led to the greatest loss of human life in world history.
We live in a world which is so desperate to make peace: with terrorism, with Islamic fundamentalism, with an Iranian desire for nuclear power as a stepping stone to regional and, perhaps even world, domination. But there are some things with which we cannot make peace. As long as Iran refuses to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and declares its desire to annihilate us, we cannot make peace with it. As long as the Palestinian Authority continues to support suicide bombers and teach their children to hate, we cannot make peace with them, and in fact such “peace” agreements will inevitably lead to war.
The refusal to make peace with evil, is actually the pursuit of real peace.
And lastly, there are so many things we should not make peace with on a personal level. We should not make peace with leaders whose behavior is less than exemplary (though we must be careful about pillorying them publicly without being sure of the facts), and we should not make peace with unethical behavior, even if it may be unpopular to publicly take that stand.
Perhaps, this week, it would be worthwhile to consider what things we should not “make peace” with, and what we might do to pursue such a reality.
Rabbi Binny Freedman is rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Orayta. He is a member of the Mizrachi Speakers Bureau (www.mizrachi.org/speakers).
