Drashot with a difference

Introduction By Rabbi Genende

For this week’s blog, I am sharing two cracker drashot from two exceptional young women in our Melbourne Jewish community. 

I had the pleasure of hearing Paris Enten at Blake St Shul and their young adults / families Sifriya service, and Emma Gunn at our Zooz Friday night service (which runs with Kesher partnership). 

They refer to the Torah readings over the past few weeks and both explore the contentious Pinchas / Phineas model and its implications and what it means for the Jewish people today.

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Article By Emma Gunn

I want to start with a question. We’re living in a world where everyone seems to have a title, a platform, a following. And you have none of that, no title, no power, no obvious claim to anyone’s attention, and you see that something needs to be done. Do you act, or do you wait for someone with a title to do it? That’s the question this week’s parasha puts in front of us.

Who Pinchas Was

Pinchas enters the story exactly where last week left off, in the middle of a crisis no one else was moving to stop. A plague breaks out among the people, and the leadership itself is frozen, weeping at the entrance of the Ohel Moed. Into that vacuum steps Pinchas: Aharon’s grandson, but never counted among the kohanim. He had every reason to sit this one out. He stood up anyway. One person’s action stood between the entire nation and destruction.

Here’s how the Torah describes it: פִּֽינְחָ֨ס בֶּן־אֶלְעָזָ֜ר בֶּן־אַֽהֲרֹ֣ן הַכֹּהֵ֗ן הֵשִׁ֤יב אֶת־חֲמָתִי֙ מֵעַ֣ל בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל בְּקַנְא֥וֹ אֶת־קִנְאָתִ֖י בְּתוֹכָ֑ם וְלֹֽא־כִלִּ֥יתִי אֶת־בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בְּקִנְאָתִֽ

Pinechas son of Eleazar son of Aaron the priest diverted My anger from the Israelites by zealously avenging Me among them. I therefore did not destroy the Israelites because of My zeal.

In other words: the Torah doesn’t credit Pinchas’s lineage or his standing for what happened. It credits the act itself, done by one person, at the exact moment it needed doing, before anyone gave him permission to do it. And that brings me to the detail I really want to sit with tonight.

The Yud

The Yud in Pinchas’s name is written small in the Torah: the smallest letter in the alef-bet. But small doesn’t mean minor. It’s the one letter that isn’t built out of any other letter, every other letter is, in some form, a combination of strokes, but the Yud is a single, standalone point. It’s the letter that opens G-d’s own name, and tradition ties it to the Neshama itself, the smallest mark, and the most essential one. So, when the Torah shrinks Pinchas’s Yud, I don’t think it’s telling us he was small. I think it’s telling us where to look. Not at his lineage, not at his title, but at that single point of Godliness that was in him the entire time, the same point that’s sitting in every one of us right now, whether anyone else can see it yet. As Hillel taught in Pirkei Avot: in a place where no one is stepping up, strive to be the one who does. And Pinchas doesn’t just get noticed for it, he gets answered.

The Covenant

God’s response is immediate. He grants him a covenant: לָכֵ֖ן אֱמֹ֑ר הִֽנְנִ֨י נֹתֵ֥ן ל֛וֹ אֶת־בְּרִיתִ֖י שָׁלֽוֹם

“Therefore say, ‘I hereby bestow My covenant of peace upon him.'” That covenant is a reminder that peace has always been possible, even in the hardest stretches.

This has been a hard stretch, both in Israel and for the diaspora feeling the weight of it everywhere else. But the covenant is what carried this nation through worse than this before. Israel today isn’t just a place on a map, it’s living proof that the covenant still holds, still being honoured, still worth showing up for. Which is exactly why it matters that each of us decides we’re one of the people willing to show up for it, rather than a bystander waiting for someone else to. So, what does showing up actually look like?

Leadership Isn’t About Being the Loudest

Later in the parasha, Moshe asks God for a successor: someone who will “go out before them and come in before them, who will lead them out and bring them in, so the congregation of the Lord will not be like sheep without a shepherd.” That’s not the same request twice. Going out before the people takes courage. Leading them out is harder: staying far enough to show the way, yet close enough that, when you turn around, the people are still with you. A leader who is only ever out in front hasn’t led. They’ve simply left. We saw that kind of leadership just last December. When the terror attack at Bondi Beach tore through a Chanukah celebration, volunteers from ZAKA, a humanitarian organisation that runs emergency response, rescue, and recovery operations around the world, guided by Jewish values, got on a plane. Not to hold a press conference: heads of government were there that week, and they weren’t the story. They came to help: to be there as more people among the grieving, offering practical assistance and quiet guidance, and to stand at the memorial and light a candle on a menorah, alongside a community twelve thousand kilometres from home. It wasn’t the loudest voice on the stage that held that community together. It was the people who simply turned up. And none of them needed a title to do it.

The Call

So here’s the call. You don’t need a title. Pinchas didn’t have one. The ZAKA volunteers who flew to Sydney didn’t need one either. What they had was the willingness to notice the small Yud in themselves, and to show up before anyone told them to.

The covenant is still being written. That means it’s still ours to finish.

Shabbat Shalom

Emma Gunn is in her final year of a Juris Doctor degree, having previously completed a Bachelor of Biomedical Science. In her spare time, she enjoys learning Torah and giving back to the community through her volunteer work with UIA. 

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Article By Paris Enten 

Good Shabbos everyone. Before I start this drasha, I just want it on the record that this is the first drasha, and this is a double parasha which feels very daunting, so if I get anything wrong or I’m saying things you already know, I apologise and you can come and find me in the kiddush to tell me where I went wrong.

There is a ridiculous amount that happens in this week’s parashiot. To name just a few:

• Laws of the red heifer 
• Miriam dies
• Striking of the rock and moshe and aharon being told that they will never enter the promised land
• Aaron dies
• There is the battle against Sichon and Og
• Bilaam prophesies about the Israelites
• We also have the story about the Midianite woman, Cozbi who is killed with her Israelite lover, Zimri ben Salu, by Pinchas

As I was reading through Parashat Balak, I was keeping my eye out for all this talk about prophesies that I’d heard so much about. And I knew that the story about the Midianite woman was in there, and yet I was so shocked on first reading by how quickly the story turned from praising Bnei Israel to talking about our sins and follies. 

Something Hashem says, through Bilaam about Bnei Yisrael:

His king will prevail over Agag, his sovereignty will be uplifted.

Hashem who brought them out of Egypt with his towering strength, will consume the nation, his enemies, break their bones and dip His arrows in their blood. 

He will crouch and lie down in his land like a lion, an awesome lion; who will dare rouse him?

Those who bless you will be blessed, and those who curse you will be cursed.

So that’s a fairly energising passage, but then just 16 psukim later, we are learning about the immorality of Bnei Israel and their relations with the Moabite women. This change in tone was extremely jarring. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, we are hearing this story where Pinhas takes a spear and pierces through the torso of Zimri and Cozbi whilst they are engaging in relations in full view of the community. 

As something of a feminist, I find the portrayal of the Moabite woman to be a little bit difficult to wrap my head around. The commentary that I read explains that the Moabite women seduced the Israelite men, and right as they were about to engage in carnal relations, she would whip out her idol and cause the Israelite to worship it. One sentence reads, “the Moabite girls invited the people to the feast offerings and the people ate of the offerings and prostrated themselves to their gods at the urging of the Moabite girls”, which places onus on the women at both the start and the end of the sentence. It starts with “the Moabite girls invited” and ends with “at the urging of the Moabite girls”. And because the Israelites were successfully persuaded by these women, Hashem became angry and unleashed a plague on the innocent and the guilty of Israel. 

If you don’t agree that the narrative places onus on the Moabite women, I still think it’s absolutely crazy that in just nine pesukim we learn about the deaths of some 24,000 people from a plague brought on by sexual misconduct. There has to be something more to learn here.

As a hopeful future lawyer, I was also horrified that when Pinchas goes to execute Zimri and Cozbi, he does so without a trial! This just flies in the face of everything else I had been taught about capital punishment in Judaism.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to take away from this story as a woman in the 21st century — both the placement of the story in relation to that of Bilaam, but also the fact that women seem to me to be blamed (at least in part) for the actions of Israelite men — was really challenging for me. We should remember that Cozbi, as a Midianite, and the Moabite women, were not bound by Jewish law, and so may not necessarily have been doing anything wrong according to their own sets of laws. 

One interesting explanation offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 106a is that the actions of the Moabite women were actually a systematic plot to seduce the Israelite men into worshiping idols, which was concocted by Bilaam to ensnare Israelite men into idolatry. This is described to be quite a sophisticated plot, involving many members of the Moabite community, including the older women who would act as an innocent looking entry point for the Israelite men. Then once the men were comfortable in her presence, the younger woman would be introduced, who only offered to eat and drink with the man. Then she introduced an idol, but didn’t tell him to worship it straight away. Only once he was comfortable with that did she ask him to reject the Torah and the teachings of Moshe. 

So something here may be beginning to emerge that makes things seem a little bit more proportional. Perhaps the placement of the story of Bilaam right next to the story of the Moabite women makes a bit more sense if it was indeed Bilaam that caused the Moabite women to act in the way that they did. And maybe the blame is placed seemingly on the Moabite women not only for their sexual proclivities, but also because of their calculatedness, and their intention to systematically convert Jewish men away from their religion. 

But what about Pinchas? How could he justify killing Cozbi and Zimri without a trial? 

When we think about what was going on at the time, that there was a plot by Israel’s enemies to systematically draw its people away from the religion through seduction, Pinchas’ anger becomes a little bit more understandable. He’s a Jewish leader in the midst of a communal crisis – another nation has set themselves up to trap Jewish men using attractive young women. Zimri is engaging with this in the open, and as Moshe stands there stunned and unmoving, Pinchas takes it upon himself to take action. In a moment of real weakness for Bnei Yisrael, Zimri comes in to flaunt the exact source of that weakness to everyone around him. But did Pinchas do the right thing?

Sources are inconclusive. Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 97 says that Pinchas’ actions were not met with approval by the sages of his day, and Rabbi Yudah bar Pazi even goes as far as to say that they sought to excommunicate him. Of course, there are other sages who believe that Pinchas acted courageously and for the betterment of Bnei Yisrael, and it is for that reason that the plague was cured. In any event, the midrash says that Moshe stood by and watched without acting because he forgot the relevant laws, and this is almost universally criticised.

In any event, lots of these things still bother me, but perhaps we can learn something from that discomfort.

This story is about a plot to slowly seduce Jews into rejecting their religion through temptation. We have so many examples of that today, the big and obvious ones we are all familiar with. But I want to touch on another temptation that I’m starting to see emerging, and that is the temptation of safety and security.

There are so many plots around us which are designed in some way to cause our collective downfall. Whether that be to eject us from universities, to demonize our homeland or to evoke age old antisemitic tropes to defame us in the court of public opinion. 

Each one of these attempts to denigrate our community starts small, and insidiously grows bigger over time. It starts with really friendly people and organisations, equivalent maybe to the older women who would bring the men into their market stalls. Then there are jokes and comments that maybe aren’t directly related to you, maybe you find yourself laughing along, or maybe you just stay silent. This is equivalent to the young woman who invited the Israelites to eat and drink with her. What’s the harm? But maybe then the organisation passes an antisemitic motion, or your non Jewish friend is silent after a mass atrocity. This can be thought of as the woman bringing out her idol but not asking you to worship it. And then it escalates into something more proactive, like them refusing to work with or hire Jews, and making institutional changes that we are suddenly powerless to stop. This is the equivalent of asking us to worship the idol. 

And what should we do in this scenario? It is so easy to turn inwards, to give into the temptation to put our heads down and look the other way – to remove ourselves from the situation. Like Bilaam, this is a plot to get rid of Jews – to make antisemitism so intolerable that we do the hard work for them and abandon our Jewish convictions and Jewish pride in public.

Should we be like the Israelites who allow themselves to be lulled in and accept our current circumstances as the new normal? The Torah told us very clearly what would happen in that scenario – both the innocent and the guilty will suffer.

When we see other Jews who are lulled into this pattern of antisemitism, who defend the wrongdoers and sometimes even join them, how should we respond?

Should we jump to confrontation and blame, the equivalent of Pinchas? Should we sit passively by and act like we don’t notice, the equivalent of Moshe? It’s probably somewhere in the middle. Whilst we shouldn’t ever resort to aggression, we should always be active in protecting our community from those who seek to make it more difficult for us to be proud Jews and Zionists. 

I think the two lessons I take away from this week’s parasha is that 1) as individuals, we must remain vigilant when protecting our community from the insidious impacts of antisemitism, and within reason, never allow ourselves to normalise losing our Jewish pride in the name of safety or security. Second, when we are confronted with someone who has succumbed to this temptation, someone who maybe stopped practicing part of their religion or stopped using their Hebrew name in public because they feel unsafe, we must provide them with a safe place in which they feel comfortable being loud and proud Jews. To do that, we must make ourselves and our kehilah more approachable and more inclusive. If we don’t, the innocent and the guilty will suffer.

Paris Enten is a recent Arts / Law graduate from Monash University. She is currently working as a legal associate to a Judge and is a board director of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia (VIC).