Pinchas
This teaching is about beauty, healing and transformation. And we get there through the parasha Pinchas.
Pinchas chronicles the moment right after a shock. Whether
we are Pinchas followers or not…whether we apologize for Pinchas, recreate him,
praise him or just plain vilify him… what
amazes me is the way Torah handles the moment immediately following his gigantic action. The parasha (to me) is a validation of the
roots of Judaism, the real story behind the story, the silent and heart-felt cry whether we hear it or not: I’m speaking of
the cry for loving-kindness.
As for Pinchas himself, sometimes when you’re in the moment
things need to be done. The whole community
might be a certain way and if you know in your heart it’s hurtful you must act on it . It’s that simple. Acting with God isn’t about pointing a finger
though. It’s about seeing beyond the boundaries of time and the quotidian world.
It’s about doing what’s necessary…even if it’s painful… for the sake of not
only love and peace in the moment….but in the paradigm of eternity.
So before we even hear the cry I refer to above we need to
try to understand Pinchas himself. And the way we can do this is to get out of
the box.
Which box, you might ask?The box of rational analysis.
What does this mean?
Are we not rational? Well, the truth is, according to scholars (JPS) the
rational school of thought is only a blip in the history of Judaism. The rabbis of Midrash and Talmud choose to
explain Torah through fanciful stories, symbol, metaphor. If we look at the
fables of Rav Nachman and the Baal Shem Tov, again we are blessed with fantasy
and myth. Not to mention the Zohar, the Bahir and all of the mystics including
Nachmanides.
So instead of looking at Pinchas through rational 21st
century eyes or (or through those of medieval commentators) my choice is to go
with the flow of the greater wave of our tradition (as much as possible) and to
bring the events up a notch to symbol.
Here we go. It’s Baal
Peor. The Israelites are merging with the Midianites and praying to their bull.
There are flowers and candles and
chanting and dancing. They are partying and yes having sex and being primal and
real. It’s cool. It’s in the moment. So
what we can see is that masks are merging, layers are inter-weaving, and the physical
pleasure is immense. But it isn’t soul-action.
It’s body-action. In kaballah we can see it as the merging and strengthening of
the kelipot, these husks that block any
flow and spark. So Baal Peor strengthens
that which hurts us.
I want to get specific though. What is Baal Peor really? Well, given what I’ve studied, it’s a sexual state
of non-soul. Therefore it’s also a
mind-state of deception, lies and fear. The thing about it though is that we really want to know it if we’re in
it. And if we are, we have the responsibility to tell others who are intimately
involved. And to get out fast.
Pinchas stops the disease right at the point of fertility. He stops it with a long sword. He gets it
right at the center of infestation. When
we think of a sword we think of violence and bad people. When we think of death
we think of tragedy. When we think of
how Pinchas did this…right through the groins of two lovers, one Israelite, one
Midianite…we are shocked. This is quite rational and literal of us. We’re being good 21st century
Americans by seeing it that way. But let’s try to see the sword as simply the
precise tool….like the arm of Moses…that breaks open the kelipot and stops the plague. Let’s see death as an
ending not of life but of both life and death
as we see it; and in this case the absolute end of this one plague. Death in Torah certainly does not refer to the
physical body alone! So, imagine… this moment of action by PInchas is a huge
and necessary healing and transformation forced on the whole tribe of Israelites.
And then it’s over as quickly as it began. We
read: And the plague was stopped.
I repeat: And the plagues
was stopped.
What can that moment be like? It must be enormous. It must
create a vacuum of silence, awe, respect or maybe disbelief….like after a
storm. It must really cause us to
reconsider our perspectives, the words we’ve said and most important, our
behavior.
I think I experienced
something like this moment just yesterday.
It was a really hot day. A friend asked me if I wanted to go
to the top of Mt Ashland (about 7,000 feet) and have some wine and bread and
cheese. Why not, I thought. It was Sunday.
I would be teaching the next day. On the way up we talked about two things. First,
his girlfriend. Next my crisis of the
past week; A close friend had threatened me in an email after we had been out
of touch for a good three months. It had blown me away, to put it mildly and I
felt disrespected and blackmailed.
I had already done
the work to push away the angst but there were still remnants of dismay and
disbelief and I was outraged at his
mistrust of me.
My friend in the car (who was already aware of the larger
situation for private reasons) quietly
and quickly said that maybe it wasn’t
blackmail. Maybe he was just really frightened. Maybe he was just threatening
because he felt his own situation had gotten out of control.
One action in the aftermath of the Pinchas
debacle is the organization of the inheritance of the Irsaelites. The
daughters of Tzelefchad approach Moses and make a claim for their inheritance…since
they don’t have a brother. They say that their father wasn’t as bad as
Korach..the rebel…and why does he have to suffer the same punishment….no
inheritance for his children? Rashi says that their father was the man
collecting sticks on Shabbat. He was stoned
to death. Korach on the other hand is
the rebel who gets swallowed into the earth…a much worse fate. In this way..through the sensitivity of women…
Rashi…our rationalist…points out the levels of diseased behavior. It all isn’t cancer
in other words. Some of us just may have a cold or a flu. Should the level of
healing-punishment be the same for each? God says no. The daughters get their
inheritance.
Yes, I thought to myself after my friend spoke, there are
certainly levels of threat and blackmail. But how horrifying that anyone would use one's
obsessive fear to excuse and validate his own mean actions.
Well, we drove real high and had wine and cheese and talked
about a book we were writing and then walked up the road a bit to Dutchman’s Point
and there was this huge mound of snow.
There’s nothing like snow to cool you off after a shocking event. You
can see all the sparks reflected by the sun and it’s like offering after offering, spark after spark rising up.
On that snow mound all we could see were
sparks. Everything else seemed to be in the background.
There was a problem
though. A car on the other side of the snow-mound had just come from an area
called the Applegate and it had taken them two hours on that route and now they
were blocked from continuing on to our town of Ashland.
That’s when my friend had an idea. He got in his mini-van,
backed up as far as he could without going over the edge and attempted to
charge over the snow mound to create tracks for the old car on the other side.
It was a typical action by an ex-hippie still hippie and the girl from the car and
I jumped out of the way. It was a roaring mini van.
Then this is what happened. It got stuck. There we were
stuck in the snow in July on the top of the mountain while trying to help this
other car over that same hurdle. It was
time to stop and breathe.. We didn’t have a choice. We had to stop on this
mound of spark-sacrifices and do the necessary work to release the snow from
under the car. We used big sticks. We
started to be real specific, checking cell phone coverage, finding the jack,
collecting rocks to place under the wheels.
But it was just me and the other
girl…and we weren’t car mechanics…and my friend and the girl’s friend, a man in
his early 20s. And they seemed to know
something but not a lot about cars. This is when a dirt bike headed up the road
from the Applegate. It dodged the snow bank, went on the hard earth above us
then stopped.
You need help, the driver asked?
So now there were five of us. We were all meeting on this same snow hurdle
for different reasons. We were writers and possible college students as well as a rabbinic student and a
medical professional. We were from the east coast and the Midwest, Jewish, Pagan,
Christian. We had come from different places and we’d be heading elsewhere real
soon. We were all the leaders of a million thoughts and souls rising within our
beings moving from the foundation-up. We were all helping each other. It was the
obvious thing to do. We were talking and
laughing. It got hard. We were there for a few hours. But we kept laughing.
And the view was
amazing. Shasta was rising with its ridges in all its white glory like the
soul-renewal of anyone killed by any plague anywhere anytime.
I thought of Moses looking at the land he
couldn’t go to. I imagined finding the Joshua within myself to take on from
where Moses left off. I felt this: If
there was one situation where Moses would hand the reigns to Joshua and the
whole Pinchas event would be assimilated into the universe and the cells within
our bodies would be counted it would be here…on snow bank in July stuck somewhere
between the town of Ashland and the Applegate.
This wasn’t about fear, rather faith. When you’re frightened…this is when you
complain and blame and threaten or
blackmail friends. Well, we finally got the car up and out but the front bumper
fell off. Maybe it’s time for a new
bumper I said. And we all laughed.
My friend was worried on the way home that I would be upset
at him for trying to race his mini-van over a snow mound in July. He seemed scared that I would think that his
mini-van superman routine had not been rational. I really could only thank him.
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