Thursday, February 21, 2008
![After the plague was over, and the Jewish people were in a recovery mode, God told Moshe Rabbeinu:
“Pinchas, the son of Elazar, the son of Aharon HaKohen, stopped My anger towards the Children of Israel, because he was zealous on My behalf, which prevented Me from destroying them because of jealousy.” (Bamidbar 25:10-11)
God wasn’t just praising Pinchas’ act, He was telling everyone why Pinchas had succeeded against the odds, and why he had been able to take action at a time that even his teachers had not: he had acted completely on behalf of God, not on behalf of himself. If he had felt any personal feelings about what Zimri was doing, he had cast them aside, relating to the crisis from God’s perspective, not his own.
This was not something that Pinchas had learned to do at the moment of the crisis, as the Midrash teaches:
“They were crying at the opening of the Appointed Tent” (Bamidbar 25:6); their hands became weakened at that moment … At the end of the 40 years, as the Jewish people camped by the Jordan river ready to cross over into Eretz Yisroel … they went ahead and acted promiscuously, weakening Moshe and the righteous people with him. “They cried”?! Did Moshe not stand up against 600,000, as it says, “He took the calf which they had made” (Shemos 32:20)? His hands were weakened?! Rather, [Moshe was made to forget the law] in order for Pinchas to take that which he deserved. (Bamidbar Rabbah 20:24)
Deserved? What did he do previously to deserve to be such a hero on behalf of the floundering nation? We only briefly find out about him in Parashas VaAira (Shemos 6:25), and then again at the end of Parashas Balak. Where does it tell us what made Pinchas unique?
In the verse itself, when it traces his lineage back to his grandfather, Aharon HaKohen. As we learn from Ya’akov Avinu, whenever the Torah traces a person’s lineage back to his ancestor, it is to associate his actions with those for which the ancestor became well known (Rashi, Bereishis 49:6). And, if ever there was a zealot on behalf of God, it had been Aharon HaKohen, as the Rambam writes (Yad Chazakah, Hilchos Talmud Torah, 3:1).
Another example of this idea is the Bnos Tzelofchad, who had the merit of being the ones through whom a halachah regarding inheritance was introduced in the Torah:
The daughters of Tzelofchad — the son of Cheifer, the son of Gilad, the son of Machir, the son of Menashe, from the family of Menashe, the son of Yosef … (Bamidbar 27:1)
Why did it have to mention this, since it already says “the son of Menashe”? To tell you that Yosef loved the land, as it says, “Bring my bones up” (Bereishis 50:25), and that his “daughters” also loved the land, as it says, “Give us our possession” (Bamidbar 27:4). (Rashi)
In each case, it was not that the Gadol HaDor lacked or lost the merit to provide the direction at the critical moment in history. Rather, it was that someone else, because of his love of the mitzvah, merited to be the instrument of God at that moment in time. In fact, in each case, Moshe Rabbeinu was “held back” by Heaven to “make room” for the zealot to do his thing, with, as the Talmud explains, his blessing (Sanhedrin 82a), something that is not even necessary when Chillul Hashem is involved.
Today, unfortunately, that is almost always the case, whether we are talking about 80 percent assimilation, 52 percent intermarriage, or, as the prophet said, Jews spread throughout the world with little or no desire to return home. Not to mention a whole list of other issues and crises that Klal Yisroel is grappling with today.
So, you can take your pick; just don’t avoid getting involved. For, as Mordechai told Esther:
“Do not imagine that you will be able to escape in the king’s palace any more than the rest of the Jews. For if you continue to remain silent at a time like this, relief and salvation will come to the Jews from another place, while you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether it was for such a time as this that you attained the royal position!” (Esther 4:13)
Or, whatever position of influence we may have achieved in our own worlds.](3205BCBE-E0F0-4B11-B68F-756D0FB2D055_files/shapeimage_2.png)
