Torah Posting: פינחס
Our parashah break last week happened in a jarring place. The awesome but distant view of the people as seen and blessed by the strange wizard Bil’am was contrasted with an ugly scene of idolatrous fraternization with the local deity cults, punished rather viciously by Pinhas, son of the high priest, El’azar: He ran through an Israelite man and the Midyanite woman with whom he was fraternizing with a spear.
This week’s parashah, named after Pinhas, begins by celebrating him for this act. God tells Mosheh that Pinhas’ action spared the people God’s wrath, and God reinforces the eternal paternal lineage of the priesthood through him for it.
The people Pinhas killed are then named and shamed at the tribal level, just to be sure.
Then things take an even harder turn, as God tells Mosheh to conquer the Midyanites for all this seduction and trickery, even though Mosheh has married into their people and learned much of his stabilizing wisdom from them.
To me, it seems like things are starting to get a little out of hand.
After the plague sent to punish the idolatry and fraternization clears up, God calls for another census of men of fighting age. A litany of lineages is given. The rebellion of Korah is briefly recounted when we get to those lineages, with an interesting passage that commentators take to mean that Korah’s direct descendants — as opposed to those of Datan and Aviram, who joined his rebellion of their own accord — had some second thoughts about the whole thing, and so while they went down into the underworld with everyone else, some kind of protective barrier was built around them, so that rather than die, they could sort of live down there. Is that better? Apparently so.
Anyway, many, many lineages are recounted. Just because I don’t spend time on it here doesn’t mean I don’t consider it valuable or worth reading. When I read it, I let the names and relationships wash over me, feeling out the contours of my ancestry like a place, learning its terrain. These sections are also useful and timeless repositories of names, which one might wish to choose for a child and thus continue the lineage. The bottom line is that the current count of fighting-age men stands at 601,730.
Then God instructs Mosheh to apportion the land in shares according to these tribal proportions. The size of the shares will be determined by the size of the families, but the specific allotment will be chosen by lot.
After these instructions, the lineages of the tribe of Levi are given, since that tribe is designated for Temple service and does not get land holdings. The males of Levi — this time from one month old and up — are also counted: 23,000.
At the end of this census, the text clarifies that none of these people counted were in the original census near Sinai, because God condemned them to die in the wilderness for their impudence, all except Kalev and Yehoshu’a, who faithfully assisted Mosheh.
Look, I agree this parashah is a bit of a letdown after last week’s wizard stories, but now comes a good part. This is maybe one of the only truly feminist legal cases in the Torah, but it’s actually quite substantive, so I feel it’s important to spend time on. It’s time to meet the daughters of Tzelofehad.
Tzelofehad was a man from the tribe of Menasheh who died in the wilderness, but not for any big reason. He left behind five daughters: Mahlah, No’a, Hoglah, Milkah, and Tirtzah. One day, they come before Mosheh, El’azar, and all the chieftains and elders to plead their case.
When their father died, he left no sons. He was not part of Korah’s rebellion; he did not deserve punishment. The daughters ask the leadership for a landholding amongst the tribe of Menasheh, so their father’s name need not be lost just because he had no son.
I think, if you could ask the average liberal-flavored secular Westerner with a passing familiarity with “Abrahamic Religions™” to articulate what the Torah’s view on gender roles and family was, they would describe an uncomplicated one: male descent is all that matters, and all inheritances go to male children. If you asked them when in history that conception might have been complicated or challenged, I think they would expect it to happen later, after various kinds of philosophical and cosmopolitan historical developments. I know this is a straw man, but I just have a feeling people might find it surprising that it’s actually in the Torah where this cultural norm gets at least an opening challenge.
This is one of the most interesting moral jobs the Torah does. It’s an ancient marker of moral progress. It lionizes actions that still might seem barbaric to our contemporary view, but if you look closer, it’s often making a big, demonstrative point out of imposing limits on the barbarity: giving basic rights to slaves and foreigners, drawing lines at specific acts of merciless violence, those sorts of things. I just think it’s worth considering that even things that seem backwards now could have been progressive for their time, and that perhaps the eternal value in such a thing is that progress itself is part of the tradition.
Anyway, let’s see how the Torah does with granting property to these women.
Mosheh takes their case to God, and God says their plea is just; Mosheh should transfer their father’s holdings to them. Furthermore, make it a law: If a householder dies without leaving a son, his property shall be transferred to his daughter. If he has no daughter, it goes to his brothers. If he has no brothers, it goes to his father’s brothers. If his father has no brothers, it goes to the nearest relative in his own clan.
So there you have it. It’s still all men further down the food chain, and the son is still first in line, but the provision is there and clear: Daughters may own property, and now these five daughters of Tzelofehad do. I wish we could read more of their story and hear how they fared as leaders of a family, and how their family revered its five matriarchs on down the generations.
Mosheh’s story takes a pretty dramatic turn here, which feels like an emphasis on the importance of the case preceding it. God tells Mosheh to go up to the heights of ’Avarim, where the people are now, and view the land from above. “Once you have seen it,” God says, “You shall be gathered to your kin, just as your brother, Aharon, was.” And God reminds him specifically of why he will not be allowed to enter the land: because, out of frustration with the people, he struck the rock in the wilderness of Tzin to produce water, when God had only commanded him to speak to it.
Now, there’s still a good bit of Torah left. Mosheh is not going to die right now. But God has officially initiated the epilogue of Mosheh’s life. It’s time to think about what happens to the people after Mosheh dies.
Mosheh replies to God in beautiful language, asking God to name a successor for Mosheh, so that God’s people may not be like sheep who have no shepherd. God immediately replies that Yehoshu’a, son of Nun, who has proven himself a faithful assistant to Mosheh, will be the one, and Mosheh is to bless him before the high priest and the whole community, investing him with authority. And to seal the deal, El’azar the high priest is to consult the urim — the mysterious divination tools built into his priestly garments — to show that this transition is God’s will.
As God commanded Mosheh, so it is done. Yehoshu’a is ordained as Mosheh’s successor.
With this done, it is time for some good old ritual law. The daily burnt offerings are commanded at their specific times, morning and twilight, and their ingredients and procedures are delineated, with extra offerings for Shabbat, New Moons, and the other festivals and holy days. This forms the backbone of daily Jewish practice until today, with heroic rabbinic effort exerted to convert these offerings into prayer services that are appropriate to times and places where the Temple does not stand.
We have already learned these rituals, but they are restated here in complete detail. This is what it takes to transmit a responsibility as great as Mosheh has for this people to another generation of leaders.
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