וירא פינחס בן אלעזר בן אהרון הכהן ויקם מתוך העדה ויקח רמח בידו
פינחס the son of אלעזר, son of אהרון הכהן saw, and he stood up from amid the assembly and took a spear in his hand…
At the end of this week’s פרשה, the בני ישראל (once again) sin towards ה' by taking for themselves the daughters of מואב (which eventually brought them to idolatry). This problem reached its pinnacle when זמרי, the head of שבט שמאון, took for himself a מואבי princess, brought her into the camp, and began to have relations with her in public. This was s Jewish leader! People looked up to him! This could have, and almost did DESTROY THE JEWS!! ה', angered by this, sent a plague that was going to kill the nation.
פינחס, seeing what was happening, ran to משה to ask what he could do. רש''י says over here, that פינחס came to משה and said “you were the one who told me that there is a הלכה that if there is a person having relations with a non-Jew, another person who is jealous (angry) in the name of ה' can go and kill him. [WARNING SPOILER ALERT] As we all know from next week’s פרשה, the answer משה gave was “yes”.
What does this mean!? Ok so first of all, this Dvar Torah is in NO WAY promoting going out and killing people who intermarry. I’m not some crazy guy preaching mass homicide. This whole idea is really hard to understand. However, we do need to know that, in our times, we have NO IDEA what it really means to be on level of holiness and care for ה' that פינחס was on. We can’t fully understand what it really means to be “jealous” for the sake of ה'. But I would like to see if we can get an idea of what it means.
In order to try to figure this out I would like to make a comparison. Parents. Parents may be the best example of this kind of jealousy or anger. How? Here is an example: a child comes home from school one day, he is crying, and has a black eye because the bully beat him up. To make it worse he got pushed into a locker and everyone was laughing at him. How does this child feel? He feels sad, depressed, his self-esteem is shot. Basically the child is just hurt. So the parent of this child gets angry, and in a way jealous. Parents care about their children and are very closely connected to them. When something happens to the child, the parent feels it. The parents become jealous of the time when that child was happy. It is not the type of jealousy that we think of. This parent isn’t trying to take anything away from anyone, they just want so badly for their child to be happy.
ה' was watching His nation destroy itself. He was angry, sad, and hurt by what they were doing. פינחס understood this. All that פינחס wanted was for ה' to be happy and treated with the respect that He deserves. The Jews were destroying that relationship with ה'. It was like פינחס watching the children of the nation that he loved all leave the Derech. So, פינחס got jealous. Jealous about the time when they were happy with all that ה' did for them. Therefore, in order to save the nation פינחס was allowed to kill זמרי and in turn stop the plague from killing everyone.
Have a Great Shabbos
Yoni Spigelman
