(no subject)
Jul. 8th, 2018 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretWe were talking about Pinchas at Shabbos lunch yesterday. The paradox of Pinchas is that he performs an act of violence and is rewarded by God with a Brit Shalom- a covenant of peace. How do you reconcile?
My host argued that the point was that the violence of Pinchas was minimal and justified. The lashon of the story is וַיַּרְא, פִּינְחָס and then וַיָּקָם מִתּוֹךְ הָעֵדָה, and only then וַיִּקַּח רֹמַח. First he examined the situation from a distance, then he entered into the situation, and only then, after he had considered all other options, did he raise his spear. The קַנְא of Pinchas is read as this careful, measured thing done in service of Hashem. The message of the story of Pinchas according to him is that violence is appropriate, but only rarely and only when one is completely certain that it's done al Kiddush Hashem. And then he transitioned to thinking about other ways we can be considerate of Kiddush Hashem, how in our daily lives violence isn't the appropriate method, but there are always opportunities in front of us to sanctify God's name.
Meanwhile I recently acquired a book of Divrei Torah organized by parsha from Rabbi Steinsaltz, and I've been trying to read the appropriate one each week on Friday night. R' Steinsaltz's d'var Torah on Pinchas is a different take on the question of קַנְא. Of course R' Steinsaltz is a genius and his drashes are always so precise that I worry I misconstrue them. Which is why I'm writing this, to work through what he says and make sure I understand it.
R' Steinsaltz's first point is that in the notion of priesthood in the Torah and commentaries there seems to constantly be this entanglement of violence and peace. Aaron haKohen is frequently associated with the virtue of rodef shalom, and the disciples of Aaron are said to walk in the ways of peace, yet Pinchas is granted this eternal priesthood for his killing of Zimri and Cozbi, and more fundamentally, what exactly is it that priests do all day? They slaughter animals and offer the blood and body to God.
And then he looks at Eliyahu HaNavi, who Midrash spiritually or perhaps allegorically associates with Pinchas. In the prophetic writings, Eliyahu is always seen as an emissary of peace, performing acts of kindness and foretelling the days of Moshiach. Yet if you read Melachim, that's hardly who Eliyahu is- he kills people left and right. How do we understand this dual nature of Pinchas and Eliyahu and of service to Hashem in general?
This is where I get a little confused. I thiiink what R' Steinsaltz is saying is that קַנְא represents a devoted, passionate love for God, and that Pinchas and Eliyahu felt this קַנְא at all times, but that it manifested differently in different moments. Most of the time, the crazy passionate love that Pinchas felt for God was represented in devoted worship of God, in rodef shalom, but when it was threatened, it struck out with violence. But really both are sides of the same coin.
In a past post about Shir Hashirim, I wrote about how the metaphor about God's love for Israel relating to a person's love for their lover operates both ways in Jewish tradition. We examine how we interact with God and learn lessons about how to treat our lovers, and we examine our relationships with our lovers and learn how to treat our relationship with God. But I'm uncomfortable with how R' Steinsaltz extends the metaphor to Pinchas's קַנְא, his jealousy for his threatened relationship with God.
There is an even higher spiritual level: the level of kin'a. One who is truly zealous not only loves something but cannot bear the fact that others can possess it as well. This desire for exclusiveness can sometimes reach a state where one cannot love two things at once.
I can sort of following applying this notion of קַנְא to the relationship between God and Israel, but... when you apply it to a human romantic relationship, and link it to the context of Pinchas's violent zealotry in defense of Israel's relationship with God, it seems irreparably toxic. And I don't just mean in terms of the expressed violence, but the inherent possessiveness of this theme is at odds with a lot of other Torah ideals of love as a partnership.
I'm not sure how to deal with this. I think you have to keep it safely in the realm of metaphor and use it to think about confronting strong emotions. Your love might be so all-consuming that it provokes you to feelings of violent jealousy, and that can be a real and powerful form of love, but that doesn't mean you should actually target violence to the subject of your jealousy. You should channel that passion back into a brit shalom, because that too is a form of קַנְא.
Maybe that works? Maybe I'm misunderstanding R' Steinsaltz's point. Maybe R' Steinsaltz, genius and tzadik that he is, is living in a misogynistic society and sometimes enacts patriarchal ideals of love that are at least potentially damaging to women. *shrug*
My host argued that the point was that the violence of Pinchas was minimal and justified. The lashon of the story is וַיַּרְא, פִּינְחָס and then וַיָּקָם מִתּוֹךְ הָעֵדָה, and only then וַיִּקַּח רֹמַח. First he examined the situation from a distance, then he entered into the situation, and only then, after he had considered all other options, did he raise his spear. The קַנְא of Pinchas is read as this careful, measured thing done in service of Hashem. The message of the story of Pinchas according to him is that violence is appropriate, but only rarely and only when one is completely certain that it's done al Kiddush Hashem. And then he transitioned to thinking about other ways we can be considerate of Kiddush Hashem, how in our daily lives violence isn't the appropriate method, but there are always opportunities in front of us to sanctify God's name.
Meanwhile I recently acquired a book of Divrei Torah organized by parsha from Rabbi Steinsaltz, and I've been trying to read the appropriate one each week on Friday night. R' Steinsaltz's d'var Torah on Pinchas is a different take on the question of קַנְא. Of course R' Steinsaltz is a genius and his drashes are always so precise that I worry I misconstrue them. Which is why I'm writing this, to work through what he says and make sure I understand it.
R' Steinsaltz's first point is that in the notion of priesthood in the Torah and commentaries there seems to constantly be this entanglement of violence and peace. Aaron haKohen is frequently associated with the virtue of rodef shalom, and the disciples of Aaron are said to walk in the ways of peace, yet Pinchas is granted this eternal priesthood for his killing of Zimri and Cozbi, and more fundamentally, what exactly is it that priests do all day? They slaughter animals and offer the blood and body to God.
And then he looks at Eliyahu HaNavi, who Midrash spiritually or perhaps allegorically associates with Pinchas. In the prophetic writings, Eliyahu is always seen as an emissary of peace, performing acts of kindness and foretelling the days of Moshiach. Yet if you read Melachim, that's hardly who Eliyahu is- he kills people left and right. How do we understand this dual nature of Pinchas and Eliyahu and of service to Hashem in general?
This is where I get a little confused. I thiiink what R' Steinsaltz is saying is that קַנְא represents a devoted, passionate love for God, and that Pinchas and Eliyahu felt this קַנְא at all times, but that it manifested differently in different moments. Most of the time, the crazy passionate love that Pinchas felt for God was represented in devoted worship of God, in rodef shalom, but when it was threatened, it struck out with violence. But really both are sides of the same coin.
In a past post about Shir Hashirim, I wrote about how the metaphor about God's love for Israel relating to a person's love for their lover operates both ways in Jewish tradition. We examine how we interact with God and learn lessons about how to treat our lovers, and we examine our relationships with our lovers and learn how to treat our relationship with God. But I'm uncomfortable with how R' Steinsaltz extends the metaphor to Pinchas's קַנְא, his jealousy for his threatened relationship with God.
There is an even higher spiritual level: the level of kin'a. One who is truly zealous not only loves something but cannot bear the fact that others can possess it as well. This desire for exclusiveness can sometimes reach a state where one cannot love two things at once.
I can sort of following applying this notion of קַנְא to the relationship between God and Israel, but... when you apply it to a human romantic relationship, and link it to the context of Pinchas's violent zealotry in defense of Israel's relationship with God, it seems irreparably toxic. And I don't just mean in terms of the expressed violence, but the inherent possessiveness of this theme is at odds with a lot of other Torah ideals of love as a partnership.
I'm not sure how to deal with this. I think you have to keep it safely in the realm of metaphor and use it to think about confronting strong emotions. Your love might be so all-consuming that it provokes you to feelings of violent jealousy, and that can be a real and powerful form of love, but that doesn't mean you should actually target violence to the subject of your jealousy. You should channel that passion back into a brit shalom, because that too is a form of קַנְא.
Maybe that works? Maybe I'm misunderstanding R' Steinsaltz's point. Maybe R' Steinsaltz, genius and tzadik that he is, is living in a misogynistic society and sometimes enacts patriarchal ideals of love that are at least potentially damaging to women. *shrug*
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-09 08:58 pm (UTC)Or maybe that two-way jealousy does happen in corporate situations, sort of. I'm thinking of contexts where religious differences prevent people from acknowledging that they might be worshipping the same God as the Other, or that the Other might also be worshipping correctly and being equally pleasing and approved of (despite the differences). But that seems maybe a little universalist to have been intended in the original context.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-09 09:16 pm (UTC)I do want to say that I deliberately used the Hebrew קַנְא rather than an English word most of the time because I think it's a tricky word to translate, and that it often clearly does not mean 'jealousy'. A lot of the times when it's traditionally translated as 'jealousy', I don't think it's an entirely accurate translation. R' Steinsaltz's translators use 'zealotry' more often than 'jealousy', and I feel like 'passionate' might be a more versatile translation.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-10 02:39 pm (UTC)It's a thing I keep running into, that translating these sacred texts into English and the European/"Western" worldview has been where an awful lot of things seem to go haywire in Christianity (or where things were set up for disaster later). The wages of antisemitism, I guess -- you're never going to really understand the text if you kill off, drive out, or exclude the people who could best explain it to you.