This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored by David Landman.
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Hello? Mr. Burns? This is your mother… Son, this is your mother, Mrs. Burns.
—Homer Simpson in The Simpsons (season 7, episode 17, “Homer the Smithers”)
We hope that whoever is on the other end of our telephone line is the caller they claim to be. We hope that when we read a note from someone, the alleged author is the true writer. We hope that the news that gets reported to us is all factual. However, in an age marked by deceit and division, fact-checking proves hard.
Despite how many research tools we have now, humanity has found a new sparring partner in artificial intelligence, which powers all too many bots to spread lies on the World Wide Web and lacks any ethical consciousness. It has taken only a few programmers with perverse intentions to flood the so-called ‘information superhighway’ with unbearable fraudulence. We may be advanced in many ways, but we inevitably grapple with a very basic uncertainty: How can we know when a terrible developing story today ought either to unsettle us or to be treated as mere hogwash?
Long before the mechanical revolution, our ancestors routinely asked this very same question. When faced with conflicting stories, our ancestors typically did not filter false representations of the Divine and preserving only the authentic expressions of God’s will. They would preserve multiple stories and allow us to gravitate to the ideas that most moved us. Our spiritual forebears therefore handed to us a Torah that tells us that, in Noah’s lifetime, God flooded the earth for exactly 40 days and nights (Genesis 7:4, 7:12, 7:17, and 8:16) and that this same flood lasted most of the months in a single year (Genesis 8:2–5).
Neither version of the flood story is necessarily the morally superior; each reflects a different narrative tradition, now smudged together with the other. But some pieces of the Torah that do not neatly fit together pose higher stakes for us. Could it be that the same God who allegedly commanded us to commit genocidal acts against the ancient people Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17–19) also taught us to love the strangers in our midst (Deuteronomy 10:19)? Did the greatest scribes of our tradition get one of these right and one of these wrong?
This Shabbat, Jews around the world will be reading God’s command to Moses to exact retribution against the Midianite people (Numbers 31:2). God had in fact informed Moses earlier in the Torah that it would be the responsibility of the Israelites to strike the Midianites; it was, after all, those very Midianites who had tricked Israelite men into committing idolatrous acts (Numbers 25:16–19, referencing Numbers 25:1–9). As the events unfold in this week’s reading, Moses will dutifully tell the Israelites to assemble for this anti-Midianite mission (Numbers 31:4)—1,000 Israelites from each tribe (Numbers 31:4–5). After bringing to Moses and the priest El’azar the Midianite women, children, and other ‘possessions,’ Moses would clarify that only young women who had never engaged in intercourse with a man would be granted clemency amidst the massacre taking place (Numbers 31:17–18). Those wondering what the fates of these exempted women would be will not find their answer in the Torah itself. Instead, the Torah abruptly turns its attention away from the details of how the Israelites would desacralize the legacy of the Midianites. In a pietistic turn, the Torah subsequently records laws pertaining to such ritual matters as the purification of the people and cloths that had come into contact with death (Numbers 31:19–24); and levies to be paid to God, to the priesthood, and to the general Israelite population (Numbers 31:25–47).
As Rabbi Dr. Jacob Milgrom (1923–2010), citing the biblical scholar J. de Vaulx, notes—the 12,000-strong force massacring the Midianites (Numbers 31:4–5) is equal in number to the Israelite military that would eventually engage in battle against the tribe of Benjamin (Judges 20:2–21:23, and especially 21:10). As Milgrom and de Vaulx note—as was the case in the fighting against the Midianites—when battling against the Benjaminites of Yavesh-Gil’ad, the Israelites came to exempt from their killing only one category of person: young women who had never engaged in intercourse with a man (Judges 21:10–11, compared with Numbers 31:17–18). Anyone with any editorial input for the Book of Judges, which ends only a few words after the narration of this civil war, made very clear their moral evaluation of this terrible violence: “אִ֛ישׁ הַיָּשָׁ֥ר בְּעֵינָ֖יו יַעֲשֶֽׂה׃” (ish hayyashar be’eynav ya’aseh, “each person would do what was right in their own eyes”)—but not necessarily what was right in the eyes of God.
Could the Israelites’ invasion of Benjaminite territories have been reprehensible in God’s opinion if God had also commanded the destruction of the Midianites? Were the Midianites all that much more depraved than the Benjaminites, who had been responsible for the brutal abuse and murder of a certain Levite’s concubine in Judges 19? Did God judge the few bad apples among the Benjaminites to be better off than the whole of the Midianite people in light of the (supposedly) many (or totality of) Midiniate women, who had turned Israelite men towards idol worship? These are all possibilities, but none are truly satisfying. Those of us seeking an actual lesson in Jewish ethics should worry about any line of logic that justifies genocide or anything so resembling genocide.
Rabbi Milgrom suggested that we would do well to consider how this war against Midian seems “unhistorical.” A genocide against the Midianites must have been unsuccessful—and unreal—because the Midianites reappear later in the Hebrew Bible (in Judges 6–8 for instance). Milgrom also cast his doubts about the historicity here because the spoils of the war add up to “astronomical quantities.” In fact, Milgrom followed the thinking of de Vaulx, who had suggested that the war on the Midianites was a later entry into the Torah and a ‘midrash’ on the civil war against the Benjaminites in Judges. As a midrash, it was the job of the author of Numbers 31 to compose a narrative that shares much in common with Judges 19–21 but allows the author to expand. And the author did expand—appending to this tale of warfare a variety of laws about purity and levies that would be of special interest to those descended from the Israelite priesthood (Milgrom, p. 490).
Yet, there is a real human factor that scholars seem to overlook when understanding how the travesty of attacking the Midianites could have come to be—in fact or in fiction. The God whose spirit summoned the author of Leviticus 19:17 to teach in God’s voice “הוֹכֵ֤חַ תּוֹכִ֙יחַ֙ אֶת־עֲמִיתֶ֔ךָ” (hokhe’ach tokhi’ach et amittekha, “You shall rebuke thoroughly your peer”) must have believed in the power of words rather than the power of might. Nonetheless, in Numbers 25:1–9, Pinechas—the grandson of Aaron the first High Priest—committed a violent act of religious zealotry as he took a spear to an Israelite consorting with a Midianite woman. Jewish scribes, for more than a millennium, have made sure that their Torah scrolls very clearly break apart the letter Vav (ו) in the word שלום (shalom, “peace”). This brokenness describes the covenant God forged with Pinechas after his act of bloodthirst (Numbers 25:12); Jewish wisdom has long suspected that Pinechas was no model for how to make peace in whole. (See “Fixing the Broken Peace.”)
Pinechas seems to be everywhere when we read what leads up to our Torah reading. Not only did he spearhead (bad pun) the war against Midian, but he even joined the military band of 12,000 as “הַכֹּהֵן֙ לַצָּבָ֔א” (hakkohen latzava, “the priest for the army”), accompanied by sacred objects and trumpets—but serving no other clear role. If we could say that he brought fanfare to the warfare, we must also recognize how oddly the civil war against the Benjaminites came about “during those days” (“בַּיָּמִ֣ים הָהֵם֮,” bayyamim hahem), when Pinechas evidently stood in front of the Ark of the Covenant and communed with God (Judges 20:28).
With Pinechas acting on behalf of God in these three cases of religious violence, is it possible that the voice of God we have recorded in our Torah reading this week came from an outlying school of Pinechas-admiring zealots? Pinechas, described as “עֹמֵ֣ד ׀ לְפָנָ֗יו” (“standing in front of that [God or Ark of the Covenant]”), perhaps stood in the way of an entire people’s direct access to God. Pinechas spoke for God, and the God of his own yearnings may have given lip-service to peace while practicing a Torah of retribution—not a Torah of peace, love, or necessarily even truth.
Commenting on Numbers 31:6’s somewhat surprising mention of Pinechas, the Ukrainian Rabbi Me’ir Leibush ben Yechi’el Mikhel Wisser (1809–1879) wrote that “פה פינחס שקול כנגד כולם” (“the mouth of Pinechas was equal in weight to all of those [Israelites combined]”). Although Rabbi Wisser (also known by his Hebrew acronym, MaLBYM [מלבי״ם]) may have meant this as praise for Pinechas’ charisma, the same words can be read as insulting Pinechas’ being a loudmouth, and a dangerous one at that. He thought he knew the truth—so much so that he would murder to demonstrate it. Not only would he murder, but he would massacre. And not only would he massacre, but he would claim it was for a religious purpose. But was it?
We are lucky that the Torah is not a history book—because the blemish of Numbers 31 would make for a harder coexistence. We do not know whether or not Pinechas spoke for God, or at least for a God whom Pinechas really believed he heard or understood. We truly cannot check these facts. But we can check our guts, our souls, our stomachs, and our hearts. If we are sincere in our beliefs and morally attuned to a universe that needs greater lovingkindness, we will be bold enough to say that religious violence is hardly religious at all. When we read the historically false words of Numbers 31—evidently inserted to teach hypothetical laws of purity and priestly levies in warfare—we are grateful for our ability to remember how far we have come and how immensely we have grown in holiness, far from the sacrilege of Pinechas.
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