Pinhas
Numbers 25:10-30:1

I have a confession to make.  I am a big fan of motivational literature.  Throughout my life and long before I went to rabbinical school and became a rabbi I had read tons of motivational books, listened to cassette tapes (remember them?) of motivational speakers from Dale Carnegie’s famous “How to Win Friends and Influence People” to Tony Robbins.  What can I say?  I have been a kind of motivational junkie for years, and have loved that sense of excitement and commitment that comes with creating a vision and then throwing myself into it until the vision becomes a reality.

Motivational speakers and writers have been a great gift to me in so many ways throughout my life.  It was almost like having an A-list of personal trainers and mentors to urge me on when life has thrown curves and disappointments, which of course are inevitable for everyone.

When I think back on all those books I have read and lectures I have heard, I realize just how many times I have heard one of those motivational speakers turn to an audience and with as much intensity as possible, say something like, “Passion – that is the key to success in any field.  Follow your passion and you will find fulfillment in your dreams and success in your life.”

Now I must admit I, too, am a big fan of passion.  There is nothing quite like throwing yourself 100% into something you care about, feeling the passion ignite your spirit and inspire you to pass some of that same energy to others.  I have felt it often when delivering a sermon on the high holidays, or leading a young man or woman through a bar or bat mitzvah life transition, or wrapping a couple in a tallit and sharing a powerful moment of blessing with them as they unite their lives in marriage.  So there is no doubt that I come to this week’s Torah portion with a positive bias toward passion.

But then again, there is passion and there is passion.  We who live in a post October 7th world also live in the shadow of a different kind of passion so horrific and destructive that it threatens to destroy our very way of life and perhaps all of Western society as well.  We who witnessed the towers falling on 9/11 or the Hamas horrors of rape and burning families alive followed by the unbelievable vitriol and anti-Jewish hatred spewing from the chants of “pro-Palestinian” attacks on Jewish students and faculty on campuses across the globe know the evil that “passion” in the form of religious extremism can bring.

And we Jews who more than half a century later are still haunted by the death camps of the holocaust, some of us still walking this earth with numbers tattooed upon our arms, unspeakable horrors forever locked in the inner recesses of our souls, we are a people who know intimately what misguided passion can wreak upon innocent human beings.  So reading this week’s Torah portion in which Moses, God, and the sages who wrote the Torah itself reward Pinhas for his religious zealotry and passion looks and feels not a little off color and tainted seen through the lenses of our painful past and fearful present.

Pinhas and his descendants were declared by God to be gifted with the reward of an everlasting priesthood because in his passion to follow what Moses said was God’s word, he killed an Israelite named Zimri and a Midianite woman named Cozbi because they choose to be together publicly as an interfaith couple.  In fact, by driving a spear through both of them in last week’s portion, Pinhas stopped a plague among the Children of Israel that according to the Torah had killed 24,000 people.

Of all the wise words that Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism ever wrote, my favorite idea that Kaplan taught was that the most important challenge of the modern Jews was to learn to take the Torah seriously without having to take it literally.  So I suppose this is one of those Torah stories in particular, where taking it literally will really get you in trouble and it would be much better to see it as some kind of allegory instead.  Even so, in our world of the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism, of Isis and Hamas, the glorification of a religious passion in which one person following what he believes God wants him to do results in the murder of a man and a woman simply because they are from different religions or cultures or beliefs is a lesson I would never want anyone to take to heart today.

A dear friend of ours who is a song writer and actor named Chris Wallace once wrote a song that he taught to children at KI almost 40 years ago when we created our first KI Children’s Talent Show.  It was a song in which the lyrics were almost entirely made up of the word for “peace” in nearly every language on the planet.  I think of that song often and the message that seems to be so overshadowed by war and killing, hatred and fundamentalisms of all kinds.  How simple to realize that every language, every culture, every religious tradition, every people in the world has their own word for peace.  Every time I read a story like that of Pinhas, where religious passion ends in the death of others, I think of how different our world would be if all of us could only embrace the true heart of the other and see the “peace” we all crave at its core.