PINCHAS

Jul 2

Pinchas (Numbers 25:10-30:1) is a hodgepodge parsha. It begins with the conclusion to the story of Pinchas where he is granted “a covenant of eternal priesthood” (25:13). Why the editors separated this from the previous parsha seems odds to me. Chapter 26 is another census that is done by who our ancestors could muster for their army (26:2) but is actually about who gets how much land (26:52-56). We then find out that all of the old generation has died out (somehow 40 years have passed (26:65). There’s an interlude where the daughters of Zelophehad successfully plead their case for inheritance in the absence of any brothers. We then learn that Moses will see the Promised Land but not enter it (27:12-14). His response, as I discuss below, is not to question YHVH’s judgment, but to request that YHVH appoint a successor ((27:16-18). Joshua is anointed as Moses’ successor. Lastly we have a recounting of which holidays should be celebrated, starting with Shabbat, including Pesach, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, the biggest party of all with by far the greatest amount of sacrifices. I discuss this in more detail below.

I want to discuss four themes.

How should we understand the claims for eternality?
Who owns land?
What does it mean to be an elder?
Chapter 29 presents the Holidays without any historical and not much theological meaning.

I want to explore the theme of eternality by offering two pairs of contrasts. One is between eternality and impermanence. Our other pair is the contrast between the idea of eternality and long lasting.

YHVH rewards Pinchas for his murder of the mixed nationality couple. “Here, I am giving him my covenant of peace, and it shall be his, and his seed’s after him, a covenant of eternal priesthood because he was jealous for his God and he made atonement for the children of Israel.” (26:12-13). We’ve seen a lot of text about how this or that shall be an eternal law for the Israelites. There are many practices from the Hebrew Bible that we still follow today. We still eat unleavened bread for Pesach, have Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah with a shofar, Yom Kippur with fasting. There are also many practices that we no longer follow. There’s no high priesthood, we don’t stone adulterous women or people who gather firewood on Shabbat, we don’t murder people who marry outside the tribe or disavow people who pursue other spiritualities etc.

The priestly instinct in the Hebrew Bible, it seems to me, really, really, really wants to make permanent its practices and world views. Is this even possible?

Both Buddhist philosophy and Greek thought with Heraclitus insist on the impossibility of permanence or eternality. Both are close in time to when our text was edited, about 2,500 years ago. They both insist, in modern language, that the only constant is change. They deny the very possibility of a divine being who does not change. For the Greeks, the Gods are born and die, just on a different time frame than humans—just as Redwood trees or rocks have an unimaginably long life span from a human perspective, and just as we humans have an unimaginably long time span from the perspective of a fly. My father, of blessed memory, used to tell the joke that one fly says to another “If only I knew this morning what I know now this afternoon.” The core Animist insight is that there are no beings on a different ontological plane than other beings, just that we are differently bodied and therefore have different perspectives, interests, talents.

To live from a view of the impermanence of all things seems to be really difficult. Indeed the Buddha himself after offering the philosophy of impermanence as his first noble truth, then promptly prescribed an eternal and universal way out of the suffering caused by impermanence with his eightfold path.

Alternatively, we could focus instead on things that endure in contrast to things that are relatively transient. To focus on things that endure is a key part of being grounded in anything. It matters in terms of being grounded that I recite the exact words that Balaam prophesied more than 2,500 years ago or that I can read Heraclitus and engage with this thought. It’s different than engaging with who won the latest reality TV show. Further, the specifics of what has persisted are important because it is how we are connected—that connection needs to be grounded in specific, and often sensory things (Matzah is a sensory experience for instance). It’s really hard to be connected to something abstract or non specific.

However to believe that any of these specifics cannot change is a form of self delusion that is deep within our tradition. Matzah is not eternal, even if it is enduring. The priesthood is neither eternal nor enduring. YHVH, Asherah etc are not eternal if you are an Animist, though they are enduring. All beings are born, and all beings die.

Is there anything that is permanent? What are the implications of really being committed to the idea that there is nothing permanent? What, in your experience, endures that helps you be grounded? What kind of things seem transient to you?

The question of land ownership is behind a legal puzzle in our parsha. Zelophehad dies without any sons, but four daughters. So who inherits the land—the daughters or the dead father’s brothers? But let’s back up and take a look at land ownership in general, before we see how this plays out in our parsha.

In gathering-hunting societies (I put gathering first because most of the calories actually came from the gathering activity of the women, rather than the hunting of the men), personal or family land ownership made no sense. Tribes had the use of certain land, and they certainly had to occasionally fight other tribes for the right to use that land, but land use was a collective tribal right. Further, settlements were always temporary and the people always moved, even if only a few times a year, because of the limited capacity to forage and hunt in a given area. There’s personal property, but it is limited to possessions such as bows, bowls, furs and the like.

The advent of agriculture makes family or individual land ownership possible. Permanent villages become possible because of the concentration of calories per acre possible in farming is much greater than in gathering/hunting. Corn doesn’t run away from you the way deer do and you can grow a lot of corn and store it without moving. Land ownership could be individual, collective or some kind of combination. Importantly, land could now be inherited in a way that hadn’t been possible before.

The biblical conception of land ownership has three important features in our consideration. The first is that all land belongs to YHVH. It’s leased to the people on a long term basis, and only if they obey his wishes, lest the land disown them and exile them, as we repeatedly read. Second, the land is granted to families who can temporarily sell it to someone else, but it still reverts to them come the Jubilee year—so more like a long term rental than an actual sale with the right to sublease the property to a third party. Third, this land ownership is granted to someone because they are part of a given tribe. The purpose of the census of Chapter 26 is to allocate land, since land is allocated by the population of the tribe. (26:52-4)

The Biblical concept of land ownership and the pre agricultural concept are wildly different than the commodity approach that is characteristic of our world where land is no different than owning gold, a stock or anything else that can be bought or sold. Land, in our world, is a thing. Yet, as aboriginal Australian thought teaches, it seems to me that our entire character was once upon a time shaped by the land that we inhabited. But we don’t actually inhabit land anymore—too often we just happen to live someplace; we aren’t really part of the land. We have mostly lost the ability to know ourselves as part of the land. This is a core part of our alienation from the more than human world.

I have found in my life that I am a different person in different landscapes. I was a different person in New Mexico because of the barrenness of the land that let me see the barrenness of my soul. I’m a different person in a city than I am in the country.

Now, let’s go back to Zelophehad’s daughters, a text which is often raised as a feminist example. The question facing Moses is who inherits Zelophedad’s share of the land—his daughters or his brothers. This is a hugely important question because land cannot be permanently alienated in the ancient Hebrew system of ownership; it was supposed to revert back to its original owner upon the arrival of the Jubilee year. So if Zelophehad’s brothers inherit the land instead of his daughters, Zelophehad’s name disappears from control of land, and thus his lineage would be lost. That is what is at stake. Zelophehad’s daughters appeal on this basis, and not on any feminist claim that women are equal to men. “Why should our father’s name be subtracted from among his family because he didn’t have a son? (27:4). Moses is stumped by the question, so he brings it to YHVH who rules in favor of the daughters. (27:7-11)

Do you think of land as something you can possess, akin to an automobile or any material object? To what extent does the physical characteristics of where you live shape who you are? Are you different in different landscapes? What are the implications of tribal land ownership compared to individual land ownership?

Elders, to my mind, have two fundamental responsibilities. The first is to assure a smooth transition of leadership for the good of the tribe as we inevitably age and die. The second is to share our accumulated wisdom with the younger, active leaders in our tribes. My working assumption is that the work of a society is done by the adults in the society. Plotkin believes that one of the hallmarks of becoming an elder is a change in focus from the work of the tribe in connection to the more than human world to a focus on the broader cosmos as a whole. I tend not to agree with him, but I don’t think of myself as an elder yet, so we’ll see.

Leadership transitions should take place before we die. When I see 80 year olds holding onto work roles that I think should belong to adults, rather than elders, my instinct is to think that here we have a failure of psychospiritual maturation. Joe Biden, to use an example should not be president—his holding on is a sign of psychospiritual immaturity (this obviously isn’t to say Trump should be president, a man who has the emotional maturity of your average toddler).

I want to be clear that being an elder doesn’t mean that all you are allowed to do is travel or play golf or somehow pursue pleasure as if you were a 70 year old adolescent.

Let’s take a look at the leadership transition that is laid out in this parsha. YHVH informs Moses that he will die after seeing but not entering the promised land (27:12-13). Moses responds, not by complaining that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime of rebellion against YHVH when he struck the rock at the wilderness of Zin, but by saying “Let YHVH, God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation…so YHVH’s congregation won’t be like sheep that don’t have a shepherd.” (27:16-17) So who should this be? What’s the qualification? How much preparation have they had to rule an unruly people who have fought Moses every long step of the way for 40 years?

YHVH says take Joshua. What do we know about Joshua? As far as we know, he has been Moses’ aide and was one of the two scouts who trusted in YHVH when he scouted Canaan. He was also jealous for Moses when some of the tribal leaders continued to prophesy. That’s it.

The transition of leadership is that, in front of all the people, Moses lays his hand on Joshua (the Biblical way of transferring power or ownership, as we saw in sacrifices), the high priest reads the divination from the Urim and Thummim to get divine sanction, and that’s it.

I sit on a board of a small Jewish day school and we put more effort into choosing our new Head of School than this. I co own a business where we recently replaced me as the executive director, and we put more effort than this into choosing my replacement. Maybe, you can say that they aren’t really changing leaders because YHVH is the true leader. But ensuring a successful transition is as important as it comes, and boy, this feels lacking.

If you are an elder, how are you working on the two tasks of transitioning your leadership in your life to younger adults and sharing your accumulated wisdom? If you are a younger person, do you have elders in your life who are training you to take over for them or be your own kind of leader?

We are given a radically stripped down version of our holidays in Chapters 28 and 29. What has been stripped out is all of the historical and most of the theological meaning of the Holidays. These meanings are what we tend to focus on today. Here’s what I mean by this.

The commandments around Passover only mention unleavened bread and say nothing of the Exodus from Egypt. (28:17). What we call Shavuot is called first fruits and talks only of the new grain offering (that is using grain from the just completed harvest for the first time, rather than grain from the previous harvest). (28:26) and nothing about the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. This giving of the Torah is the focus of how we celebrate Shavuot these days. What we call Rosh Hashanah only mentions “horn blasting.” (Yom Truah), nothing about repentance or judgement. (29:1). What we call Yom Kippur says we should fast (degrade ourselves) but nothing again about repentance or judgment, not even the name of Yom Kippur. (29:7). Sukkot doesn’t even have a name, just a great increase in the number of animals that are sacrificed over a seven day period with a convocation on the eight day (29:12-38). There’s nothing about abiding in huts or remembering that we wandered in the desert for 40 years.

Here's the thought experiment: pretend that this is all we have. What are these holidays all about? How would you celebrate them? All you have for Pesach is unleavened bread. All you have for Shavuot is the completion of the grain harvest and first fruits. All you have for what we have come to know as High Holidays is what is given to you here? What about Sukkot where all you know is you are supposed to have a big feast?

QUESTIONS

Jared Gellert https://www.earthbasedjudaism.org

PINCHAS

MAATOT AND MASE’EI

CHUKAT AND BALAK