Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] There was a nation of median that had a focused effort of enticing Jewish men to commit inappropriate, prohibited by Jewish law, sexual acts. And Jewish men got sucked into it. Not only did they get sucked into it, like it happens very often when you are doing something bad.
[00:00:27] And if you feel bad about it, and if you are conscious of the fact that others are thinking poorly about you because of it, then you are trying to recruit others to join you. And you actually show off that you are proud of the bad things you are doing. And you are trying to make your transgressions into something cool. So this way you will not feel bad about it. And that's exactly what happened. The sexual impropriety that was going on over there became the in thing. It became the cool thing to do.
[00:01:02] And the most prominent Jewish young men were involved in it. The Hollywood of those days and the celebrities were promoting it. Sounds familiar, right? History doesn't change much.
[00:01:16] So now we have a scene. A very prominent young man, a head of a tribe. His name is Zimri, and he is publicly getting involved in what is prohibited by the Torah. And he is cheered on by a huge group of onlookers. And it all happens right in the middle of the Jewish camp.
[00:01:40] So comes a person whose name is Pinchas, who was the grandson of Aharon Hakohen, the high priest. And he remembers that there is a law that just like when you witness a murder right in front of your eyes, you are allowed to take the law into your own hands and kill the murderer. The same thing when you are witnessing sexual impropriety right in front of your eyes at that moment, you are allowed to take the law into your own hands and kill the those involved if it's done publicly. Because the Jewish law in many ways compares prohibited intimate relationships to murder. You cannot take the law into your own hands afterwards. Just like you are not allowed to kill the assailant of the murder that you witnessed a couple of minutes ago, but you are allowed to do it at that time in the act. So Pinchas kills this man Zimri.
[00:02:39] And by the way, when he is doing it, he is literally risking his life because the crowd of onlookers who were cheering them on was actually about to murder him. But he's doing it. And then God is thanking Pinchas, telling him that now he's going to be given the status of a kohen, because previously he was not allowed to have the status because he was born before the status was awarded to the family.
[00:03:11] So God says, now you're going to be a kohen. And God says, I'm giving to Pinchas my covenant of peace. And this is the main part that I want to focus on right now. This guy killed somebody. Why is he now given a covenant of peace?
[00:03:30] You understand that maybe what he did was allowed by Jewish law. Maybe Jewish law would even instruct to do it.
[00:03:37] But the question is, why is he referred to now as a person of peace? Killing somebody is not a peaceful matter.
[00:03:45] For this, we have to understand what is the idea of peace in Jewish law.
[00:03:51] Absence of fighting is not a peace. Yet according to the Jewish understanding of peace, when people don't kill each other, when people don't fight with each other, this is just absence of war. It could be what we called in recent history a cold war. In other words, we are not fighting, but we are gearing up for a potential fight.
[00:04:15] Peace. Shalom in Hebrew comes from the word shleimut, which means completion or harmony.
[00:04:24] When we are sitting here today at peace with each other, according to the Jewish understanding of peace. According to, we have to feel that we are completing each other. We are at harmony with each other, which means that we cannot live without each other. This is what peace is.
[00:04:43] So if we are at peace, that means that our relationships between each other are in a way that we fit each other, like a puzzle.
[00:04:56] And the Torah is calling upon this world to be at peace with each other. To be at peace with each other, we need to have only certain specific type of relationships with each other. And if there are relationships which are prohibited by the Torah, that means that we cannot be at peace. We cannot be in harmony. We cannot complete each other with these relationships. As a matter of fact, this is why the Torah is saying that only married people should have intimate relationships and that only one man is supposed to marry only one woman. Because when Adam and Eve were created, they were first created as one human being. First there was one person, and then this one human was split into two halves.
[00:05:53] When Eve Chava was created, she was taken from a side of Adam's body. A rib is actually a mistranslation. In Christian Bible, it was a side of Adam's body, which means that Adam was split in half.
[00:06:09] So when we have a man and a woman, they were originally one body. The Torah says that before a man and a woman are born, there are not two separate souls that are up in heaven. They are one soul which is separated at birth.
[00:06:27] So when they're getting married to each other, they are returning back to their original state, which means they are completing each other. So this is the idea of shalom, peace, harmony.
[00:06:38] Now we see why marriage in Jewish tradition is so important.
[00:06:43] Because the two people who are getting married, first of all, they are destined to marry each other. They are meant to marry each other. They were before they were born. Two parts of one whole that is connecting now. And the idea of soulmate in English is usually referred to soul mate, like classmate soul mate. When I am referring to somebody as a classmate, it doesn't mean that he is a part of me. It means that we are two separate beings and we are just friends. Mate means a friend.
[00:07:14] So soul mate means soul friend, means our souls are friends with each other. In Hebrew, it's incorrect. We are not friends with each other because you cannot be a friend of yourself.
[00:07:25] This is your soul. This is a part of you.
[00:07:28] So when a husband and a wife are getting married, they're not called soul mate, they're called one soul.
[00:07:33] So when two people are getting married, they are returning back to their original state before they were born. They are reuniting. This is peace. This is harmony. Other intimate relationships that people might have are not harmony.
[00:07:50] So this is why what Pinchas did was called Brit Shalom, the covenant of peace. But then also there's another very important point. If a person is a pacifist, if he does not believe in taking up arms when it's needed, then according to the Torah, he is not called a peaceful person. A peaceful person is someone who is at peace with others. Like we said, he is harmonious with those around him. But then he is also ready to fight for peace when it's required. A peaceful person is somebody who is ready to go to war for peace.
[00:08:31] In modern world we see so many people saying that majority of Germans in Nazi Germany were peaceful people.
[00:08:41] Why are we speaking poorly about the entire country of Germany of the beginning or middle of 20th century?
[00:08:50] So the answer is maybe they were peaceful according to the non Jewish understanding of being peaceful. In other words, they were not hurting anyone. But peaceful is a person who is ready to defend peace even if it takes to take up arms.
[00:09:04] So my question is, how many Germans were fighting for peace? How many Germans were fighting for the Jews? How many Germans were hiding innocent Jews?
[00:09:15] These were the peaceful Germans, Others were not peaceful. And the same thing by the way, with many extremist Muslim cultures today. People say most of them are peaceful because are not actively fighting against Jews or against Israel, against America.
[00:09:32] The question should be not how many of them are not fighting against America or against Israel or against the Jews. The question is how many of them are fighting against this militant Islam. The ones who are doing it are called peaceful. The ones who are not are not peaceful. They're just pacifists or they're just apathetic at best. Being apathetic is not being peaceful.
[00:09:57] So this is how the Torah is describing peace. And this is why Pinchas was called a peaceful person. This is why he was given a covenant of peace.
[00:10:07] A, he was for harmony in the relationships between people, and B, he was ready to fight for peace, and that's why he was called peaceful.
