Pinchas: The Substance Of Our Lives

A zealot's actions, a daily routine, and the ordinary acts that build a good life

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Have you ever thought about the substance from which your life is built? Is it the dramatic moments those grand once-in-a-lifetime experiences, or is it the day-to-day steady, consistent routines? Our parsha this week is named for a man called Pinchas. In last week's Torah reading, the camp was in crisis, people were falling into idolatry, and a deadly plague was spreading. In a moment of intense moral passion, Pinchas took a spear and publicly killed a high-ranking Israelite leader and a Midianite woman who were desecrating God's name. It was a radical, violent act, but it brought the plague to an immediate stop. This week, the Parsha opens with a reward he gets for this moment of zealotry. Welcome back to Torah in Seven. I'm Bela Oli Dart, and our Pinhas episode is generously sponsored by Peter Himmelman, who dedicates it to those who tirelessly endeavor to strengthen our bonds of unity and connection to our timeless traditions. Thank you so much, Peter. And if you would like to dedicate an episode in memory or in honor of someone you love, please email me at torain7 at gmail.com. So what is Pinchas' reward? God grants him a Brit Shalom, a covenant of peace, and it's a striking phrase. It sounds almost as if something inside Pinchas needed calming. The great 19th century commentator, the Nitziv, makes a profound claim here about the psychological residue of killing. He explains that taking a life, even when it's fully justified, leaves a deep emotional scar. On this reading, the covenant of peace isn't a medal of honor, it's God's promise to heal Pinchas' interior state. God is ensuring that the man who had to do this one violent thing would not be consumed by agitation. He would not be permanently made into a violent man. And make no mistake, this was a one-time exception. Pinchas acted on a law that exists, but it's a law that cannot be taught or issued. In fact, if he'd had stopped to ask permission beforehand, the courts would have told him no. It was a momentary explosion of radical passion. Later on, the parsha takes a sharp turn. It concludes with a long list of the laws of the daily and holiday offerings. And the list starts with the law of the daily offering known as the Korban Tamid. Et Akevis Echatas, the daily sacrifice of one lamb in the morning and a second lamb in the evening. And it makes you wonder why would the Torah place something this incredibly routine in the same parsha as the dramatic story of Pinchas? Now there's a famous debate among the rabbis over which single verse is the most essential principle in the entire Torah. One sage says it's the Shma'israel Hashem al-Keno Hashem Echad, here, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one, which makes a lot of sense. Another sage says, it's veahlarecha kamocha, love your neighbor as yourself, which also makes a lot of sense. But then a third sage, Shimon bin Pazi, points to the verse we just read, one lamb in the morning, one lamb in the evening, and he argues that this is the most cardinal principle in the Torah. And according to the Midrash, the law sides with him. But how could a verse about loving your neighbor or a verse about the unity of God lose to a verse about a daily lamb sacrifice? So we need to think about what the Tamid, what this offering asks of a person. It doesn't demand a radical act of courage. It just asks you to show up every morning, every evening, again and again. Pinhas' act was fueled by adrenaline. There was danger, a plague, and the eyes of the entire camp were on him. It was a highly charged, unforgettable moment. The Tamid has none of that. No one is watching the priest bring the lamb on the 400th morning in a row. There's no plague to justify it and no exciting story to tell afterward. And that, maybe, is exactly the test. Can you keep showing up when nothing is asking to be noticed? When there is no pinhas moment to rise to, just a regular Tuesday, and nothing to show for it but the fact that you came back. The law says this is the verse that holds up the Torah. So the Parsha leaves us with two images side by side: a man with a spear who acted once, and a lamb brought twice a day by a priest whose name the text doesn't even bother to record. Hasidic thought teaches that these two images live inside every single one of our souls. They represent two spiritual movements, Ratso and Shov, running and returning. Ratso is the soul's urge to break past its limit. It craves the dramatic, the urgent, the grand defining moment. Pinhas is pure Ratso. Shov is the opposite. It's the soul coming back down into the ordinary, into a physical body, into a quiet Tuesday, and doing the unremarkable things simply because it needs to be done. The tamid is shov. And notice which side the Torah takes. It doesn't side with the drama of Ratso. It sides with a tamid, a word that literally means constancy. We live in a culture that rewards the dramatic, the post that gets seen, the story that goes viral. It's so easy to start believing that those are the moments a life is made of, the ones spectacular enough to be photographed or envied. George Elliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, ends on this note precisely. Her heroine Dorothya spends the whole novel yearning for a great history-making life. She wants to reshape the world through sheer force of religious passion. That's not the life she gets. She gets a smaller, quieter life instead. And at the very end of the book, Elliot insists that the good in our world depends less on those history-making lives and far more on countless unremembered acts, the kind that never make it into any story at all. There is, of course, a time and a place for a Pinchas moment, but the Torah doesn't ask us to build a life around it. What the Torah does ask us to repeat every morning and every evening is the offering that nobody photographs, the one no one live streams. It's the patience shown for the thousandth time to someone who will never know what it cost you. It's the phone call made out of habit to someone who has come to take it for granted. None of it goes viral. But according to Jewish law, that's the verse that holds the entire Torah together. Maybe that's the substance that builds a meaningful life. Not what gets seen, but the quiet moments nobody thinks to mention. This was Torah in seven Phipar Shatpin Chas. If you'd like to go deeper, you can find a companion study guide with Hebrew terms, sources, and questions for further learning at Torah in seven dot substack.com. Thank you for listening. Shabbat Shalom.