Pinchas: Zimreality Bites

As has been detailed previously in these pages, the "zealotry" and "extermism" of Pinchas is often misunderstood, sometimes deliberately (the self-proclaimed "zealot" who murdered Shira Banki in Jerusalem being one such example of the misapplication).  

Yet discussions of not only Pinchas' action, but also the sordid deeds of Zimri sometimes gets limited to the direct halachic implications surrounding the narrative; larger hashkafic questions about why this became the climax of the national emergency, and why, get lost in the legal details. 

The narrative as related in TB Sanhedrin 82 indicates how a "Prince in Israel" was overcome by Balaamic tendencies in the midst of a national emergency, indulging his need to conquer on political and personal fronts.  As Bilaam's "desperation pass" ("come let me advise", 24:14)  has hit its mark with a mass idolatrous orgy, a concimtant plague, and near mass executions, Zimri takes the opportunity to execute a Balaamic grand slam: 

• He asserts his leadership bonafides: "Kozbi: I am the king's daughter. My father asked me to have Bi'ah with the most important Yisrael Zimri: I am Nasi of a Shevet, and my Shevet was born second to Yakov, before Levi (Moshe's Shevet), which was third!";

• He tries his hand at p'sak: "Zimri took her in front of Moshe, and asked 'is she permitted or forbidden? If you say that she is forbidden, who permitted you to marry Yisro's daughter?!";

• He (over)indulges his lusts: "He had 60 acts of Bi'ah";

• He does this all not simply befarhesia, but in the Ohel Moed itself.

What might even be more disconcerting about this is how first his tribesmen, and then the populace at large, at first encourage, then enable, and then defend the executed Zimri and disparage Pinchas:

• Encourage: "Shevet Shimon complained to Zimri (its Nasi) that they were being sentenced to death. He took 24,000 Yisraelim and asked Kozbi to have Bi'ah with him."

• Enable: "They thought [Pinchas] also wanted to sin [-] [Pinchas] removed the dagger at the end of his spear and put it in his garment. He used it as a walking staff and came to Shevet Shimon [and said] "Where do we find that Levi is greater than Shimon?" (Also we can do like you!)[-] so they allowed him to enter the tent of Zimri."

• Defend: "The tribes were scorning Pinchas - 'this son of Puti, whose grandfather (Yisro) was Pitem (fattened) calves for idolatry, killed the Nasi of a Shevet!'"

Zimri, in effect, becomes the archetype of one who would sell out his own people to their enemies for his own aggrandizement and gratification.  Even Korach didn't do this: while there was certainly something egregious about tying up his quest for power in a spiritual guise, the fact that Korach at least "merited" a miraculous intervention to being about his demise indicates that, as inappropriate as his power grab was, it was an internecine offense.

Zimri's offense wasn't that. Zimri, as it were, sided with the enemy in a time of war: while the Moabite mass seduction was aimed at the general populace, the Midianite harlotry was aimed right at the upper echelon.  Unlike Korach, Zimri's motivations aren't as extensively parsed, but the results are spelled out: he influenced a not insignficant number of his tribesmen that his conduct was preferable.  The fact that he met a rather and sordid and ignoble in public indicates the baser nature of his offenses.

In other words, Korach, while trying to upend the system, wasnt employing completely alien influences to foment his rebellion.  Zimri was, and his primary influence was Bilaam, even if he was was too libidinally addled to realize it.

Finally, we saw last week that Bilaam was among other things a master cultural appropriator: 

• Balak, told about Moshe that "his power lies only in his mouth", and is compelled to engage an antagonist "whose power was also in his mouth"; 

• Bilaam has pretentions toward nevuah, and in fact is identified in the literature as one, but the nature of his visions are downgraded, and he eventually has to fall back on his original divination skills, betraying his envy for the former when he declares "let my end be like his".

What Zimri does by executing the aforementioned Ballamic power play resembles the methods of misapprorations and gaslighting used by contemporary internal enemies of the Jews: taking our own principles ("is this allowed? Who allowed you?") and using them against us in battles against our enemies; somehow managing to attract a mass following (his whole tribe was behind him); whilst arrogating unearned poitical legitimacy to oneself ("the most important Yisrael").  

The list of current ostensible/erstwhile Jewish eminences who defend our people's most ardent detractors while insisting that their approach is the true expression of Judaism is too long to recount here. But those Zimris are carrying out Bilaam's mission all over again.

Balak: Balaamic Vinegar

In Parshas Korach, we meet a disingenuous liberator: Korach proclaims "kol haedah kulam kdeoshim", while--as On ben Peles' wife pointed out to her husband--he likely meant to rule just as ostensibly absolutely.  Posel b'mumo, indeed.

Last week, in Chukas, we saw--if you would--the "preseason" of the wars of conquest: Edom and Moav massing at their border, the mountains crushing the lying-in-wait Amorites, Sichon, and Og. 

This week, we meet another disingenuous liberator: Bilaam.  In fact, a surface glance at Bilaam's personality as per midrashim ostensibly borders on libertinist anarchism:  Bilaam is deemed to be the first public advocate for unfettered carnality since the Mabul; and he is deemed to be "belo am", a one-world, open-borders guru.  

Several ironies in the narrative expose his blatant disingenuousness woith regard to his ostensible cosmopolitanism and liberitnism:

*Bilaam uses his libertinism as an tool of war, counting on the licentiousness to invite Divine retribution--knowing it would make G-d angry at the Jews and not the Moabites indicates that he was aware of indelible national distinctions, and the libertinism he preached would ultimately not be as freeing, but destructive to both his emeny and ultimately his client.

*Bilaam is presonally even more--er--libertine than he is willing to let on, the donkey revealed the "ishus balaila".  One can speculate that either Bilaam is so frustrated by turning his libertinism into a chiyuv of sorts that he seeks out [ahem] comanionship where he could finally find it, because being libertine became an obligation, rather than an "alternative".  Yet he even he feels constrained enough by some baseline morality that he can't make everything he does public.

(It's also possible that Bilaam's ultimate attitude resembles King Amon as related in Chelek, while in bed with his mother [!]:)"Do you have any pleasure by engaging in intercourse from the place from which you emerged? He said to her: I am doing this only to express insolence to my Creator...)

*The Belo 'Am, open-borders Bilaam is less a dissident and more a mercenary with an impressive client list: Kush, where he batlles the exiled Moshe; Egypt, where he advises Pharaoh to promote slavery and genocide; Sichon, who hires him to curse Moav when Moav was winning that war; and Moav, where he uses Midian--an erstwhile enemy of Moav--to aid Moav.  Somehow--not unlike contemporary Palestinian nationalism's most ardent external sycophants--all of his efforts are aimed to erase one nation, not any of the others (while he is credited with the elegy for Moav at the end of Chukas, it didn't prevent him from working with them later.)

In being forced by G-d to speak in complete contradistinction to his desires, Bilaam is also forced to publicly undercut (for all time, having it encoded in the Oraitic text) his professed tenets:

*He praises the Jews' privacy/tznius in "Mah Tovu": Bilaam is forced to praise a belief system that completely undercuts his libertinism.

*He desires a "mos yesharim": he hopes (almost like St. Augustine--"give me chastity, but not yet") that he can gain a Heavenly portion without the effort of abandoning his libertinism. 

*He is forced to endure "nationalist" visions ("reshis goyim malek"): he is forced to acknoweldge that the ultimate eschatologiscal vision ("acharis hayamim") involves national demarcations, as opposed to his porfessed utopian "belo am".

The Balaamic penchant for erasing moral baselines and the concomitant domino/boomerang effects are bipartisan maladies.  One one hand, Peter Singer, the eminent animal liberator who has been called "the most influential philosopher alive", has written about removing the moral stigma from bestiality (more of inyana deyoma than one might think, considering Bilaam's secret), infanticide, and even rape.  On the other side of the political fence, as I wrote in 2003, just when the Catholic Church's history of depredation was finally just beginning to be exposed and condemned: 

"The "terminal decline" of the Church’s influence on moral, political, and cultural life in the West, so lamented by Mr. Johnson, did indeed begin when it abrogated what he calls its mission of "challenging the assumptions of its environment": i.e., once the Church decided to not halp save the Jews, it wouldn't be a stretch for them to not save their own internal victims of sexual assault and child abuse."

The second area where ostensible crusades for "freedom" succeed is that they become more dogmatic and oppressive to a degree that far exceeds the systems overthrown for their purported "benightedness", and those in power will nearly always exempt themselves from the maintaining the conduct they demand of their adherents.  Korach knew well enough how the system worked that even if he was going to survive the test, none of his followers would; he was willing to sacrifice the for his own aggrandizement.  Bilaam's crusade for freedom was all about enriching and gratifying himself at everyone's expense; he was willing to employ the very systems he was ostensibly trying to overthrow--political and spiritual--partiuclarly because he recognized their truth, even up close.  

Furthermore, as per TB Sanhedrin 106, the Moabite women conscripted into the Balaamic scheme used his gaslighting method, first making their prey believe they were doing nothing wrong--"He then said to her: Submit to me and engage in intercourse with me. She then removed the idol that she worshipped from her lap and said to him: Worship this. He said to her: Am I not Jewish? I am therefore forbidden from engaging in idol worship. She said to him: And what is your concern? We are asking you to do nothing more than defecate in its presence. But he does not know that its worship is conducted in that manner"--and then, after playing the "libertine" card, she would become dogmatic: "Once he did so, she said to him: Moreover, I will not leave you until you deny the Torah of Moses your teacher, as it is stated: “But when they came to Ba’al-Peor they separated themselves to the shameful item; and they became detestable like that which they loved” (Hosea 9:10)."  

One should note how badly gaslit the offenders were by women who had basically been turned out en masse by their own Moabite leaders...and then one fo our own joined the gaslighting: Zimri, whose public demise ends the sordid part of the narrative.  Next week, we examine how that worked.

The Balaamic gaslighting continues to this day, and too many of our co-religionists continue to fall for it.  This has implications on both macro and micro--or, political and personal--levels.

As far as the macro/political--very few can explain it better than Rabbi Berel Wein:

"Bilaam is a non-governmental, allegedly not-for-profit, one man organization, proclaiming great ideals while at the same time condoning enslavement and murder of thousands. And, in spite of his protestations of idealism and even-handedness, he is for hire.  He is the original spin artist, the public relations genius, the amoral unprincipled guru looking always for new clients."

On the micro/personal level, too many find themselves enticed by the siren song of belonging at the price of abandoning the core of one's identity, one hears promises of broken chains, only to find oneself in heavier fetters. Instead of working from within our own system of rule--even if/when ostensibly onerous, ultimately some replace it with other regimens that prove to be a lot less forgiving: another series of obligations towards others at your expense, while no one else feels compelled to fulfill any obligations towards you.  To quote Henry Rollins:  Freedom?  You can't handle freedom/And now you're dyin' for it

G-d laments to Yirmeyahu: "They have forsaken Me, the Fount of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, which cannot even hold water";  but when the intoxication becomes particularly acute, they forsake wine for Balaamic vinegar.