Last week’s parasha ends with a quite gruesome event. Pinchas, who is of the priestly family, sees an Israelite man with a Midianite woman and following the instructions from God and Moses, impales them with a spear. It is a painful scene to imagine and provides of piece of text that leaves us readers today with a conundrum. On the one hand, Pinchas followed his instructions and his action led to the ending of a plague afflicting the Israelites. On the other hand, he murdered two people and was rewarded for it.
We have a few options with troubling texts like this one. We can skip them completely because they do not fit with our modern understanding of how to treat people or we can choose to read them davka because they are troubling and in our tradition.
If you are reading the parasha with younger children, skipping might be the best course of action. But otherwise, it is incumbent on us to wrestle with the parts of our tradition that we find offensive. Through engaging with those troubling parts, we claim the Torah as our story, even as we may reject the pieces that no longer reflect how we should be acting.
– Rabbi Avi Fine