The Appeal of Zeal
“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
-Bertrand Russell
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
—Barry Goldwater
The wry commentary on oxymoronic hypocrisy chides: “Fighting for peace is like (the colloquial word for sexual congress) for virginity.” Particularly in our hyper-polarized era of resistance to nuance and embrace of binaries, the extremes seem more reasonable, moderation a sign of cowardice, and zeal far more laudatory than deliberation. It’s a challenge as old as this week’s Torah portion, Pinchas.
Pinchas is a sacral guard of the Tabernacle, who thwarts a God-inflicted plague upon the Israelites because of their idolatrous and lustful pursuit of Midianite women and their gods. In one of the oldest examples of a crime of passion, Pinchas executes a sacred shish-ka-bob of a Midianite woman and Israelite man engaged in some form of cultic sexual rite. God rewards him with a brit shalom—a covenant of peace—seeming to sanction his act as an exceptional necessity in light of the urgent circumstances.
Putting aside for the sake of argument the need to distinguish the sensibilities and mores of the Iron Age Near East from our current moment, this event and its seeming divine sanction are troubling. Our struggles with religious extremism of all stripes are anathema to our modern, post-Enlightenment pursuits of reason, human dignity, and toleration of difference. The rabbis strive to interpret Pinchas’ zealotry as permissible to meet the moment and acceptable in that he was an essentially good and peaceful person, and therefore, his extremism was an anomaly.
The challenge of gleaning lessons from this portion reflects our struggles to identify the line between justified passions and rationalized violence—between the demands of the moment and the concession to our worst impulses.