Parshas Maatos-Massei

This week’s Torah portion, Parshas Matos-Masei, opens with the next step in the confrontation with the nations of Midian and Moav. At the end of last week’s portion, the Jewish people fell into immoral behavior with the Midianite women, and a plague broke out killing thousands. At the height of the crisis, a Jewish prince named Zimri brazenly brought a Midianite woman before Moshe and the entire nation in open defiance. Pinchas, the grandson of Aharon, took a spear and killed them both. The plague stopped. Twenty four thousand people had already died. Pinchas’s act of zealotry saved the nation.

At the opening of Parshas Pinchas, Hashem rewards him with what the Torah calls a bris shalom, a covenant of peace. The Haamek Davar, Rav Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, explains this reward in a way that stops you cold. The nature of killing another person with your own hands, he writes, leaves a powerful emotional imprint on a person. It awakens something fierce and agitated inside. Under normal circumstances, someone who had done what Pinchas did would carry that intensity with him for the rest of his life. So Hashem gave him a special blessing of inner peace and serenity to counteract what the act itself would have naturally done to his character.

Here is what is so striking about this. Pinchas did the right thing. Completely and unambiguously. Hashem Himself validated the act. And yet the Haamek Davar is telling us that even a righteous act of necessary force carries a cost to the person who performs it, a cost that without divine intervention would have left a permanent mark.

This is a profound and uncomfortable truth. When we stand up for what is right, when we confront someone, when we take a necessary stand that causes another person pain or loss, even when we are entirely justified, something happens inside us. Righteous indignation has a way of taking root. The intensity that drove the right action has a tendency to linger and harden into something less pure over time.

We must stand up for what is right, but not having its effect on us at the forefront of our minds is a trap that we cannot aord to fall into. We must focus on the pain we are causing, the sadness of the situation rather than the thrill of being right, the less that intensity takes hold of us. We do what must be done, but we do it with a heavy heart rather than a raised fist.

May Hashem give us the courage to stand up for what is right when we must, and the sensitivity to never lose sight of the cost, and in that merit may He bless us with the same gift He gave Pinchas, a life of genuine peace and serenity.