Sermons

Shabbat Pinchas 19/07/25

You can read Rabbi Deborah's sermon below or listen to it here:
 

Some years ago, at Limmud, I went to a talk by an educator called Miriam Brousseau. She was speaking about the early days of her teaching career when she was first set loose on a class of kids. She was so passionate, so excited, so ready to gift these children the joys and treasures she felt she had to share. She walked in, sat down, told them all about this amazing thing, and they basically just looked blankly back at her as if to say so what.

She used the story to pose a question, it’s one thing to share information, but how do we share passion? How do we communicate not just a thing but the way that we hope someone else will feel about a thing, is it even possible?

What do we rely on when we hope someone will hear something we have to say and take from it what we want them to take? And what happens when we find it harder than we want or expect to bring them round to our way of seeing things. What happens when the thing that we care about is so important that giving up on protecting or advancing the idea is untenable? 

People with values hold feelings strongly, it’s a good thing. If you asked someone what the opposite of passion was they’d say apathy, indifference- exactly what the world needs less of. Strongly held feelings are essential to anyone taking responsibility for anything, and without them we’d have a social disaster.


This morning the Torah invites us to extend the continuum further so we can see that apathy is at one end, passion and strongly held feelings in centre, and something else at the true opposite end of the spectrum- zealotry. The uncompromising and absolute conviction in an idea, when you care so much and feel so strongly that you’ll do anything to preserve its place in the world and to assert its dominance. 

Which brings us to Pinchas.

This week’s Torah portion tells the story of a man who saw something that violated his sense of what was holy and just and acted. Violently. Pinchas, a priest, kills an Israelite man and a Midianite woman in the middle of the camp, in full view of the community. 

It is one of the most theologically troubling stories in the Torah. Blatant religious violence, an extremist act, and the person who perpetrates it is held up as a hero.

 
And yet, it is not hard to understand what Pinchas felt.

Zealotry is not alien to us. The desire to act with absolute conviction, to defend what feels sacred, to obliterate whatever seems to threaten it - this is not ancient or unfamiliar. It’s human. 

In a synagogue like this, in a progressive community built on shared values, we might feel quite distant from the idea of a zealot. We use different language. Passion. Conviction. Justice. But how different is it, really? We love the idea of caring deeply. But what happens when someone else doesn’t care in the same way - or cares just as much, but for something else?

Where is the line between passion and zealotry?

I’ve been thinking lately that the line might have something to do with who we imagine surviving the encounter.
When I’m passionate about something - an idea, a practice, a belief - and I enter into conversation with someone who disagrees, what’s my goal? Is it that we both emerge changed, a little more seen, a little more informed, even if still in disagreement? Or is it that my idea must prevail, and that if the relationship doesn’t survive - or the person doesn’t stay - that’s just the cost?

Zealotry, I think, is what happens when our need for an idea to win overtakes our care for the people involved. When we stop seeing others as worthy of preservation and start seeing them as obstacles to truth. When our principles harden into purity tests, and our passion becomes permission to behave however we want.

It can happen in conversation. In community life. On social media. In the language we use, the doors we open or close, the assumptions we make about one another.

And when that happens, it can lead to a kind of annihilation - not necessarily physical, but existential. We dehumanise other people. We edge them out of spaces. We explain away any complexity that might help us understand where they are coming from. And sometimes, we feel righteous doing it.

This isn’t an argument for moral relativism. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care. I’m not saying anything goes. What I am saying is that how we show our care has consequences. And that without vigilance, our most passionate commitments can push us close to violence - in thought, in word, in action.

These urges live in all of us. The desire to be right. To win. To be heard, and not just heard, but followed. These are deeply human instincts. But they need tending. They need boundaries.

And so maybe the work - especially in a community like this - is to stay in conversation not just with those who agree with us (that bit feels obvious), but its the internal work of noticing the parts of ourselves that rise up when we’re challenged. To ask: when I feel most certain, what am I afraid of? When I argue, do I want to be understood, or to dominate? When I speak in the name of justice, does my vision of justice still allow others to belong?

According to Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, the kotzker rebbe, Pinchas was supposed to succeed Moses as leader of the Israelites but although he is acknowledged and rewarded by God for his zealous act that stopped immediate chaos in the camp, he’s stripped of that future which is why the parasha immediately names Joshua instead as Moses’s successor. Joshua is also not a stranger to strongly held views. Alongside Caleb, he is one of the two spies who returns from the land and believes the Israelites can go forwards. For their conviction, Joshua and Caleb are pelted with stones by the rest of their community, until ultimately vindicated by God. Joshua is the leader of quiet and steadfast conviction, of resolution and bravery but not of conquest. He ascends to his role because he has conviction but he stands out against Pinchas for his rejection of violence even when confronted by others' violent actions.

At this moment when Torah elevates Joshua and steadfast conviction over Pinchas and his violent zealotry, I want to leave us with a few questions:

What do you care about most deeply - and how does that care show up in your relationships?

When have you felt the desire to shut someone down - and what was underneath it?

What does it mean to act with passion and principle without imagining the cost as someone else’s erasure?

None of us are immune from acting like Pinchas did. But we are capable of noticing when that story is stirring within us and making different choices. Choosing to stay, to listen and to allow room. Not for everything, but for one another.
Not because our ideas don’t matter, but because people do as well.