by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

The idea of taking the law into one’s own hands makes us uneasy, and so it should. Indeed, Pinchus’s slaying of Zimri and Bat Kozbi for their acts of immorality was not greeted with universal acclaim. On the contrary, his motives were impugned; his ancestry brought into question. But the Torah’s endorsement of Pinchus’s act of zealotry should allay whatever qualms we would otherwise have about his action. If God Himself bears witness to the purity of Pinchus’s motives and the rightness of his act, we can put our doubts to rest (Bamidbar
25:1-14 ).

But if we can understand Pinchus’s outrage, how do we explain Zimri’s behavior? What was Zimri thinking? If he had been someone simply driven by desire, and had pursued it privately, it would be straighforward enough. However, the Midrashim say that he did not simply take up with the forbidden woman; he first challenged Moses to explain to him why he should not do so. He entered into the relationship publicly and made an issue of it.

One explanation for his action is that he anticipated that many Jewish men were vulnerable to seduction at the hands of the Midianite women. Zimri reasoned that since these relationships were going to occur anyway, it would be better to have them out in the open, with legal sanction. Otherwise, if they were condemned, it might lead the men to forsake their Judaism altogether. For if they were to be confronted with a choice between their women and their faith, they might not be strong enough to choose the latter.

So Zimri’s audacious solution seemed reasonable, civilized. Pinchus, however, did not agree. He understood that such relationships could not be tolerated, because they would corrupt the whole Jewish people. Better for those who cannot abide by the law to break it and suffer the consequences, and preserve the integrity of the community as a whole, than to ignore the law to save the transgressors.

Still, one might ask, wasn’t Zimri’s action justified by the well-known Torah principle of et la’asot l’Hashem, heferu Toratecha, there is a time to act for God, to suspend Your Torah”? This principle was invoked by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi when he decided to commit the Oral Law to writing. Until then, the material known to us as the Mishna was handed down orally; not written in texts but memorized by the student. In order to facilitate its propogation through Israel, he permitted its writing. So, too, one could argue, Zimri’s approach was designed to save the Jewish people by suspending a prohibition. Ends justifying means.

But the comparison is faulty. The prohibition of writing down the Oral Law was intended originally to facilitate its teaching. Students who had to learn it by heart would pay more attention, review more assiduously, and internalize the precepts of the Torah more fully, than if it were all easily referenced in a book. When it became clear that people no longer had the capacity to memorize and master so much—over 4,000 Mishnayot—writing down became a necessity. Since the reason for memorization was to strengthen Torah, and it could no longer accomplish that, writing became the new guarantor of tradition.

The prohibition against inter-marriage was intended to guarantee the integrity of the Jewish family and tradition. It was then, and is now, a fallacy to think that relaxing that prohibition could in any way preserve them. Whereas writing was never, in and of itself, destructive to tradition (students were always allowed to keep private notebooks), it was eschewed in favor of a more effective method. When that method lost its effectiveness, writing replaced it. Inter-marriage, on the other hand, is inherently destructive of the Jewish family, and permitting it under any circumstances can bring only ruin.

Today, there is no Pinchus, and no prophetic validation for anyone’s pure motives, and so we certainly cannot take the law into our own hands in such matters. Nevertheless, the lesson of Zimri is there to be learned. Using the ends to justify the means is a risky business, especially when the gratification of personal desire happens also to be a beneficiary.

Which is the real reason why Zimri thought the way he did.

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