Pinchas

Oh, DOODY! I did not manage to post an entry on Pinchas. I did read Pinchas, and I did make some notes on it, but I was a little slower than usual last week because of a bizarre out-of-nowhere debilitating episode of depression.

Anyway, Pinchas is really not that interesting. God gives Pinchas some kind of special covenant for having killed that guy having sex with that Midianite or Moabite woman (not clear which). There’s a census plus some lottery for distributing land (maybe I recall wrongly though, there seems to be a census and land lottery every other freaking parsha ). The only interesting bit about that is that someone’s daughters show up and complain to Moses that they shouldn’t be permanently disinherited because their dead father left no sons. Moses asks God about that, and God agrees, so the inheritance laws set down in the Torah actually count daughters as inheritors, although only if all the sons are dead. Ladies, get ready for fratricide! Or something. Sorry, I’m a bit weird today, having some funky-ass responses to some meds.

The rest of Pinchas is verse after boring verse about appropriate offerings to be made to God in the form of sheeps, goats, bulls, grain, oil, aromatic spices, and whatever else people have on hand that is precious and can be burnt. Not quite as dull as the endless descriptions of how to build the tabernacle that we got back in Exodus (er, I think) but still. If I’d managed to write an actual d’var last week it would have been something about sacrifice, and the temple, and how Orthodox prayer books still include page after page of descriptions about what sacrifices we ought to be making at particular prayer services which we replace instead with prayer since we don’t have the temple anymore, and even non-Orthodox versions of the Amidah usually say something about rebuilding the temple speedily in our day, and really? We’re looking forward to temple sacrifice again? As a good thing?

Look, the Temple is centralized. I don’t like that. At least the tent of meeting was movable, and for a long time the tabernacle moved from place to place within Israel. Till David (or wait, was it Solomon?) built the Temple, and even then there were all these alternative spiritually important places where one could go to worship and sacrifice, the places mentioned in Genesis where someone or other is always erecting (heh) a monolithic stone to mark a spot where “God was in this place”. So, lots of sacred places, moveable tabernacle, yeah, some idolatry mixed in with all that decentralized worship in high places. Then along comes some priest or other, time of Josiah, who ‘finds’ an ancient scroll in the temple that says “definitely do not worship in high places or anywhere but in the temple or god will hate you” and then Josiah says “OMGZ!!!!!!!!” and goes on this rampage of sacred place desecration all over the country, and if I felt like bothering I’d stick a picture here of the Taliban smashing those gorgeous buddas to pieces wherever that was in Afghanistan that time, because it sounds kinda the same.

So there, centralized Temple worship only, controlled by an inherited priestly caste. Uh, yay?

No, not yay. Fast forward to ‘Second Temple’ period, otherwise known as “the time of Jesus”. You have your Sadducees, super-temple people, enforcing the centralized temple model of where you go to get you some God. You have the Pharisees, who are expanding the commandments so that non-priestly Israelites can experience, serve, sacrifice to God even if they are nowhere near the temple, just in their daily lives. Sure, that expansion was/is crazy legalistic and not always conducive to actual godliness (c.f. criticisms made by Jesus in christian scriptures. ) But the Pharisees were not trying to make things harder for regular Israelites, they were trying to find a way to include regular Israelites in the daily service of god. They substituted the authority of a particular place and an inherited priestly caste with the authority of scholars all over the place, and not just a single party line but a plethora of voices arguing and disagreeing with each other. And they were starting to do this even before they ‘had’ to, after the destruction of the second temple in 130-something c.e.

Jesus/Christianity did something else altogether with that authority/access to god: Jesus took it on himself. So it was decentralized in that it was no longer associated with a particular place, but it was highly centralized in a particular person. If that particular person was/is really God in human form, then it makes sense to centralize faith and authority and practice on that person. I don’t think Christianity has managed to remain centralized on the idea that Jesus is the only authority/way to God. I think religious practice probably leans toward fragmentation and decentralization. Judaism never has had or attempted to have much in the way of central authorities or put much importance on creeds or on infallibility or on there being just one way to get to God. The mitzvot are multitudinous, and since no one actually manages to practice them all, they offer a decentralized, personalized approach to God. Of course this means some people will put a lot of emphasis on the mitzvot that are furthest from the central teachings, as stated by Hillel, and which I’ll restate as “Not only don’t be an asshole, be a mensch!”. But for those of us who are really trying to follow that, there are many ways to be a mensch and hence serve God, and no particular central belief or barrier to entry. (I’m talking about those of us born Jews; for converts, there are pretty high barriers to entry, in fact). And then there’s still this ongoing experience of participating in the conversation of oral torah, with all the arguments, debates, and yes, sometimes legalistic wrangling that this entails.

So really, I have no interest in seeing the Temple re-established and all those sacrifices take place again. According to the Torah Judaism existed before the Temple, and it certainly has managed to exist after the Temple. What, I need the temple so I have to fly a zillion miles and contribute to global warming so I can serve god? Or what, I’d commission animal sacrifices via the internet, along with millions of other jews, so that the temple mount would just be a constant burning mess of dead animals? I realize I’m being deliberately provocative here. Dude, I’m god-wrestling. Okay, maybe with a little bit of the wicked child in me. But underneath the flippancy I really do have a point, and that is my discomfort with the fact that I am supposed to pray for a re-centralizing of Jewish practice around a Temple that really did have a bunch of people selling animals for sacrifice sitting around it, and really was probably corrupt and venal some of the time, institutions and human nature being what they are. I like my decentralized Judaism, and I like offering God my prayers instead of my animals.