Pinhas reinstates the yeast, returning it to the dough where it belongs, blending it back into the broader matrix of human wholeness, after Zimri has extracted it, at Bilam's advice.

Existential reality is pushed aside by human beings who choose a virtual reality.  Virtual reality is imaginary, pragmatic, and follows its own rules in its own game,  rules invented by human beings, for their own convenience - game rules that have nothing to do with the natural needs of human existence. 

Ad hoc activity becomes the all-embracing reality.  Sports, politics, economics, even the law itself in all its glory; the law has become a reality of its own, determining the rules of existence, rather than serving them.
 

Such is science - a servant turned master.  It has adopted the mathematical yardstick rather than  a yardstick compatible with a reality that attaches values to the needs of existence. 

Common sense has become a persecuted creature, hunted down by lying alternatives that are the fruit of human imagination.  Frankenstein has turned on its creator.  A virtual reality eventually devours the human being who creates it.

As young children, we focus on what is directly before us, but we are not rigid about it; we do not fixate on one point; we pass naturally from one interest to the other.  But as adults, we may tend to replace that focused yet flexible concentration with rigidity, fixating on a single point, and ignoring other aspects of reality.

Freedom and Belonging

When freedom and belonging unite, man finds his natural place.  When they are detached, each becomes a virtual reality of its own.  Too much freedom can detach man from the tendency toward belonging – toward belonging to reality.  When belonging then recedes, it turns into rigidity, which is a prime example of detachment and of the lack of balance between freedom and belonging.  It is the result of the two opposing tendencies existing separately.  Side by side, each attempts to live at the other’s expense, rather than living together as one.

Judgment disconnects from compassion, as divisiveness separates the Godly formula: “God rose and blended the measure of compassion into the measure of judgment”  - creating a freedom and a belonging that interfere with one another, rather than cooperating as content within container.  A virtual reality is created, and turns into its own game, its own artificial bubble.  Rigidity develops within this artificial bubble.  Dependency develops as well.  One becomes dependent on the rules of the game, which serve to blur reality.

The truth that Bilam discovered and revealed – that the family unit constitutes a model and a criterion for a natural human reality, in which truth and peace encounter one another – he then succeeded in distorting, in his wicked cunning.  The evil rasha drew the yeast out of the dough.  He drew out intimate relations, removed them from the greater picture of the family unit, and flaunted them against the sun as something independent, as something independently permissible, as an autonomous root and cause to be encouraged in itself.

Thus the rasha turned something true into something virtual.  When a true reality turns virtual, all related realities are upturned.  Truth is distanced from peace.  As soon as the framework that unifies all the conflicting components of existence is destroyed, man loses the very foundation of his existence, i.e. the family – in which the sexual element is the spice; it is the yeast in the dough but it is not the dough.  Isolating it, turning it into a reality that one relates to independently, undermines the harmony of the basic whole.

At this point, the need for the self-sacrifice of the zealot arises.  This is the kana’i, the one who is needed to perform an act in stark contradiction to all things harmonious.  Only this can restore balance, and restore harmony: Fighting fire with fire, sweetening the bitter water with a bitter tree, and “from bitter came forth sweet”.  A curse is turned into a blessing, after the rasha has turned blessing (family harmony) into curse.  A one-time, abnormal action returns the crown to its original splendor.

In order to grant legitimacy to such a non-standard act, to an act that is normally dangerous and destructive in the extreme, the Creator must come Himself in all His glory, and bestow the secret of harmony upon Pinhas – shalom.

We must not forget that fanatic zeal is the antithesis of harmony, and is legitimate only when performed in utter purity of midot, as a once-only act of self-sacrifice for the sake of Heaven.  It is not compatible with the Jewish perception, which aspires toward unifying opposites.  Such unification can only be grown in the natural ground of the family unit, an entity built upon and supported by unity.  Withdraw unity by isolating any single component, and you cause the entire edifice to collapse.

Tslofhad’s daughters – who, as women, tended more strongly toward an authentic and healthy reality than men, who tend more toward the virtual – came to remind Moshe that one must beware of the tendency to turn the Torah itself into a virtual reality.  This matter was not entirely clear even to Moshe himself.  He needed to refer the problem further, to the Creator Himself in all His glory, Who answered – yes, these women are justified in their claim.

Serving the same purpose – of relating to reality as a whole, rather than to pieces of it as virtual realities – is prayer, a substitute for the sacrifices: “We shall pay the bullocks of our lips.”  All the components of reality are gathered together to connect with their heavenly source.  This was the purpose of the sacrifice – to express the bond that connects all physical matter with the spirit.

The law, too, is a virtual condition.  Citizens that relate to the law can be divided into different types.  A primitive type (whose brute-force picture of reality is every bit as virtual as the abstractions of the law) finds it difficult to step out of his own virtual situation in order to adjust to a new virtual situation that he is not used to.  He attempts to impose his own virtual reality upon the virtual reality of the law.  He talks back to the judge, in order to prove that his virtual is more powerful than the judge’s virtual.  He is charged with contempt of court, he runs afoul of the law; he never manages to comprehend the virtual logic of the law.  As the powerful one within his own primitive patriarchal community, he is quite incapable of taking legal procedure seriously.  He feels no anxiety over the fact that he must stand trial, for after all he is all-powerful.  It is only the legal professionals who are able to make their own virtual reality overlap the virtual reality of the law.

Fanaticism is alien to the Torah perception, because by his zeal, the zealot creates a virtual situation.  He draws one single element out of the overall harmonious picture, and destroys it thereby.  Pinhas’ act addresses the same “yeast in the dough” that Bilam pulled out in order to create a virtual reality, only Pinhas attaches a negative attitude to it.