Pinhas puts the yeast back into the dough

(Zimri has pulled it out, on Bilam’s advice)

Pinhas blends it back into the larger picture of being human. 

[A continuation of last week’s Parasha]

“Taking the yeast out of the dough” means pushing aside existential reality and choosing instead a virtual reality.  This virtual reality is imaginary.  It relates to a single isolated element of reality that is pragmatic.  This reality is conducted as though it were a game.  Man, for man’s convenience, invents the rules.  The rules of this game have nothing to do with the natural needs of human existence. 

In these games, ad hoc activities that constitute only a particular aspect of human existence are made into an all-embracing reality of their own.  A virtual reality can be invented out of anything.  Thus virtual realities have been created out of sports, politics, economy, and even the law itself in all its glory; the law has become a reality of its own.  It determines the rules of existence, rather than serving them.

The law is a virtual condition.  The citizens that relate to the law can be divided into different types: The 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.

With science it is the same; the servant has become the master.  Science has established the mathematical yardstick as its master – reality is measured in mathematical terms – rather than employing a yardstick that is compatible with reality – with a reality that connects values to the needs of existence. 

For each of these virtual realities, one is forbidden to say that the emperor has no clothes.  Common sense has become a persecuted creature, hunted down by lying alternatives that are the fruit of human imagination.  Frankenstein turns on its creator.  The 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.

It is a case of din, judgment, detaching from rahamim, compassion.  It is what happens when God’s unifying formula is severed by man.  The Godly formula is: “He stood forth and blended the measure of compassion into the measure of justice.” 

When the urge for freedom and the urge for belonging are allowed to 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.

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. 

As far as we are concerned, there is no difference between a negative and a positive virtual reality.  Both have in common that they are elements that have been removed from the matrix of the whole, and are destroying it.  Pinhas, however, was acting according to the imperative of the moment, in order to arrest God’s wrath, in order to prevent the virtual from becoming a legitimate reality. 

Therefore, in order to put the virtual reality of male/female sexuality back into the harmonious picture of a complete reality, God creates a new creation, a sort of catalyzing element – shalom, peace.

Shalom is the new ability that the Creator grants Pinhas, as a reward for his courageous action, as a compensation for the fact that he has been forced to disconnect from his wholesome picture of reality and relate to a virtual reality, as an antidote to, and a healer of the destructive and self-destructive effects of fanaticism. 

Shalom is the gift of empathy.  It is the capacity – the wonderful ability – to penetrate the heart of another human being.  “Do not judge your friend until you have reached his place.”  It is the ability that crosses the unbridgeable gap, the fathomless divide that separates one human being from the other.  It is the ability that promises a bridge to the other, and this bridge promises mutual understanding, and ultimately “love that does not dependent on any thing.”

According to the Talmudic view that Pinhas and Eliyahu HaNavi are one and the same person, we may suggest that Pinhas was granted eternal life in order to eternalize shalom, in order to make eternal the ability to identify with another human being, for this ability is the completion of the family unit.