We live in a world that demands reactions. Yet Parshat Pinchas and its haunting haftara remind us that sanctity doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it whispers and we must be still enough to listen.
Zeal and the Covenant
Pinchas acts with ferocity and is rewarded with brit shalom or “a covenant of peace.” That paradox alone should make us pause. Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, zt”l, understood shalom not as a passive state but as a reconciliation of clashing truths. Pinchas restores order; this is true, but only in a moment when moral collapse had breached the covenant.
Rav Samson Rephael Hirsch, zt”l, warns us not to glorify zealotry. G-d’s reward of peace, he says, isn’t an endorsement of the spear, rather it’s a containment; A Divine reminder that unchecked religious passion must be met with equilibrium, or it will devour the very holiness it seeks to uphold.
Without prophecy, the modern instinct toward zeal is unmoored. Rabbi Zev Leff teaches that righteous indignation must be tempered by clarity. Not every gut impulse is a moral directive. When we confuse conscience with certainty, we risk mistaking personal anger for sacred missions.
The Silence That Strikes
Let us contrast with another zealot, Chushim ben Dan. A nearly silent footnote in the Torah’s narrative, yet his act is loud. Deaf and all but certainly excluded from his family’s deliberations, Chushim reacts to Esav’s obstruction of Yaakov’s burial by striking him down. Was it righteous? Was it impulse? Did his isolation sharpen his instincts or dull his judgment?
Chushim’s story cuts into modern anxieties. What does it mean to act from incomplete information? From the outside of the consensus? In my professional and communal experiences, I’ve encountered the costs – sometimes painful, sometimes irreversible – of acting without full context. Good intentions do not guarantee the right and ethical outcomes.
And perhaps that’s the Torah’s silence on Chushim’s deed: an invitation to sit with the discomfort, not resolve it.
For years, I held Shirley Chisholm’s “folding chair” parable close as a reminder that if there’s no seat at the table, I can make my own. That image shaped how I moved through institutions, through spaces not built with me in mind. It gave me courage to stay at tables that were narrow or brittle or strained, because I believed I could help widen them from within.
But this past winter, I heard a new teaching that shifted something in me: if the table can’t hold the fullness of who you are, or the stories you carry then bring your chair, yes. But don’t be afraid to walk away. Not in retreat, but in resolution. Carry your integrity with you and build again, elsewhere, with others who are ready to make room.
That insight reframed things I hadn’t been able to name. It reminded me that peace isn’t always staying. Sometimes it’s knowing when to leave without slamming the door. Sometimes it’s having the faith to trust that the still, small voice might be calling you somewhere else entirely.
The Still, Small Voice
The haftara follows Eliyahu, another zealot, into his cave of exhaustion. He has fought, judged, won and now pleads with G-d: “Kinnah kineisi laShem” or “I have been very zealous for the L-rd.” The echo of Pinchas is unmistakable.
But G-d’s response isn’t one of affirmation. Instead, G-d reveals Himself through absence:
Not in wind.
Not in earthquake.
Not in fire.
But in a kol d’mama daka, or rather a still, thin voice.
Rav Soloveitchik understood this moment as a pivot in the prophetic path. Truth does not thunder. It stirs softly and demands restraint. In the absence of Divine command, all we have is discernment. And that, in our time, is the highest form of holiness.
The Destruction We Don’t Recognize
Rav Shlomo Breuer, z”l, once asked: “Why was the duration of the first exile known, and the second hidden?” Because, he answered, we knew the sins that led to the destruction of the first Temple. But the second? We tell ourselves we know sinat chinam, baseless hatred, but we don’t know it well enough to recognize it in ourselves.
That form of hatred doesn’t often declare itself. It cloaks in righteousness. It weaponizes care. It creates hierarchies of belonging and justifies them with tradition. Sometimes, it even quotes the Torah.
Rav Yisrael Salanter’s words feel especially sharp: “The righteous worry about their own souls and others’ bodies. The hypocrites worry about their own bodies and others’ souls.”
I’m not accusing anyone but I’m wondering. How often do I – do we – cross that boundary without even realizing?
A Quiet Reckoning
Maybe I don’t want to be Pinchas or Chushim. Maybe I want to live in the space created between them. Inside the holy tension between knowing and not knowing. Where there is the humility to pause and to ask: Is this judgment holy, or is it mine alone?
I’ve felt the pull to act urgently, even righteously when something in me flared at the injustice of it all. I’ve written words I believed were for the sake of Heaven and shared them with conviction, posted them with urgency. And maybe they were righteous. But maybe they also stung someone who wasn’t ready to hear them. Maybe they silenced someone still finding their way back to Hashem.
That tension haunts me.
Peace isn’t a posture. It’s a discipline. It is relentless, inconvenient, and sometimes extremely excruciating work. It asks not what we feel most fiercely, but what we’re willing to forgo in order to create space for someone else to belong.
During these Three Weeks, we mourn not just what was lost, but what we’re still waiting to hear: the whisper of presence, the glance through the cracks. As Shir HaShirim says, “Kol dodi hineh zeh ba… mashgiach min ha-chalonot, meitzitz min ha-charakim – The voice of my beloved, behold, it comes… peering through the windows, glancing through the lattice.” We long for a G-d who no longer speaks in thunder but reveals Himself in the quiet, fragile spaces.
So maybe this year, we dare to stop demanding certainty and start practicing compassion. To choose mercy over spectacle. To unlearn the kind of zeal that destroys, even when it feels holy.
And maybe that still, small voice? It’s been waiting for us to get quiet enough to hear it.
