This past week we read Parashat Pinchas—the Torah portion known as Pinchas, so named after a religious zealot who carries out a violent act of vigilante justice on a fellow Israelite and his Midianite partner in order to stave off a plague that had come about as a result of God’s wrath, which in turn had been unleashed by acts of social deviance on the part of some of the Israelites. (More details can be found in the Book of Numbers, 25).
This gave us the opportunity to reflect on what “God’s wrath” means in today’s terms. I don’t think any of us present for that Torah discussion (though I could be wrong), today imagines a God who rains thunderbolts down from above or unleashes floodwaters or causes a virus to run rampant throughout the world to punish some purported sins of a people. That was not the theological space from which we approached this question.
And yet the Torah makes clear a belief that, time and again, individual actions of kapparah—atonement or expiation or absolution, related to the word for Yom Kippur—have an effect on God’s temperament and therefore on our experience of the universe. When Pinchas carried out his action (abhorrent as it was to us moderns), referred to by that same root kapar, it seemed to diminish God’s wrath. When we as a people made monetary contributions to help support the ancient sanctuary, referred to as kesef kippurim, atonement money, it served to mitigate a wave of cosmic anxiety and yet another plague that was in the offing (Exodus 30:11-16). When, on the eve of Yom Kippur, we made atonement and the ancient priest would purify the sanctuary, it had the effect of balancing the cosmic scales, sending a wave of calm into the divine essence, giving us a fresh start for our year (Leviticus 16).
We wrestled with what this means in today’s terms. For many of us, it came down to control.
We recognized that much of our experience of the universe is well beyond our ability to control: life and death, natural disasters, the existence of disease. Part of being Jewish and being human is a profound sense of humility that, worry as we might, we have minimal ability to affect the cosmos.
And yet we also recognized that a lot can be done in the space of that minimal ability. As we are getting ready to chant this year during the Days of Awe: teshuvah, tefilah u’tsedakah mavirin et roah ha’gezearah. Profound actions, categorized under the trifold ancient structure of repentance, prayer, and acts of justice, while not able to altogether eliminate the previously-referenced threats invoked by the ominous recitation of “who by water and who by fire,” do have the ability to transform our consciousness and thereby transform our experience of the universe.
So too with kaparrah: while we don’t have the ability to fundamentally change how the universe operates, we have the ability to take action to mitigate some of its harms: staying socially-distanced, when appropriate, to limit the spread of disease; early warning systems that let us know of the onset of earthquakes and tsunamis; love for our fellow humans so that each moment lived is marked by holiness.
We’ll never make total sense of the universe. And yet, in engaging with the texts of our ancestors, we pick up the thread of the inquiry where they left off, week after week.
