ספר במדבר

Numbers 25,11. Pinchas, son of Eleazar son of Aaron the ‎priest has turned back My wrath.” Before elaborating ‎on this verse we need to explain a verse in Lamentations 111,8: ‎חטא חטא ירושלים על כן לנדה היתה‎, “Jerusalem has become guilty of ‎a sin; this is why she has become a wanderer (homeless).”We ‎have a rule that if someone commits a transgression of G’d’s law ‎due to his natural urges having proved too strong for him to ‎resist them, he is not subject to the same penalty as someone ‎who has committed the same transgression in order to anger G’d. ‎Concerning this distinction between penalties for the same ‎transgression the prophet Ezekiel 20,38 speaks when he says: ‎וברותי מכם המורדים והפושעים בי מארץ מגוריהם....ואל אדמת ישראל לא ‏יבוא וידעתם כי אני ה'‏‎ “I will separate from you those who rebel and ‎those who transgress against Me; but to the soil of Israel none ‎shall come. Then shall you know that I am the Lord.” The ‎prophet makes clear that sins committed deliberately in order to ‎anger G’d are not subject to repentance, i.e. the penalty of exile, ‎for example, will not be reversed not even for a single one of such ‎sinners. Not so when the sin was committed merely due to the ‎weakness of the flesh to resist temptation.‎Jeremiah, in the above quoted verse from Lamentations, ‎makes it plain that the sin of Jerusalemites which was punished ‎by exile, i.e. ‎נדה‎, was not due to the arrogance of defying G’d ‎deliberately, but was only the result of weakness of the flesh; ‎hence in due course repentance of the sinners or their ‎descendants, will enable them to return to their ancestral ‎homeland. The prophet chose the word ‎נדה‎ to describe the ‎Jerusalemites’ punishment, as we all know that a woman who is ‎temporarily out of bounds to her husband due to her menses, will ‎in due course, after immersion in a mikveh, ritual cleansing ‎bath, be reunited with her husband. The purification of such a ‎woman is unique amongst cleansing from ritual pollutions, as in ‎all other cases of ritual pollution, -for instance the contact with ‎any of the eight ‎שרצים‎, “teeming creatures (listed in Leviticus ‎chapter11)- the source of the contamination is not rehabilitated ‎by the ritual bath, only its victim.‎In fact there exists blood of a menstruating woman or a ‎woman that has just given birth which is not considered as ‎contaminated at all. It is axiomatic (in our faith) that when G’d dispenses of His ‎largesse to us this is invariably for our benefit, though sometimes ‎it is not immediately manifest.‎[If I understand the author correctly, he means that ‎both these categories of blood come forth from the same part of ‎the woman’s body. When a woman gives birth this indicates that ‎her ovulation resulted in something positive, a new life, this is ‎proof that what turns into something polluted when not ‎resulting in pregnancy, can become the opposite when resulting ‎in pregnancy. Ed.]‎The prophet hints at this when describing Israel’s state after ‎the destruction of Jerusalem as that of a ‎נדה‎, the message being ‎that just as a woman having her menses may become pregnant ‎during her next cycle, so this status of the Israelites is also ‎capable of resulting in redemption in due course.‎When we apply this concept to the deed of Pinchas who had ‎spilled Jewish blood, (without legal action having preceded his ‎act), enabled the Israelites to realize that the result of his act was ‎the saving of an untold amount of more Jewish blood. What had ‎at first glance appeared as an act of cruelty, turned out to be a ‎vehicle for thousands of acts of loving kindness.‎ ‎