Clergy Sermons

Pinchas - The Broken Vav

Peace is fragile.  It is difficult to achieve and maintain. Through a subtle detail – a broken vav - our Torah portion drives this point home.

Before we can get to the detail, we have to know the back story. At the end of last week’s portion, we learn that a plague had broken out because the Israelites were straying sexually with the Midianite woman and offering to the Midianite gods.  Amidst this chaos, in the most holy place of our people, the Tent of Meeting, where God dwells and offerings are brought, utterly off-limits to anything profane, something even more shocking happens.  An Israelite man named Zimri and a Midianite woman named Cozbi engage in a public sex act in front of the whole community.  This is unfathomable!  Pinchas, a priest and nephew of Moses, takes matters into his own hands. He takes his spear and runs it through the couple.  It’s hard to process this story. Was his act appropriate? Was there an alternative?  Did he bypass necessary judicial process and create a precedent for individual zealotry that might be dangerous?  The text seems to justify his actions; the plague stops.  And then we come to this morning’s portion.

God tells Moses the Pinchas’ act has turned back God’s anger, exemplifying God’s zeal against idolatry and immorality.  In Numbers 25:12, God says, “Say, therefore, ‘I grant him my pact of friendship.’ And then God grants him and his descendants the priesthood for all time.  This is one of those moments where the Hebrew makes a difference.  The words translated as pact of friendship, in Hebrew are brit shalom – literally – a covenant of peace.  What do those words mean? Why would God give Pinchas a covenant of peace after his zealous act?  

This is where commentary gets interesting and we learn about ourselves and our world.  Nineteenth Century Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch sees Brit Shalom as a reward.  He teaches that too often peace gets confused with passivity, which allows terrible things, like the worship of idolatry or permitting inexcusable behavior, to persist.  For him, Pinchas’ actions save the nation and restore peace with God’s law, opening the door for true peace to emerge.  Might acts of self-defense and war be necessary for true peace at certain moments in time?  I believe this is true, especially in the context of Israel’s actions against Hamas, an organization devoted to destroying Israel and killing Jews. Although knowing when the time for such acts occurs and how far Israel’s self-defense extends is not easy to assess.  We have many legitimate, diverging viewpoints.

Much commentary does not see the Brit Shalom as a reward, but instead sees it as a response to how the justified violence must have impacted Pinchas. When you take a life, it injures and impacts you in profound ways. Think about the soldiers returning from war with PTSD.  The brit shalom acknowledges that Pinchas may have been torn up inside by what he felt he needed to do and addresses the emotional unrest he must have been feeling.  Now extend that interpretation: Many difficult, but necessary acts, leaving a bad marriage or toxic work environment, pulling away from a friend who is not healthy for you, have an emotional cost even though the actions are necessary.  We all need a brit shalom at those moments.

Other commentaries interpret brit shalom in a very different way, as a correction to a piece of character that needs to change.  Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, another Nineteenth Century rabbi, teaches that the brit shalom is given to Pinchas so that he should learn not to be quick-tempered.  His actions may have been justified, but how he achieved his ends was not okay.  This is the case with many of us when we act in anger too frequently. Rabbi Berel Wein writes that the brit shalom is God warning Pinchas that zealotry cannot be an ongoing behavior, that now he needs to invest himself in the challenging task of bringing peace in a different way.  The High Priest’s job is to bless the people with peace, the eternal priesthood and broken vav remind Pinchas that he and his family must now make peace his essence, speaking peace, living peace, being a vessel of peace. 

And here is where the detail in the Torah of a broken vav in the word shalom – which means peace - is a subtle and powerful commentary.  Hundreds of years after the Torah was compiled as a singular group, the Masoretes, the Eighth and Ninth Century rabbinic sages, codified every detail of how each word should be written and pronounced including the vowels which are not written in the text.  They broke the text into portions and paragraphs and determined which musical notes should be assigned to each word.  They wrote the word “Shalom” in the term Brit Shalom with a broken letter vav.

Take a look at it:

One more bit of background:  One of the rules for a Torah scroll is that if even one letter is broken, or the ink cracked, or written with an error, the whole scroll is invalid.  If we see such an error during the reading, we wrap the scroll up and take it out of use until it is repaired.  Each letter matters!  Yet here the word shalom is purposefully written broken!  The Masoretes instructed us to do something that would normally be forbidden!  This broken vav is the only place in the Torah that this happens.

Why did they do this?  They didn’t leave a manual explaining their decisions; they left it to us to interpret them.  It is that peace achieved through violence, even if it is necessary, leaves us broken and incomplete?  With this interpretation, we can name that which leaves us broken.  It is only when we can name brokenness that we slowly moved toward healing. 

In explaining the broken vav, Rabbi Chaim Ovadia offers two explanations:  First, that occasionally peace must be broken for a higher purpose, such as resisting a dangerous enemy.  This is the explanation Shimshom Rafael Hirsch gave to explain brit shalom. Second, echoing our second explanation of brit shalom, that peace achieved through violence will always be incomplete.  Peace is complex and fragile, and often broken. Peace cannot be reduced to glib statement.  It requires sacrifice. We have to be aware of the cost, because the costs can ripple.   

What else might the broken vav mean? The vav goes straight up and down – seemingly connecting heaven and earth. In the aftermath of violence that connection is severed and it is up to us to rebuild that connection.  How might we do that?  In our fractured, angry, polarized world, our individual and collective efforts to turn toward one another, listening to viewpoints we might not like while holding onto our passionately held opinions, yet not at the expense of diminishing another’s humanity, allow us to help repair the broken vav and relink heaven and earth.  It requires us to embrace uncertainty and humility as we move from rage to connection. It calls upon us to listen with heart and soul.  Good listening bridges worlds rather than destroys them.  All of this leads to richer outcomes than what fear and anger yield. Let us be vessels to fill in the gap of the broken vav and do our parts to re-link heaven and earth.

This tiny detail, unspoken detail of the broken vav speaks loudly. It helps us understand ourselves.  As many of you know, I lost my beloved mother two weeks ago.  The broken vav depicts my reality.  Brokenness is an essential part of life.  I know that, down the line, memories and inspiration from my mother will restore a sense of wholeness. My mother taught me that caring for others is the way to respond to brokenness. She also taught me to be an activist in repairing injustice in the world. We have teachers who help us find the seeds of wholeness amidst brokenness, for me that was my mother.  

I have always loved the midrash that the broken tablets that Moses smashed after witnessing the Golden Calf were carried in the ark together with the whole tablets that were re-written.  In brokenness are pathways to wisdom and growth.  The broken vav reminds us that our brokenness is holy.

I conclude with the wisdom of poet and singer Leonard Cohen, who understood the wisdom of the broken vav.  He wrote a song Hallelujah: “It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah….Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.” And in his song Anthem, he sings, “there is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Let the space in the broken vav allow us to voice brokenness.  Let the broken vav inspire us to the sacred task of re-connecting heaven and earth as we allow the light to pour into the blank space separating the top and the bottom of the broken vav.