God’s Image in Pinchas?

Perhaps like you, I struggle to see the good in some people. You know what I’m talking about.

What about everyone being made in God’s image/B’tzelem Elohim?

Yet God is violent, flying into rages, sending plagues upon God’s own people again and again.


Do we want to be made in that image?

Maybe you remember the story of Pinchas at the end of last week’s parsha; Pinchas shows his passion for the Israelite God by putting his sword through a Midianite woman and her Israelite lover.

The pagan Midianites and Moabites are seen as using their women to lure the Israelites away from their own all-powerful “God” back towards pagan gods and practices.

In God’s fury at seeing the Israelites cavorting with the local pagans, God sends a plague upon the Israelites.

The plague ends with Pinchas’ horrific act. And—God makes Pinchas a priest!

“How can God reward such violence??!” we say.

Indeed, Pinchas is seen as a hero by many Jews. His story has been used as a license toward similar violence in today’s time against Jewish and Israeli “enemies.”

Some of this can be understood by looking at history. Paganism throughout the ancient world was a constant threat to the newly forming Israelite religion of monotheism. Thus, the repeated reminders in the Bible that we are different and must keep ourselves apart.

Fear of the stranger has been compounded by millennia of violent Anti-Judiasm.

But there’s another way of looking at this story, writes Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center.

True that “The plague of violence ends the plague of sickness.”

But maybe God sees Godself in Pinchas, and  realizes that God’s own rage and violence are the wrong example to be setting.

Perhaps, as Waskow puts it, God is “shocked into shame.”

God’s covenant with Pinchas as a priest, is one of peace; literally, “I give him my Pact of Peace/Noteyn lo et briti shalom.”

Maybe this is God's way of saying, by making you a priest, you take a vow never to use violence again.

This may be a generous reading, but doesn’t it often come down to how we read—and look at—things?

I heard a recent episode of This American Life called The Possum Experiment. It investigates the basic question, “Are most of us bad or good?” Its authors wonder whether it’s better to stay on guard most of the time; having been burned, isn’t mistrust the better way to go?


Mistrust protects us, after all.

Act One is an interview with comedian and writer, Darryl Lenox (who is very funny—listen here).

Lenox has gone blind as a mature adult, giving him the privilege of being able to compare the “before and after.”

A tall, imposing, Black man who has lived with the kind of prejudice a man like him would in the U.S., Lenox is now forced to put his trust in strangers.

What he finds is that, when people discover he is blind, they are suddenly no longer afraid of him. Total strangers share intimate secrets and make him listen to confessions of all sorts.

There’s a priest who likes to have sex with men; a white cop who recognizes how his work has changed him by being on the look-out for danger always.


But mostly they’re older, white women—women who might be afraid of him under different circumstances, and now pour their hearts out to him.

The interviewer wonders, don’t these experiences make Lenox more cynical and distrustful?

No, he says, they've actually given him more faith in humanity.

Because to him, it means that we are all just “this small thing away from being exactly the same.”

May we read goodness and trust into our neighbors. 

Whenever possible, may we follow the way of peace in our dealings with those we disagree with and those who threaten us.

May we retain our faith in humanity.

And may we say Amen.