18 July, 2025 10:06 | Soul of One Jewish Folk

Here is the **full transcription** of the recording entitled **"Voice-250718_085831.mp4"**:

> A lot of people like to see this Parsha as an example of, hey, see, if you’re violent and you commit murder or you kill somebody and it’s supposedly for God’s will, you’ll get the covenant of peace. But Phinehas is a one-time thing. I’m not sure you’re supposed to draw the conclusion that anytime you do violence that God’s going to give you the covenant of peace.

> People like to draw this example from the Torah and say, see, in the Middle East you have to act violently, otherwise our enemies won’t listen to us and they won’t, they won’t comply. I’m not 100% sure I agree. Well, you know what? I’m 100% sure I don’t agree. I don’t agree with that assessment. And sometimes actually, I know people say that I’m naive, but anyhow, we have other things going on in the Parsha.

> We have, of course, another census. We have the division of the land. We have Moses not knowing a Halakha, which is an interesting thing for us to think about—where there’s daughters who don’t have any brothers come to Moses and say, hey, just because we don’t have brothers, are we not supposed to get any land? Which is a valid question and surprising it never came up before… I mean, I guess we didn’t have the division of the land before that. So… but just in general inheritance, you’d have thought it would have come up before because people died in the 38 years.

> This story takes place right before we get into Eretz Yisrael, before Yeshua Bin Nun. It actually talks about the **transference of power**, which is another topic. So, anyways, before we get the transference of power, we have this question that comes before Moses about inheritance, which one would have thought would have come up before—that whether or not women should get anything if they don’t have brothers. That would have been something that you would have thought somebody would have asked or the Torah would have brought to us before.

> So then, that’s the same thing one could say about all the offerings. So we have the **daily offerings**, the **double offerings on Shabbat**, we have all the **Hagim listed**. How come none of these things were mentioned earlier? This is 38 years into the desert. Were not the Jews doing these holidays and having daily offerings when they had the Mishkan in the desert? So why are we like learning about this now—that there’s daily offerings and twice on Shabbat?

> I would have thought that that would have been something we would have learned right after, or at Har Sinai, or in Mishpatim, or one of the earlier books that takes place — one of those parts of the Torah that takes place before the sin of the spies and we’re left wandering for 38 years. Again, these Halakhot that we’re learning, or these Parshiot or verses are all taking place right towards the end of our journey in the desert. So one has to think about that.

> The **transference of power**—it’s interesting, you know. So Moses apparently has to… God wants like—what God wants is Yeshua Bin Nun. We don’t see any resistance on the part of Yeshua Bin Nun, unlike all the times that Moses resisted. Yeshua Bin Nun… but God does seem to ask, according to Rashi—or maybe Moses—God seems to be like, well, make sure that, you know, Yeshua Bin Nun—you have to convince him. You actually have to convince Yeshua Bin Nun to do it.

> But we never hear Yeshua Bin Nun’s opinion about it. We don’t see him ever asked if he wants to be the leader, and there’s nobody else ever proposed. Nobody else is ever suggested by the Torah or by Moses. So what if Phinehas didn’t want to do it? What if he wasn’t capable? What if the people didn’t want him? Does it matter what the people want? Do the people have a say in the matter? It’s not democratic. I mean, you can’t really say it’s a democracy when God’s the one choosing.

> And Moses putting his hands on him is like the **visual transference of power**. Now, we know that nobody has the same prophecy as Moses. But Yeshua Bin Nun does get, I guess, as close as possible. I think Shmuel HaNavi has a high-level prophecy, and even Bilaam has an extremely high-level prophecy according to Meforshim. But Yeshua Bin Nun is, I think, like second to Moses in the list of prophetic vision powers in terms of clarity of vision—according to most commentators on the Torah.

> And it’s important that Moses puts his hands on him. So this is this idea of **semikhah**, which they actually tried to revive in Tzfat in the 1600s. There’s a whole thing about it where they tried to revive it, and that’s one of the reasons people claim that we don’t have a Sanhedrin now, and that the rabbis that we have today are not exactly the same level as, you know, the rabbis or the leadership that was with semikhah—which is literally laying their hands.

> There was an *unbroken chain* of Moses laying his hands to Yeshua, and then Yeshua to other people, etc., etc. I think it’s detailed in Pirkei Avot, and also the Rambam brings down a list of all the direct laying of hands that went on for thousands of years and then, of course, was interrupted due to our exile, our long exile.

> But now that we’ve returned back to Israel, I think this has been a question that’s been going on since the 1800s, 1890s—that the rabbis in Israel—I don’t think it was only in the 1600s that they thought about it—when there were great rabbis in Tzfat, including the author of the Shulchan Aruch, Yosef Karo. I think he and the Ari wanted to reestablish the Sanhedrin and even… they thought about it, but then I guess it was turned down because the Sanhedrin is supposed to be in Jerusalem and not in Tzfat.

> There was actually a dispute that resurfaced with Rav Kook, z”l, about the seat of power—should it be in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem? There was sort of a dispute, kind of a rift between Rav Kook and the leadership of the rabbis of Jerusalem about whether or not… who… where the seat of power is, and where halakha can emanate from.

> So Yeshua Bin Nun is an interesting character — interesting person that we should think about more. So the Torah he had already learned up to that point wasn’t enough; he had to also have *prophetic vision*.

> And there’s the role of the **Urim and Tumim**, this light system vest that the Kohanim had. That was also supposed to tell us when to go to war. Why would you need that when you have prophecy still existing? And it also shows that, yeah, see, war is not something that you just rush into.

> And you don’t want to have a bunch of—a vast majority or even a minority—of your society acting like Phinehas, running around and stabbing people. Now, according to many or most of the Meforshim on this, the thing with Phinehas, if either one of the people who got killed had tried to defend themselves at any point, they would have been justified. Because if someone is trying to kill you, you’re allowed to kill them. So these two people who were copulating were doing it in front of the entire people, and they literally had to be—in accordance with Rambam—actually in the act itself. There couldn’t have been a break. There couldn’t have been a pause. He literally had to be conjoined with her at the very second of getting speared.

> So if there had even been a short pause—if he had not been inside her, for example—it would have been murder. I mean, the margin of error for Phinehas was astronomically small.

> Anyhow, so I don’t think we should take the story of Phinehas running and killing these two people as a *reshut* (permission) to go around killing people when we want to have peace. But, you know, people love to draw their own conclusions from the Torah. I’m sure a lot of people are like, see, look what the Torah says—we should be more like Phinehas. We should just go around doing—you know—we should act strongly in the Middle East…

> I know it’s like the easy thing to think, and I mean, there is a time for war, and there’s a time for peace. I think Shlomo HaMelech writes that, right?

> So the parsha wraps up where basically the last sentence, the last few sentences of the Parsha is that Moses does everything that God wants.

> And so, I think like that’s a giant message of the Torah—that you know, we’ve spoken about this many times—the role of **free will**. I honestly don’t know if we even have free will… Everything that we think is free will, or is our will, is actually God enabling it to happen because nothing exists without God.

> So we’re kind of just supposed to do the right thing. I mean, not *supposed* to. It says we *should* do it, right? And what are the right things to do? The *mitzvot*—the ones that we’re supposed to do—and the things we’re not supposed to do, we’re not supposed to do those things.

> There’s a list and we’re just supposed to understand what the list is. Now, of course, it needs **interpretation** because it says “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” but all the Meforshim come and say that it’s supposed to be monetary. So you need oral explanations of the written verses.

> We’re not supposed to be biblical literalists. We’re not supposed to read the Torah and always take it exactly for what it says because if we did, we’d be cutting people’s hands off and taking people’s eyes out—which none of the rabbis want us to do. The Talmud, all the halakha, all our great tzaddikim who always understood the Torah, understood that we’re not always supposed to take the Torah literally.

> You have to have **witnesses**, and you have to be **warned**, and there’s a whole **system of judgment** in place. And judgment’s supposed to be here.

> **The Torah is not meant for angels**. The angels don’t need the Torah. **Humanity** needs the Torah.

> So, that’s… I think I’ll end with that.