Pinchas
Pinchas – the eponymous hero or anti-hero of this week's sidra – appears only at its beginning. He is promised a covenant of peace and a covenant of everlasting priesthood because of his zealousness for God. However, the sidra mainly concerns itself with details of the names of those in each tribe of Israel, the inheritance to be given to the daughters of Zelophechad, and ends with a description of what sacrifices were made on each festival, Sabbath and new moon.
Becoming Case Law - Miriam Bayfield
Miriam Bayfield is Associate Rabbi of Finchley Reform Synagogue.
As a teenager at school I went to stay with my brother for a couple of days who was, at the time, studying law at Cambridge. My parents suggested I go to a couple of lectures with him just to make sure that theology, rather than law, was the route I really wanted to take. As I sat in the lecture I became very frustrated, nobody was asking the questions I wanted answers to. With every case that was referred to I wanted to know a little more: I wasn't interested in the divorce settlement but I was interested in why the couple were divorcing. The sentencing didn't interest me but the motivation behind the crime fascinated me.
The Torah teaches about laws in a number of different ways. Sometimes we simply have to swallow them with no explanation and sometimes we have to unpick a story to establish a law, but here we have the daughters of Zelophechad setting a precedent with a precise case of when and why a change to inheritance law was made.
The daughters of Zelophechad are often held up as great figures of feminism. They came forward in a patriarchal society. They banded together as sisters to speak up before Moses, Eleazar the Priest, the Chieftains and the whole assembly in order to put their case forward. They saw injustice and they strove to change it. Yet I am not convinced of their significance.
Many women in Torah are unnamed, thought to be too insignificant to need even the smallest of biographical data. Yet these five women are named, each one of them, repeatedly named in Chapters 26, 27 and 36 of the book of Numbers. However I do not see this as a triumph, as a way of proving their worth. This naming process diminishes the role that God plays in promoting their case and giving rights to women to inherit. These names allow the rabbis and commentators to reduce the impact that Zelophechad's daughters had on women's rights to inherit. By being so accurately connected to one particular example of a case, by having names in a detailed case we have set parameters and boundaries to the law rather than opening it up to any situations of inheritance concerning women. This is shown first in Numbers 36 where an addendum to the story limits the women's rights to marry outside of the clan, and then in Talmud Bava Batra the ruling is made more and more conservative.
The daughters of Zelophechad could be seen, and often are seen, as feisty role models in the Torah yet they may also show us that the people who shout the loudest might get heard but they don't always make the long lasting impact. The daughters of Zelophechad remind us to work tirelessly at making change and not to assume that one campaign that makes a splash will change the world.