Parshas Pinchas - Personal Vengeance
Parshas Pinchas opens with Hashem giving Pinchas a covenant of peace as a reward for his act of vengeance at the end of Parshas Balak. The Torah says Pinchas earned this "because he took vengeance for his God". The act was a personal expression of Pinchas's individual relationship with Hashem, and his reward was a personal covenant. Most people look around and take guidance from others for social cues. If everyone is acting one way, then they feel comfortable doing acting similarly. Pinchas was unique. He could have looked for guidance to the national leaders, Moshe and the seventy elders who were all standing silently at the entrance to the Ohel Moed. Pinchas could have taken his cue from them. He would have been justified in assuming that whatever Moshe was diong was the right course of action that he should emulate. However, Pinchas didn’t stop to see how others were responding to the public chilul Hashem, he promptly swept forward and did what he thought was right to defend Hashem’s honor. It made no difference to him what others around him were or were not doing. All he cared about was what was right for him to do at that time. That’s why Hashem’s reward to him is because “he took vengeance for His God”, his personal God. At that moment Pinchas acted as if Hashem was his personal God and not anyone else’s. He alone did what was right in that moment for the honor of his God.
While none of us can be Pinchas, we know this principle applies to each of us as well. This explains why the aseres hadibros, (the ten commandments), are directed in the singular form, instead of to a group. The mitzvos are for each person to hear individually. They direct each of us to do what’s right regardless of what we see around us. When it comes to building our families and raising children, this concept becomes even more important. Chinuch is the foundation of our nation. The continuation of the Jewish people depends on parents raising children in Torah ways. For such an important mitzvah, we may have expected to have detailed laws of exactly how we must raise our children, yet we find no detailed mitzvos of chinuch. How can that be? The answer is that we can’t have chinuch specifications for everyone because each and every family is unique. Each child is unique. Each parent-child interaction is unique, and so the chinuch for each must be unique. Chinuch is what happens between each parent and child. One on one. More than in any other area, we don’t look around to see what everyone else is doing and then follow blindly. We learn from Pinchas to do what is right for us and our families, regardless of what others are or aren’t doing.
This summer is a precious opportunity to really think through what is important for our children, what is best for them as individuals, what is best for each of our family units, and how we, their mothers, can build our families and raise our children by doing what Hashem wants from us individually.
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