Dedicated to the memory of the two Druze policemen murdered by Muslim terrorists on the Temple Mount on July 14, 2017 — heroes of Israel who gave their lives in loyal service to the Jewish state.

This week’s parsha is a very strange story. And the question has to be asked whenever we read one of these strange stories in the Torah is: what’s the lesson to be learned? In other words, what do we learn? The Torah is not a storybook. Everything is a lesson for life.

The Strange Blessing of Pinchas

Bnei Yisrael, the nation of Israel, is on their way into the land of Israel, and the Midianim, the Midianites, were aiming to destroy Bnei Yisrael. And the funny thing is — how did they want to destroy us? They were not shooting missiles at us. They weren’t firing guns at us. They weren’t bringing guns up to the Temple Mount and murdering people. They were doing just the opposite. What were they doing? They wanted to make us fall into relations — and so they were trying to pervert our ways and make us have relations that aren’t allowed to be had. And one of the people of Israel, one of the Jewish people, was having these relations in public, and everyone was stunned. How could you do that? And Pinchas took a spear and stabbed both of them.

And the first pasuk of the parsha says that HaKadosh Baruch Hu — God — says that Pinchas “settled my anger towards the nation of Israel.” In other words, by killing these two people — the Jew and the Midianite who were doing indecent acts in public — by killing them, God says, it calmed His anger towards Bnei Yisrael. And the blessing that Pinchas receives is called the blessing of peace, Birkat Shalom. In other words, through this act of killing, peace came about.

Can Killing Ever Bring Peace?

And the question is: how is that possible, number one? Number two, what do we still learn from that? Should we take the law into our own hands when we see something that’s immoral? What do we still learn from this? And how does the Torah at all look at peace? What is peace according to the Torah?

The World’s Definition of Peace

I have debates every Thursday on live TV in Tel Aviv with Uri Zaki, a friend of mine who is from the left end of the political spectrum, and we talk about peace. And the left is always saying, “You guys don’t want peace.” Why? Because they’re making a deal with the Arabs — giving them guns and power and land — and I say no. So they’re the peace activists and I’m the guy who wants war. And I said to him: “No, no, you’ve got it all backwards. Every time you make a deal with them, more people are killed — both Jews and Arabs. Your idea of peace is perverted. It doesn’t work. And not because you’re a bad person. You’ve got the right idea but the wrong recipe. I really want to make a great meal, but I can’t cook — I’m going to make a mess.”

So peace is not only about giving a title of peace. The truth of the matter is that shalom — the word shalom — is one of God’s names in Judaism. So we are all about peace. The question is: what are the ingredients for peace? And how is it possible that Pinchas can kill two people — one of them a Jew — and that could be called peace? And again, what are the lessons?

Peace Begins With Truth

Emet v’shalom ehavu — peace and truth should be loved. Peace has got to start with truth. What was happening here was not just the indecent things that were going on. That’s not what was being challenged. If they were doing this in their own home, they would be punished through a court case. This was done in public — at the Mishkan, at where the Kodesh Kodashim was in the desert — right in front of Moshe Rabbeinu, in front of Moses — making a statement: “Look at us.” What was being challenged here? Morality was being challenged.

Pinchas Was Fighting Immorality, Not People

Pinchas did not only kill these people. He killed that immorality.

Now, here’s the problem. People can take this in the wrong direction. A couple of years ago in the gay parade in Jerusalem, some people killed someone. That is not what this story is about. There was no hatred. It never said that Pinchas hated these people. And no, we don’t have permission to do that today. But the question is: what did Pinchas exactly do?

Things were getting blurred. Morality was getting blurred. And what Pinchas was actually doing was stopping it dead in its tracks. It’s not that this was just one person who was doing something wrong and he killed that person. No. He stopped immorality in its tracks. The point is that he wasn’t even fighting these two people. What they were doing was immoral, but that wasn’t the point. The point was he had to stop the immorality.

Why Pinchas Received the Blessing of Peace

And why was peace given to him? Some of the sages say peace was given to him because of this act of killing — so you can get into a rut and say, “Oh, I should kill all the time when I disagree with people.” No. The blessing of peace, according to some of the explanations, was that he needed that blessing of peace lest he think he can do it to everybody who does something wrong. That’s not the way. Like my father always says: “Kill them with kindness.” You want to educate people, you want to teach people, you want to show them things that are right.

So how is it possible that Pinchas, who physically killed people, is given the blessing of peace? Well, there’s one opinion saying it’s giving him the blessing of peace because when he killed someone, we don’t want that going on over and over again — so he’s given the blessing of peace not to do it again. But again, the point is he didn’t do it out of anger. “Those two people, I’m going to kill them, I’m going to show them.” No. It wasn’t even a war against these two people. It was a war for morality. And this is very difficult to understand today. We do not have permission to do such a thing today. End of story. Don’t think for a second that anyone’s getting ideas from here.

Pinchas, when he killed those two people, was not killing with ego. He didn’t kill with anger, or jealousy, or hatred, or anything else. He was talking only about morality. He wasn’t killing people because they were immoral. He was trying to cut down the blurring of morality in total. And what happened afterwards? It stopped. There was no more of this. People caught on and understood what was going on. Very dangerous, though, because people think they can do that today. No way. There’s no permission to do such things today.

When Peace Is Actually Immoral

Let’s talk about the definition of peace for one second. What can we learn from here?

Peace is not only about feeling good and getting along and not fighting. Sometimes you have to fight. Eit shalom v’eit milchamah — there’s a time for peace and there’s a time for war. And if you, at any point in time, make peace when it’s time for war, you are immoral. The perfect example that I always mention is Chamberlain. Chamberlain making peace with Hitler. That is not peace — that’s immoral. And it’s immoral because you’re making peace with evil. You’re giving them a moral leg to stand on. That is not peace. Peace has to be defined by truth.

And as Judaism says: HaMerachem al ha’achzarim — somebody who has pity on the cruel will end up being cruel to those who deserve compassion.

Peace, according to Torah, has to be with truth. It has to be with truth. It’s not just about not fighting. Peace, according to Torah, is morality. When everybody believes in morality, that’s peace.

The End Goal: Peace Through Truth

And by the way — the end game of the Jewish people is not that you become Jewish. Not at all. The Beit HaMikdash, when the Third Temple is built, is not a place of might and war. Exactly the opposite. V’kara’u lah beit tefillah l’chol ha’amim — the house will be a house of prayer for all nations. All nations. See, our end game is peace — that everybody recognizes the truth of God and the truth of objective morality. Not subjective morality, not morality that I decide today is moral and yesterday is not, or today is yes and tomorrow is no. That’s not morality. That’s opinion. I can’t today go into somebody’s house and say, “Well, you’re not keeping Shabbat, so I hate you.” No. That’s not what Pinchas was teaching at all. There was no hatred there. None at all.

And as my father says, “Kill them with kindness.” When you’re arguing with someone, the point is not to prove them wrong — “You’re wrong, and therefore you’re stupid.” No. The facts are not with you, and therefore change. You’re not representing truth, and therefore change. It’s not to prove that they’re worse than you. The point is to get them to understand the truth and have them change in order to be a moral person — not to insult them or embarrass them or anything like that. That is not what we’re looking for, ever.

So we are definitely losing the way. Pinchas killed those two people, but his emotions were much less than ours when we’re arguing with each other politically. I see it all the time on Facebook — people are attacking people personally. Don’t attack people personally. There’s no reason to attack people personally. You can attack their views, you can argue with their views, you can attack their ideology and their philosophies.

Arguing for the Sake of Heaven

And by the way — Korach. We have a whole bunch of parshiyot in the Torah that deal with this issue of arguing and disagreement. Korach, the person who argued with Moshe Rabbeinu — the ground opened up and swallowed him. Korach was the first person to create a real machloket — real arguments, and for no reason. Moshe Rabbeinu received the Torah. There’s no machloket about how to keep things. Korach was the first person to create machloket, and for no reason.

And the Talmud says that when you’re arguing l’shem shamayim — for the sake of Heaven — that’s healthy. The whole Gemara is filled with arguments. Arguments are good and healthy because we’re trying to find the truth. When arguments are trying to find the truth, that’s a fantastic thing to do. You should not agree when it’s immorality.

Where do I see that in the Torah? Migdal Bavel — the Tower of Babel. Everybody was unified, everybody was united, doing the same thing, and they built this tower to challenge God. Well, that wasn’t good. And what was the punishment, according to our tradition? Hashem mixed up their languages. They could not talk to each other anymore — because that kind of unity is not the unity we want. We’re not aiming for unity that will cause immorality. That is not good unity. That is bad unity. Good unity is when we join together — all religions and all peoples — in order to uplift morality in the world. And yes, morality has to be defined, and not by man. If morality is defined by man, woman, or child, it’s not morality, it’s opinion.

When “Peace” Becomes a Lie

So what we can learn today is that the idea of peace is not white doves in the sky and balloons and presidents and Nobel Peace Prizes. You want to talk about a bad peace? When Yasser Arafat — a man with so much blood dripping from his hands, an arch-terrorist who murdered people around the world — when the world gives this man the Nobel Prize for Peace, you know that the word “peace” has been perverted. You know that. A man who, to the day he died, was hungry for Jewish blood. A man who killed everyone he could find, Jewish certainly. Leon Klinghoffer was a handicapped Jew on a boat — nothing to do with Israel — threw him off the boat. The kids in Ma’alot — threw little kids out of third-story windows. This is a man who the world gave a Nobel Peace Prize to. This is just how bad and how perverted the word “peace” can get — like everything else. Everything can be perverted by people according to their personal wants and desires.

Even Judaism. A person can use Judaism — I didn’t make this up, the Mishnah says it. You don’t use the Torah as a weapon to dig — “Ha, I showed you so.” No. It’s to uplift, not to bring down.

And that’s what we learn from this week’s parsha. The idea of peace has nothing to do with feeling good — “Oh, let’s be united.” United is only good when it’s uniting for good, not uniting for bad.

So the lesson of this week’s parsha is that the definition of peace is not what you think, or what I think, or what we feel.

The Temple Mount and False Peace

In 1967, when we gave the Temple Mount over to the Muslims for the sake of — yeah — “peace,” that is not peace. That is immoral, that is war, and it won’t cause the world to love us. What was the result of giving the Temple Mount over to the Muslims in 1967? UNESCO saying it’s a “Palestinian” site. What is the prize of giving the Muslims open entry to the Cave of the Patriarchs and closing it to Jews? It’s UNESCO saying the Cave of the Patriarchs is a heritage site for the “Palestinians”. You didn’t bring peace and truth — you brought lies and dishonor. It’s what Churchill said to Chamberlain when he signed a treaty with Hitler: “You had a choice between honor and war. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” There is no honor in making peace treaties with evil people. No honor in that. You’re not a better person — you’re a worse person.

When you kick Jews out of their homes in Judea and Samaria and hand the areas over to people who want to destroy you, that is not a peaceful action. That is not a moral action. That is an immoral action, and it will not bring peace — it’ll bring war. And that’s been the proven track record in Israel. Every time we made a peace treaty, terrorism went up to the sky. Because as Pinchas showed us, peace does not mean “Oh, I feel good.” Peace means bringing the truth out there.

And I think that’s what we can learn from this parsha. And again, I want to reiterate: there is absolutely no permission for anyone to take the law into their own hands today — unless your life is on the line — and do what Pinchas did. Do not get the wrong message from me. That is absolutely not allowed in any stretch of any imagination, both in terms of halacha, Jewish law, and in terms of the legal law of Israel.

Giving away the Temple Mount was a big mistake — but it was worse than a mistake because it was done by an ideology, not by accident. Not by an oops. It was done by an ideology, and we’re paying for that mistake daily.

Compassion for Evil Is Not Compassion

As long as Israel is fighting wars with this false morality — as long as we’re fighting wars with the false morality of the world — “you can’t use too much power when you’re fighting a people who want to destroy you, because it’s excessive force.” There is no such thing as excessive force when they’re trying to kill me. When a guy comes into my house, God forbid, with a knife or a gun, I’m not going to pull a knife or a gun out to kill him. I’m going to pull everything I’ve got out to kill him. There’s no such thing as excessive force when someone’s coming to kill me. That is immoral — that is a lack of all compassion for the people who are the victims.

Judaism doesn’t believe in that kind of compassion. And that is what Pinchas is showing us — the definition of peace, or the lack of definition of peace.

The Torah’s Moral Standard

Now, what happens right afterwards? HaKadosh Baruch Hu starts counting all of Bnei Yisrael again. We have a whole counting of the nation of Israel — because killing someone is a shock. It’s a shock more than everything. It’s not good to kill. It’s not a good thing to kill. If we have to, we have to. And if you don’t kill when you have to, that’s immoral. Ba ba’alecha l’horgeha — if someone’s coming to kill you and you don’t kill them, that is immoral according to objective Torah morality, not what I feel.

I’m going to go a little further, and I don’t want to be the person in the driver’s seat to make the decision — but if terrorists kidnap our boys and girls and demand that we release terrorists in order to get them back, morally we’re not allowed to do that. Why? Because the terrorist is going to kill more people. But let’s even go further: they’re not letting live people out for live terrorists. They’re giving us our boys back dead — murdered — and they want us to release live terrorists. It is totally and completely immoral to do that. According to the Torah, it is wrong to do.

And that is the point of this week’s parsha — the definition of peace. It’s not “let’s blow up balloons and sing kumbaya.” Wrong.

What Do We Do Now?

So what do we do now? As long as Israel, as long as the governments of the world for that matter, are not fighting wars with objective morality and for a real desire for peace — which can only be with truth — we’re going to keep losing.

If ISIS is slaughtering people around the world and you’re talking it through in the White House or the State Department or in England or France or anywhere else, you are immoral. The world should be bombing the hell out of ISIS. And if the world is not going to do anything about it, they haven’t learned a damn thing in 75 years.

Pinchas teaches us the real definition of peace, and it’s not killing people. The point is peace does not mean that nothing is going on, that everybody is laying back and nobody’s hurting anyone else. Incorrect. Peace means truth. Peace means fighting for truth. Peace means that truth prevails — not just not doing anything. And again, nobody has a right to do what Pinchas did. Don’t think for a second that I’m talking about that. The message is that peace is not doing nothing. Peace does not mean not fighting. If there’s immorality in the world and you’re not fighting that immorality, you are immoral. That is not peace. That is cruel. That is not compassion.

You know something’s terribly wrong when Israel has enough security forces to make sure that no Jew dares utter a prayer on the Temple Mount — the second he moves his lips, they jump him and throw him off and arrest him. You know something’s wrong when they’re out there to catch a Jew praying on the Temple Mount, but they don’t catch a Muslim terrorist who walks onto the Temple Mount with a rifle. That is the mixed-up idea of peace. “We don’t want to make the Muslims angry.” What? We want to pray, and you’re not allowing Jews to pray? That is warped morality. That is the opposite of peace.

Appeasing Evil Creates More Evil

As long as Israel is not hunting down these terrorists and terminating them — and is instead being bothered by a Jew who got married on the Temple Mount — until we stop that warped priority, until we stop worrying about the feelings of the mufti on the Temple Mount and negating Jewish feelings and the Jewish history of the Temple Mount — number one, you cannot be disappointed when UNESCO says it’s not ours. Sorry. That’s our ingredient. Number two, until we stop acting like that, unfortunately we’re going to continue burying our sons and daughters, God forbid, because we’re not fighting evil. We’re trying to appease them. And that is the worst thing that we can do. And that is the message of Pinchas.

When you appease evil, you’re actually creating more evil.

The Real Message of Pinchas

Right after all of this, the parsha talks about all the holidays of the nation of Israel — and guess what a central subject was in those holidays? The land of Israel. The land of Israel. The whole rest of the parsha is talking about the land of Israel and what we do here in the land of Israel.

If we don’t stand up for ourselves — the Jewish people in the land of Israel — this is ours by right. Also by might, but by right. Historical, religious, and national right. You can take the Tanakh, the Bible — right there is our right. The whole Bible, the whole history of the Bible, everything. Nobody denies it. We pick that book up and say, “This is my right.” When we don’t do that, our enemies are fabricating history. They have no kings. “Palestinians” had no kings in the past. They had no holy cities, no cities at all. There was no such thing as a “Palestinian” nation in history. What do they have? So when we don’t stand up for the truth, the lie will prosper. When we’re shy about the truth, the lie wins.

If you are being threatened by people who say “give us your land or we’ll kill you” — kill them first. If they want to live here in peace, beautiful — live in peace. But you don’t give away your homeland to people who are threatening to kill you if you don’t give away your homeland. That is not moral. It is not peaceful. It’s not compassionate. It’s wrong.

And until we realize that the problem here is not about land, and it’s not about rights, and it’s not about “Palestine” — it’s about a radical philosophy that wants the Jews dead and Israel gone — we are going to keep on losing the most precious of all.

And that, to me, is the message of Pinchas.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Shabbat from the beautiful, stunning hills of Judea, Israel.