Parashat Mattot-Masse'y (Numbers 32:1 – 35:14)

Commentary

This parashah contains perhaps the most chilling three-word phrase in the Bible. We rarely pay much attention to this passage: in Orthodox worship, it is chanted in Hebrew and rarely discussed; in Reform and Liberal practice, where we generally do not read the entire parashah, a more uplifting set of verses like those about the “cities of refuge” is understandably preferred. But it is there in our Tanakh, part of our Torah, our sacred tradition, and we need to confront this material rather than pretend it does not exist.

The passage describes an expedition of vengeance or retribution, commanded (according to the Biblical text) by God (Num. 31:1-2), against the Midianite nation that had in previous chapters caused serious problems for the Israelites. Moses instructs his people to mobilize 12,000 elite soldiers for the campaign “to wreak God’s vengeance on Midian” (31:3). Stunningly successful, they “slew every male”, including five members of the royal family and the pagan prophet Balaam (4:7-8). They burned to the ground all the Midianite towns and encampments, and took captive the women, children, flocks and herds (31:9-11)

When Moses came out to meet the victorious Israelite army, he unexpectedly lashed out at them in anger. Why? Here comes the blood-curdling three words: Hahiyyitem kol nekevah, “You have left all the women alive!” (31:15). Yet the Midianite women had seduced the Israelites into idolatrous practices (25:1-5). Therefore, Moses gives new instructions: kill all the male children, kill every married woman, allow only the young female virgins to survive (29:17-18).

What are we to make of this? Commentators have tried to explain this behaviour, most recently the American Conservative Movement’s Ets Hayyim, which writes that it “can be understood only in light of the Torah’s fear that their sexually charged pagan celebrations would continue to distract and entice the young, immature Israelite people.” The simple truth is that this passage is unjustifiable, indefensible, horrifying. The Torah here attributes to God and Moses incitement to genocide, long before the term or even the concept existed.

We should remember this when tempted to claim glibly that, unlike the Scriptures of other religions, the Torah’s “ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.” With all that is ennobling and life-affirming in the Torah, with all that infused the values of Leo Baeck and Louis Jacobs, of blessed memory, there is also material that has been used to justify the politics of Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein. No religious tradition, including our own, is immune to the virus of fanaticism. There are passages in the Torah from which we must register an unambiguous dissent, and affirm our belief that behaviour inspired by such passages, whether in the past or in the present, is wrong.

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