Parshat Pinchas: Evening the Scales

Parshat Pinchas picks up where the narrative in Parshat Balak ends. A Kohen, Pinchas, watches as a Jewish man blatantly brings a Midianite woman into the camp to sleep with her, and kills them both. This is amidst a tense time. Am Yisrael has again fallen to idol worship, this time by the influence of the Midianite and Moabite people surrounding them. A plague breaks out among the people. It is only Pinchas’ action that stops the plague. At the beginning of Parshat Pinchas, Hashem tells Moshe, “Pinchas, son of Eliezar son of Aaron the Priest, has turned back my rage from Bnei Yisrael by zealously avenging my vengeance among them so that I did not destroy them in my zealousness.”1

Rashi comments on this verse to say, “he displayed the anger that I should have displayed. The expression קנאה always denotes glowing with anger to execute vengeance for a thing.”2  Essentially, Pinchas settled the score for Hashem. There was a balance that needed rebalancing and Pinchas performed the deed. Is it not the nature of balance that rebalancing is always inevitable? The question is, are we the ones to cause the rebalance, or does Hashem (or more accurately, Hashem’s expression through nature) have to do it?

Taoism calls this concept harmony, the Tao, the ying-yang. Our world exists in duality, always in pairs. The ebb & flow of the ocean, masculine and feminine, dusk and dawn, hidden and revealed. We oscillate between them in everything: hungry and not hungry, connected and not connected, dark and light. On both sides are extremes, within the middle sits balance, harmony, the Tao, the natural order, Hashem’s Will. It is towards this middle that things always trend. Wolves and caribou roam the North Alaskan plains. When the wolf population rises due to a plethora of caribou, they eventually grow too numerous and the caribou again become scarce. The wolves die giving way to the caribou to proliferate. This causes a rise in the wolf population and the cycle continues. The Rambam writes, “Good deeds are such as are equibalanced, maintaining the mean between two equally bad extremes, the too much and the too little…likewise, generosity is the mean between greed and free-giving; courage, between recklessness and cowardice; dignity, between haughtiness and weakness; humility, between arrogance and self-abasement; contentedness, between lust for money and laziness.”3

What defines this point of balance? It is the place of least energy, that is to say, the most natural place to exist. We cannot exist in the extremes for very long. Consider the example of eating. One extreme is starvation. For how long can you not eat? The other extreme is gluttony.  For how long can you gorge? To hold either side takes enormous energy. The longer one does it the more consuming it becomes. Eventually, the energy demands a return back towards the middle. Oftentimes, the degree it was pulled to one side necessitates an equally powerful swing to the other. It is like a pendulum. Hashem’s Will always prevails. The pendulum never stays suspended in either extreme. It demands rebalancing.

Existing in either extreme is exhausting. The reality is that we stay stuck in extremes for one of two reasons: either we hold on to them or we resist them. These might sound like opposites, but in reality, they are two sides of the same coin. We are placing our concerted focus, our attention, on fighting Hashem, i.e. reality. In one case, we are resisting reality. We don’t like it and we want it to be different. The other occurs because we are clinging to it because we don’t want it to go away. We want it to always be like this.

We don’t realize is that it is inevitable that the extremes will pass. It is the impermanent nature of the world that things come and go. Events happen and pass. Thoughts and emotions wash through us and then leave. We have to realize that the balance point is achieved not by clinging to balance but by letting go of imbalance. If we don’t feed either extreme then we will naturally return back to the center. This means staying aware even in the extremes. Always we must return to asking ourselves, “who is the one that is aware of this disturbance?” The observer is your soul, to watch from your soul takes no energy at all. When one is caught in a rip current, one doesn’t swim against it. One will kill themselves doing so. Rather, one realizes one is in a current, relaxes, and lets the current take them until it takes no energy at all to get out.

Thus, we must notice when we are caught in the current of negativity, of imbalance, and we must let it flow through us. We must let go of any voice not serving us, not bringing us closer to connecting. רע (bad) means disconnection. טוב (good) means connection. This is such a fundamental concept in Judaism. There are no good and bad thoughts, no good and bad thinking patterns. There are ways of being that connect you and ways of being that distance you from harmony, from Hashem. You never HAVE to think disconnecting thoughts or do disconnecting things. Even if you feel that the thought or action is critical to your safety, success, or worth, that is an absolute lie. “I have to constantly judge myself (which leads to me feeling disconnected) or I’ll never do anything.” That is a lie. That is dragging the pendulum far to one side. Let go and trust that when you’re not spending so much energy constantly evaluating and hating parts of yourself, you will be filled with such light and passion that productivity will flow out of you with little effort at all. This even applies to holy actions. How long can one last praying three times a day if one hates it? Even if one knows that they should, it is not motivated by love, there is imbalance and a rebalance is inevitable.

Events in the world often have the ability to unbalance us. We let them do this to us. “I have to be angry now because that person did something wrong and if I let them off this time by not being angry, they’ll always take advantage of me.” We feed this feeling and imbalance by thinking about, by strategizing, by trying to make sure we never feel that feeling again. We have a choice. We can rebalance ourselves by letting go, by understanding that living with emunah means freeing our mind from the constant responsibility of protecting us from the natural flow of reality. Or we can wait until Hashem rebalances us. This means that we keep getting triggered, keep getting hit, again and again and again until we are so exhausted and defeated that we simply do not have enough energy to hold on to the lie anymore. Those are the options.

As Michael Singer writes, “You are merely an instrument...participating in the harmony of balance. You must reach the point where your whole interest lies in the balance and not in any personal preference for how things should be.”4 You simply encounter life and watch as it unbalances you, and then you rebalance. You rebalance by just ceasing to put so much energy – attention, thoughts, and actions – into the extreme. You don’t even have to understand why you are suddenly imbalanced. It’s enough to simply see it and let it go. Slowly, literally with Hashem’s help, you become a master of balance. A whole hurricane can blow outside and you will sit like a great cedar, strong and centered. That is what it means to be a tzaddik or tzaddikah. It means that nothing can break your centeredness. It means that no matter what unbalancing wind blows, you only see the gentle hand of Hashem guiding you back towards balance.

Tshuva is the act of rebalancing. In the Mishne Brura, we are told that we should do an accounting of our day before going to sleep. This is our time of rebalancing. It is our time to reflect back on the day and determine whether we stood in the place we wanted to stand.5 When we perform these recalibrations, then Hashem doesn’t need to do it for us. When we acknowledge those places where we are too far to one extreme then we can recorrect ourselves. The plague does not have to come to do it for us.

The ultimate balance is to live in the present, the point between the two extremes: the past and the present. The present moment is beyond judgment, beyond comparisons. In the present moment, there is no such thing as not enough time. Think of what it means when we say we are busy? When we say we are busy we merely mean to say we feel busy. Life is always just a constant stream of events. What is it about this particular stream of events that have forced us to feel busy? What we mean then when we say we feel busy is that this stream of events draws our consciousness into it and we lose perspective. Balance means constantly returning to that place of awareness. Why shouldn’t you be able to just stand and watch the winds blow, with a smile on your face and full faith that you will be just fine. We can stay balanced in the face of the storm of uncertainty. There is also a big difference between resting and distracting. Our world mixes up the too. The present moment is the only place we can truly heal. Thus, resting means allowing ourselves to relax and stop thinking, to just experience the moment fully. Any activity that returns our awareness to the now relaxes us: breathing, yoga, dancing, meditating, playing music, etc. The pendulum returns to its balance point. Distracting is what most people do today instead of resting. We switch on screens so that we simply won’t have to deal with the present moment. We lose ourselves for an hour in a Netflix special just so that we can escape the uncomfortability for an hour. But all we’ve really done is stretch the pendulum further to one side. We feel it the minute the screen goes off.

It is our birthright to be balanced. Being balanced is an internal state that reflects itself on your external reality. Balanced people live balanced lives. Balanced people stay balanced even when life tests them. It is the nature of this balance point, the Tao, is that we can never know it truly. One can never know Hashem. One merely comes to recognize imbalance and through letting go of it comes to embody that center point. There is nothing to do but to wake up, now and forever, again and again each time that we fall asleep. There is no higher work, no more profound purpose towards which we can direct our will. Each time we rebalance we come to recognize the path back more easily. May we all merit to live balanced lives, to be agents of balance in the world, and to remember that anything that ever happens to us is simply Hashem bringing us back to the point of Ain Sof.

Optional Exercise:

Explore with curiosity what it feels like to be balanced or imbalanced. Don’t search for balance. Just come to recognize what imbalance feels like. When you notice it, close your eyes and just stand in it. Grit your teeth if you have to. Watch how it tells you to do ANYTHING but feel it. It will tell you to distract: check your phone, eat, sleep, just don’t feel it. So do exactly what it doesn’t want, feel it. Watch it. How long can you stand in it? Can you watch disbalance from a place of balance? Can you be aware that part of yourself is balanced and disbalance is swirling around it? When you do this, you reclaim yourself.

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