Pinchas and Moshe: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Imagine the scenario. Right there, in the middle of the Israelite camp, one of the most prominent members of the establishment is locked in a passionate, uncontrollable embrace with a foreign princess. Shocked, horrified but unable to avert their gaze, the Israelites look on. Around them in the camp a plague breaks out. Rooted to the spot, they cannot move. Suddenly a young man springs into action. He grabs a spear and, with one firm thrust, skewers the pair of lovers. They instantly die and the plague ceases. This is the story of Pinchas (Phineas). It is also a tale of Pirkei Avot.

Moshe (Moses) is at this time the undisputed leader of the desert tribe. Why does he not act? We know that Moshe does not shrink from committing necessary act of violence, as we see from his killing of the Egyptian who was beating an Israelite slave (Shemot 2:11-12), and there is no reason to believe that, with his unsurpassed Torah knowledge, he had less idea than Pinchas as to what to do.

While the narrative of the killing of the Egyptian is sparse, it reveals a great deal. At Avot 2:13 Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel teaches that the “good path” to which a person should keep is one where he looks towards the outcome of his actions. Before killing the Egyptian, Moshe is already calculating the consequence of his act, looking this way and that before striking the fatal blow. Moshe exhibits this same trait when, in his encounter with God on Mount Sinai (Shemot 3, 4), he is unwilling to accept his mission to redeem his people without first working through a sequence of “what-if”s.

Pinchas is a very different character. He acts spontaneously. No-one else steps forward to kill the lovers and stop the plague—so he does. As Hillel teaches (Avot 2:6), where there is no-one else to take the initiative, whoever can do so must rise to the occasion. This principle is also seen in the decision of Zipporah to circumcise her son Gershom, spilling blood in order to save her husband Moshe’s life (Shemot 4:24-26), as well as in the aggadic and midrashic first steps into the Sea of Reeds taken by Nachshon ben Aminadav (Sotah 37a, Bemidbar Rabbah 13:7).

We cannot say that Moshe’s approach is wrong while that of Pinchas is right. This is because we are not dealing with mitzvot—commandments that usually have clearly delimited parameters. What we are talking about here are middot, ways of behaving, and their application is far less clearly defined. The performance of mitzvot ideally requires thought, understanding and an intention to fulfil God’s will. Middot, in contrast, are generally performed most efficiently when a person can train himself to perform them without any specific intention or forethought.

Although it is not a commentary on Avot, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, sheds much light on how we practise our middot. Some, like judging other people according to their merits (Avot 1:6), can only be done by thinking slowly, inhibiting one’s instinct to make a superficial snap judgment (as in Avot 1:1), and weighing up the evidence. Moshe, as a seasoned judge, might thus well have paused to consider not only the religious and political consequences of killing the high-status lovers but also whether there might have been any extenuating circumstances. Pinchas, in contrast, may have intuited what needed to be done. As a student of Moshe and his grandfather Aharon, his awareness of Jewish values would have been ingrained from youth, as was his understanding of God’s wishes (Avot 4:25). This being so, the instinctive reaction of Pinchas to the crisis before him is quite understandable.