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I always find it interesting to find parallels between the parsha and our daily lives, because I think in order for us to try to understand the greatness of our Torah we need to appreciate it in terms that we can relate to. An example, is this week’s parsha, Parshat Pinchas when Pinchas performs an extraordinary deed. It was so great that we know as a result of it he eventually became Eliyahu Hanavi. Now lets try to understand why what he did was so great and how can we relate to it in our own lives. The Torah says that in continuation from last weeks parsha, Parshat Balak Bilam was called by Balak, king of Moav, to curse the jewish people. As we know every time that Bilam tried to curse the jews he ended up blessing them. Finally, Bilam came up with a different idea that he knew would cause problems for the jews. He advised Balak to send out the women to entice the men and get them to serve their idols, which would cause Hashem to be angry with them and punish them. Unfortunately, he was right and as a result 24,000 jews died in a plague. Things got even worse when Zimri, the head of the tribe of Shimon, publicly sinned in front of Moshe and the Zekainim(the elders). At this point Pinchas who was a very righteous individual could not bear to witness the desecration of Hashem’s name and he went ahead and killed both Zimri and the Midianite princess he was with. Some might say how could he take the situation in his own hands and commit murder and why didn’t he leave the decision of what to do up to Moshe, the leader of the Jewish people. As Rashi explains, at the time Moshe forgot what the punishment was of being with a non jew and that’s why Pinchas stepped in and killed them. We also know that once Pinchas killed Zimri and his lover the plague stopped which tells us that Pinchas was correct in his action. At the beginning of the Parsha he is even praised by Hashem for aleviating His anger from the jewish people and Pinchas was even brought up to the status of a cohen and later Eliyahu Hanavi.

So now that we know that Pinchas’ actions was correct, what can we learn from this and how can we relate it to our lives? We can see from Pinchas’ actions that his sole concern was preserving Hashem’s honor that he was not afraid to kill Zimri, a respected leader of the tribe of Shimon. Though he knew that some might go against him and possibly want to kill him for what he did, nevertheless he put Hashem’s honor before his own and did what he knew was the correct thing to do. Though, in our own lives we don’t have such extreme conditions as what Pinchas’ went through, we all encounter situations where we need to go through the same thought process as what he went through. Either we put Hashem’s honor and desire first or we put our own honor and desire first. When we are in these situations though sometimes it is tempting to put our honor and desire first, we need to look at Pinchas’ strength and desire to do the correct thing despite what others said about him or thought of him and gain the strength to make the correct decision.