Parshat Pinchas
The show Mary Tyler Moore was a groundbreaking program. The challenge Mary Richards – Mary Tyler Moore’s character – faced was that of being a single woman working in a professional capacity in a newsroom where all the other prominent faces were male, and where being unmarried was viewed with a jaundiced eye. How was, as the theme song would have, she going to make it on her own? The question seems absurd today, but fifty years ago, in a pre-egalitarian world, it made perfect sense.
The Torah portion, Pinchas, also contains a section about a group of five daughters trying to “make it on their own.” In Numbers 27:3-4, we read that these brave women stood before Moses and Aaron to insist that, in the absence of male heirs, they be granted a landed inheritance on par with men. “Our father died in the wilderness. He was not one of Korah’s faction, who banded together against G-d, but died for his own sin; and he has left no sons. Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!”
To an ancient audience, this probably sounded like the height of chutzpah. The idea of women being equal to men was – well, revolutionary.
The 11th century midrash Bamidbar Rabbah (21:10) makes an even more radical claim. Women weren’t merely equal to men, but in some circumstances, they behaved better.
“So, all the men took off the gold rings that were in their ears.” (Exodus 32:3) Thus, the women did not take part in making the golden calf. So also, in the case of the spies who had spread slander (according to Numb. 14:36): “When the men returned, they made the whole congregation murmur against G-d.” A decree was issued against the men, because they had said (in Numbers 13:31): “We are unable to go up against these people, for they are stronger than we are.” The women, however, were not with them in their counsel…This is why this portion is written adjacent to the death of the generation of the wilderness, as it was there that the men breached the covenant, and the women repaired it.
In other words, the two great sins of the wilderness generation – the construction of the Golden Calf and the negative report of the ten spies – were the province of men alone. This fits in with a broader idea in rabbinic literature that women typically act in a more restrained fashion than men. And as such, even in antiquity they could enjoy at least partial equality with men.
No word on whether they tossed their hats in the air upon getting a positive response to inheriting their father’s estate.
Rabbi Scott Hoffman
