Parshat Pinchas Rabbi Chaim Brovender

“Reuven, firstborn of Yisrael. The sons of Reuven: Hanoch and the Hanochi…” (26: 5).

The Torah begins to count the people, tribe by tribe, family by family:

The Hebrew, hanoch-i, translates to “the Hanochite family.” Rashi deals with the literary question of why this “ite” form was not used previously in the counting that begins the book of Bamidbar, (chapter 2 and on).

Rashi offers a midrashic explanation: hanochi begins with heh and ends with the yod to spell God’s name. This means that the tribes of Israel are in a state of accord and favor with God.

Rashi adds that doubt regarding the purity of the people would be raised: “the nations of the world would say humiliating things about the people Israel.” The false claim that the Egyptians had defiled the Jewish women while the men labored would be made to slander Israel. The nations would insist that Israel had no reason to take pride in its ancestry. The Torah includes the letters yod and heh to signify God’s presence and the people’s unblemished character in answer to this anticipated problem.

Rashi has offered an explanation for the addition of the letters in our parsha and given a reason of sorts for the counting itself. However, there is still a question. Why did this problem about Israel’s ancestry not surface when the people were counted the first time? Why employ the unusual form (hanoch-i) in count number two but not in the first counting?

Some answer that the Egyptian problem was solved for the people because the births in Egypt were miraculous. “Six at one time”. It is hard to imagine that Hashem would perform miracles for the impure!

Furthermore, there is the well known comment in the mechilta, Vayyikra (24: 10), speaks of the “son of an Israelite woman”. This refers, according to the medrash, to the only case of impure relations in Egypt. There were no other impurities that arose as a result of their behavior in Egypt.

If this is the case, why should we care about the whispering of the nations about our past? We know the truth. Why defend ourselves and declare that we are the “tribes of Hashem”!

Perhaps the medrash and Rashi can be explained somewhat differently.

The nations said what they said. Am Yisrael knew the truth and were not affected by the murmurings. There was never a doubt that they were pure in the sense that the children had fathers. Everyone knew that those fathers were also the husbands of the women who had those children. This is proven by the miracles of birth as well as inferred by the words of the Torah itself.

However, after the events at Baal Peor, where Bilaam almost succeeded in destroying the people, the question of purity arose once again. After that incident, not only other nations questioned the purity of the people. Am Yisrael itself wondered if its purity before Hashem had been maintained. What had the weakness exhibited at that time done to the relationship between the people and their God?

The answer to this question is alluded to by the unusual form used in listing the names of the various families: Hanoch-i. A family surrounded by the name of Hashem.

Gut Shabbos,
Chaim Brovender

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