Parshas Pinchas begins with the covenant of peace that Hashem made with Klal Yisrael through the brave act of Pinchas. What did Pinchas do? He stopped the plague that broke out because of the Jewish people’s sin with the Baal Peor. Reb Chaim Shmulevitz explains a very profound idea about how and what the Jews’ sin was. After all, the avodah zara of Peor seemed to be utterly disgusting; how could they even desire to stoop so low? Reb Chaim says that Peor represented the freedom to do anything; there are absolutely no boundaries, and one can create such a life by completely losing any human decency. The goal, as Chazal explain, was to allow other forbidden relationships that they desired.
Recently, I found myself on a tour of Spain. This was the first opportunity I had to visit famous cities like Girona, the town where the famed Rishonim like the Ramban and Rabbeinu Yonah lived. This town was where the Ramban and other select members, like Rav Yitzchok the Blind, studied Kabbalah and mysticism. From there, I traveled to Barcelona, where the famed Rashba was the rosh yeshiva and posek for four decades. Then to Madrid, which also once had a smaller Jewish presence. The next town was Toledo, where great rabbis lived, especially the famous Rosh, who left Germany to become the Rav of Toledo and whose halachic opinion became the main one throughout Spain. The Rosh was followed by his son, R’ Yaakov, who wrote the four chalakim of the Tur, which later became the basis of the main code of halacha, the Shulchan Aruch, written by Rav Yosef Karo. The next town I visited was Grenada, and lastly, I visited Cordova, the birthplace of none other than the Rambam.
In Grenada, I visited the massive palace called the Alhambra. This massive palace gives one a little taste of what is described in Megillas Esther about the palace of King Achashveirosh and the verses in Koheles that describe the gardens of Shlomo Hamelech. Unfortunately, this place was the scene of a terrible part of Jewish history.
At the beginning of 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree for the expulsion of all Jews from Spain. The Jews were given until July 31, 1492, to leave Spain. The above date (taking into account the change of the calendar from the Julian one to the present Gregorian one) was the Hebrew date of Tisha B’Av, adding another catastrophic part of history to this dark day.
When one hears about the golden years when Jews flourished both spiritually and physically, and then the dark years like the 1391 pogroms, in which thousands of Jews were murdered or forced to convert to Christianity, one can’t help but shed tears over the darkness of exile that the Jewish people have gone through. Jewish history in Spain is a combination of Jewish darkness and incredible rays of light that emerged from the Sages of Spain, who wrote the halachos that are studied daily in the bais midrash, such as the words of the Ramban or Rabbeinu Yonah, the Teshuvos HaRashba, and the Mishnah Torah of the Rambam.
The Covenant of Peace that is mentioned in this week’s parsha came after 24,000 Jews died in a plague. As we saw above, thousands of Jews were killed throughout the Middle Ages, and although we can’t ignore the tragedies that the Jews endured in Spain, they somehow created some covenant of heavenly peace.
This ultimate Covenant of Peace is something that we ask for every day in Kaddish: עושה שלום במרומיו. We ask Hashem to make peace in the heavens by destroying the spiritual angels of the seventy nations and ushering in the days of Mashiach, which we hope to see b’karov b’yameinu.
RABBI DANIEL COREN
