Rabbi Raymond Harari was an extraordinary Jewish educational leader at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York for four decades. He could see potential in people that few others could—and often more than people could see in themselves. Through that gift, he inspired generations of students and colleagues to become more than they thought possible.
Rabbi Harari's gift can help us understand a curious phrase in this week's Torah reading. The portion is named Pinchas, after the grandson of Aaron. One of the nation's leaders publicly sinned with a Moabite woman. Pinchas stepped forward and drove a spear through both. This violent act not only stopped the sin but halted a plague that had broken out as a result.
God's response in this week’s parsha is puzzling. God instructs Moses to give Pinchas a covenant of peace. Why?
The answer, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests, lies not in what Pinchas did but in what God saw in him. Later in life, in the days of Joshua, it is none other than Pinchas who emerges as a man of peace. His skilled diplomacy helps avert a civil war between two and a half tribes and the remaining tribes of Israel (Joshua 22). How extraordinary that the young passionate zealot becomes the peacemaker who allows cooler heads to prevail.
Perhaps that is precisely the message God is delivering to Pinchas: Today, you acted with the fire of zealotry. Yet I see in you something others cannot see—the capacity, one day, to prevent violence rather than initiate it. The covenant of peace is not a reward for what Pinchas did. It is a recognition of—and a challenge to—who he could become.
The Sages captured this kind of vision in a striking Talmudic dictum: "Who is the wise man? He who sees that which is not yet born." True wisdom is not simply the accumulation of knowledge. It is the ability to perceive possibility.
The Sages teach that the Torah shows us God's thoughts and actions so that they may serve as a model for our own. Just as God is described as merciful and compassionate, we are called to be merciful and compassionate. And so just as God looked at Pinchas not only as he was, but as he could be, we are called to do the same for the people around us.
This is not easy. It requires the willingness to look past someone's worst moment, their roughest edges, their most impulsive act, and ask: what might this person yet become? It is the vision of the educator, the mentor, the parent, the friend who believes in us before we believe in ourselves.
We are all Pinchas in some moment of our lives—seen more clearly by someone else than we can see ourselves. The question the Torah leaves us with is equally powerful: who in your life is waiting for you to see them that way?
