Many Jews around the world fasted this past Sunday. Ostensibly, the reason for this fast is to commemorate the day that the Roman army breached the walls of Yərushaláyim three weeks before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD [a]. The destruction of the city was certainly a calamity — being on the losing end of a war against an expansionist imperial power is seldom a good time — but it’s hardly the only calamity of its ilk, and 2,000 years out, I suspect I’m not the only one who doesn’t feel its immediacy in a world already overflowing with contemporary reasons to grieve. Does the Fast of Tamuz have any other meaning if we’re not that pressed by the destruction of the Second Temple?

[a] There are various other calamities — ranging from Mosheh smashing the first set of tablets to a post-Temple Roman official’s act of blasphemy — but this is the headliner, as it were.

Let’s put a pin in that.

In this week’s Torah portion, we read of a man rewarded for slaughter. Pinəḥas, Aharon’s grandson, has just murdered two people with a spear for praying differently, and right at the top of the portion that bears his name, G-d rewards this act with a covenant, specifically a covenant כְּהֻנַּת עוֹלָם | kəhunat olam | “of unending priesthood” (Bəmidbar 25:13).

Now, you may have noticed that Judaism doesn’t have priests anymore. Oh, certainly, there are people who have Kohein in their name, and in some communities these people follow extra rules and get perks like being called to the Torah for the first aliyah, but they’re not running around sacrificing goats and wearing special sashes and little golden bells, and anyway, there’s room to question how well the categories of “people named some variation on Cohen” and “people descended from ancient priests” actually overlap. Ultimately, the Biblical promise of priesthood is exclusive access to the work of running the Temple, and without the Temple, that work no longer exists — the covenant of unending priesthood with Pinəḥas is broken; it is no more.

Let’s put a pin in that, too.

G-d doesn’t always give explanations for Divine actions, but here we get one for Pinəḥas’s reward: We are told, in a speech from G-d directly, that Pinəḥas is rewarded for turning back G-d’s wrath בְּקַנְאוֹ אֶת־קִנְאָתִי | bəqan’o et qin’ati | “by his zealously enacting My zealotry” (Bəmidbar 25:11). The grammar here is a little hinky, but the sense is plain enough: Pinəḥas is rewarded with eternal priesthood because he was a zealot in the same way that G-d would have been a zealot [b].

[b] And indeed, it’s worth noting that when G-d self-identifies as a zealous G-d in the ten commandments, it’s done with this exact same root, קנא | QN’. This kind of zealotry is very central to the Torah’s conception of G-d.

In a sense, this is a moment of self-recognition: G-d finds in Pinəḥas the kind of zealotry that G-d finds internally. The covenant here is also described as a covenant of friendship, and I’m tempted to imagine G-d saying to Pinəḥas, “Hey, you and Me are alike in this; let’s be besties forever!”

I have never murdered anyone with a spear, but I have certainly gotten carried away in moments of impassioned self-righteousness and lashed out at those I perceived at the time as being in the wrong. I have been spiteful, cruel, and cutting in my words and petty in my deeds. Perhaps you have been, too.

In the aftermath of these incidents, once I have cooled down, I am often filled with a deep, burning shame over my behavior. Traces of my words become unbearable reminders of my moral failings, and the result is a ferocious desire to blot the evidence out, tamp the feelings down, and deny the whole thing ever even happened to begin with. It’s harder to sit with the truth, to grapple with my capacity for rage and cruelty, to do the inner work of changing to be less harsh in future. Perhaps you have struggled with this, too.

G-d certainly has. We can see it most clearly in the story of Nó’aḥ: G-d is infuriated by the failings of humans, lashes out to obliterate everything and start over with a chosen few, then, when the waters ebb, realizes that humans are always going to fail, regrets the whole thing, and creates a natural wonder specifically as a reminder to never do that again in future. But the temptation remains: Over and over and over again, when the Israelites don’t just blithely and uncomplainingly go along with whatever G-d wants, G-d lashes out and tries to get Mosheh to sign on for the plan of “wipe everybody out and start all over again with a chosen few”; it takes a lot of intervention from Yokhéved’s son to keep the Israelites from perishing in a blaze of Divine zealotry.

And here we have Pinəḥas perking up in a blaze of zealotry, lashing out at those he thinks are failing to conform to the Divine plan. Don’t try to fix things, just kill the bad people and start over with the remaining good ones. And G-d resonates with that and specifically singles him out. “You should run My Temple forever. You and Me are the same, buddy.” Qan’o et qin’ati.

And then, later — much later to us, but what are mere centuries to The Eternal One? — G-d cools down about the whole Pə’or thing and is struck with regret. Two people murdered for marrying “wrong” and praying “wrong”, and this is the foundation of the priesthood? Yikes. And G-d is full of shame and self-loathing self-recrimination, and realizes there’s an easy way out of all this: Just burn the whole Temple to the ground and abolish the priesthood, and then there won’t be this constant reminder of reprehensible zealotry. Don’t bother with the patient, agonizing work of grappling with poor past behavior; much easier to just roll the Roman army thru town so the streets run with blood and starving parents cook their children to eat. You can’t say the priesthood is founded on xenophobic murder if there isn’t a priesthood anymore! Easy peasy, mission accomplished, we are not taking questions at this time.

When the Romans laid siege to your city, you could surrender right up until the moment that the battering ram first touched your walls. After that, it was too late; once the walls were breached, the army would not be stopped. The 17th of Tamuz, then, represents the moment when doom, destruction, indiscriminate slaughter became inevitable. The point of no return where G-d’s annihilatory shame spilled over and dragged down a whole city, a whole people with it. The day it was no longer possible to pull back, to introspect, to find a way forward thru growth and repair instead of wretchedness and oblivion.

What did we mourn with this month’s fast? What do we grieve during these three weeks? What catastrophe looms before us on the 9th of Av? That we so often lack the courage to change and fall back into old patterns of destruction instead. That our misplaced zeal and our shame over it can both be engines of so much harm. That when we spiral, we so often drag others with us into the abyss.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]