The inkling the Torah had about Will Smith and Chris Rock
Well I couldn't not discuss it, could I?
In this space we normally look at how the weekly portion has its instructive parallels to the texts of our holy cinema. You know the posts, you've enjoyed them, you've wondered what trauma could have happened to a person that makes them apply so much textual analysis to Julia Roberts. But sometimes it goes the other way — events from the world of cinema recall what happened in the Torah.
Yes, a couple thousand years before the historic happenings at the Dolby, the Torah was already contemplating what Will Smith would do, and should have done. Intrigued? Here we go!
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I won't bother recapping at length; you know what happened. At the Oscars this past Sunday Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair — and, implicitly, the disease that caused her to lose it — prompting Will Smith to take offense. He sprang out of his seat in zealous anger and, in front of 3,000 people in the theater and hundreds of millions around the world, he smote — er, slapped — Chris Rock. Then Smith returned to his seat and gently asked Rock to refrain, if he would be so kind, from allowing the spousal moniker from gracing his lips in his holy presenting utterances. Or something to that effect.
I also won't bother with the judging: I think everyone can come to their own conclusion. (And that conclusion is: how on earth could Will Smith do something like this?) But some parallels arise from the way the actor chose to handle this event that are deeply resonant for us classic-text nerds.
There were at least two main paths for Smith to take upon seeing a person he cared about confronted in a way he didn't like. He could have struck back at him, in whatever form, privately, out of sight of a watching world. Indeed many of us wondered why this wasn't settled in just that way. Preferably verbally. But certainly privately — not, as it happened, as an act of performative, almost ritual violence in front of a worldwide TV audience.
Or he could have taken another path. He could have made a spectacle of attacking Rock, almost as though the world seeing the attack was exactly the point of such an action. That the world seeing would help them learn how not OK it was for someone to verbally come at his wife — how he would defend her physically if that was the case.
Smith chose the second option.
As it happens, these two templates were essentially followed by a pair of signature characters in the Torah.
The first is Moses. As a young man still figuring out his identity in early Exodus (2:12), the adopted son of Pharaoh saw an Egyptian unfairly hitting an Israelite. So he sprung into action, striking the Egyptian (leading, it would seem, to his death, but this is not explicit).
But what reads at first as an act of foamy rage turns out to be a little more deliberate than that. Before he undertook his action, Moses looked "ko v'acho," the text tells us, this way and that, to be sure there was no one around. For whatever reason, Moses wanted to be sure he was not visible to anyone. This was a consciously private act.
The second incident happens in Numbers 25, as the priest Pinchas sees a group of Israelites engaging in licentious behavior with a non-Israelite population in their desert wanderings. So, the text tells us, "Vayakam me'toch ha'edah va'yikach romach b'yado" — "he stood up from within the camp and took a javelin in his hand." Then he walked up and "Vayidkor et shneimhem" — he stabbed the two of them He not only went violent, but he went public. He went, a little bit, Will Smith.
The Torah does not weigh in on Moses' actions. But the classic commentators tend to side with him. They see the striking as not an act of impulsive anger against the Egyptian but well-meaning compassion, even consideration, on behalf of his brother. The motivation was to protect his fellow Israelite, and the "ko va'cho" that preceded it was not just out of a desire to do something violent and not get caught but a decision to do what needs to be done without any fanfare or symbolic statement. The Bechor Shor, the 12th century French scholar, even says this was an act of "rachamim,” of mercy. Far from emotionally fueled revenge — far from what Smith did — this was something Moses did quietly, meaningfully.
Pinchas took a different approach: he deliberately made a spectacle of his actions. And it's hard to read the text of Numbers — taking a javelin and spearing two people in front of an entire camp — without feeling some of the same sense of icky discomfort we felt watching the Oscars. Given a choice between the two paths, Moses' quiet addressing seems far preferable to Pinchas' violent public splashiness.
Ok, well that's all resolved then. Smith went Pinchas, not Moses, and that helps fuel our sense of discomfort.
But wait, the Torah actually seems to be endorsing Pinchas' approach. After the event the text tells us that God, because Pinchas "heishiv et chamati me'et b'nei Yisrael" — "deflected My wrath from the Israelites" — then "hi'nini noten lo brit shalom," "I will give him a covenant of peace, a tidy little reward.
This seems like a problem, to say the least. Never mind the specifics of the offense being reacted to. Is the Torah endorsing retributive public violence? Is it endorsing lashing out, in front of everyone, against someone who committed a perceived wrong against you or your beliefs? Is it endorsing…Will Smith-think?
Many commentators, needless to say, struggle with this implication. The Rambam has an interesting behavioral insight that the "brit shalom" was not a blessing but an antidote — that is, God wasn't rewarding Pinchas for his violence but saying that this person needs a counterweight. He may have all the right motivations, sure, and that should be taken into account. But such impulses need to be curbed, and he needs to be given an eternal bond of peace to help him do that. (Incidentally, peace is also the hallmark of Pinchas’ grandfather, Aaron, which would allow us to read this as God saying a little more of that chlorine needs to be mixed into the gene pool.)
The Netziv, Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the 19th-century Eastern European rabbi known for his poetic and psychological insights on the Torah, takes this even a step further. He says that the "brit shalom" was needed because Pinchas had a roil within him. He had a roil that gave rise to such violent impulses, and a roil that was tormenting him afterward. So like the Rambam, he says God wasn't giving Pinchas a random reward. In fact he wasn't giving him a reward at all. He was helping him — guiding him — to solve the real problem.
In other words, the “brit shalom” was a message: this isn't the right approach. And only some internal calibration will fix that.
The light thrown on our own situation by this interpretation is bright. Whether either Pinchas or Smith were correct to be offended by what was happening is in a way beside the point. In this reading, it's the tendency to public violence — of being unable or unwilling to control one's impulses in front of everyone — that needs to be reined in. It needs to be reined in because it is a symptom of a deeper problem. Not an unsalvageable problem. But a problem. The action was born of a roil and it has caused a roil. And penance can’t begin unless there’s an attempt to peacefully quiet down this roil first.
The day after the Oscars, Will Smith (no doubt at the prompting of his publicist) issued a response on Instagram.
"I reacted emotionally," he said of the events. "I was out of line and I was wrong...I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be...I am a work in progress.”
It turns out Smith was, well, he was recognizing the Rambam and the Netziv. This action was born of a roil and it has caused a roil. And penance can’t begin unless there’s an attempt to peacefully quiet down this roil first.
Hey, what can I say? Sometimes the Torah goes Hollywood. And sometimes Hollywood comes to the Torah.
Thank you for reading.