Parsha Poster #41 – Pinchas: Empowering questions Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad&a

Parsha Poster #41 – Pinchas: Empowering questions

Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad… Machlah, Noah, and Choglah, and Milcah, and Tirtzah. And they stood before Moshe, and before Elazar the priest, and before the princes and all the congregation, at the door of the tent of meeting, saying: “Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not among the company of them that gathered themselves together against God in the company of Korach, but he died of his own sin; and he had no sons. Why should the name of our father be done away from among his family, because he had no son? Give unto us a possession among the brethren of our father.” And Moses brought their cause before God. And God spoke to Moshe, saying: “The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: you shall surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying: If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter.”
— Num. 27:1-8

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The Daughters of Zelophehad

The notion that Jewish law is fixed in stone, unbending and unyielding and not subject to change is simply not consistent with the story of Zelophehad’s daughters. It is not consistent with the text of the Torah portion, with God’s actions, or with Moses’ words. After all, it is God himself who changed God’s own prior rule when God saw the justice in the daughters’ argument. And it surely isn’t consistent with the actions of the rabbis centuries later, when, recognizing the inherent dignity of women as individuals, they gave them equal inheritance rights under Jewish law.

That is the kind of change, the kind of tikkun olam, or repair of the world, that lies at the heart of our tradition. It is, I believe, what God commands of every individual, every community, even of the law, even of God.

Roberta (Robbie) Kaplan, a partner in the Litigation Department of Paul, Weiss LLP, successfully argued the case of her client Edie Windsor before the United States Supreme Court. Robbie is the author of the book Then Comes Marriage:United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA, published by W.W. Norton. She also is an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches a course on Advanced Civil Procedure. This is an excerpt.