During Chanukah we will retell the story of Mattisyahu and his five sons whose rebellion against the mighty Seleucid Greeks began with Mattisyahu killing a Hellenized Jew bowing down to an idol. And it was the kana’us (zealousness) of Pinchas that turned Hashem’s wrath from the Jewish people after Zimri and Kozbi defiled the Mishkan. So there is a form of kana’us that is not just permissible but praiseworthy in the extreme.
Yet the Torah clearly recognized the dangers of kana’us. The din of kano’im pog’im bo is a halachah that is not taught — if you need to ask you are not the one to act. The Torah specifically relates Pinchas’s descent from Aharon HaKohein writes Rav Chaim Shmulevitz to teach us that only one filled with Aharon’s quality of pursuing peace and overwhelming love of every Jew can fill the role of the kanoi. Anyone who does not act out of that closeness to Hashem or lacks the quality of being a rodef shalom is a murderer pure and simple.
My guess is that of the ratio of acts of true kana’us to those that deserve the most forceful condemnation is about one in a thousand. One clue: the overwhelming preponderance of teenagers — including unfortunately American yeshivah bochurim — joining in the “action” whenever violence breaks out. I doubt that a 15-year-old ordering an 80-year-old great-grandmother to move to the back of the bus is primarily moved by his care for shmiras einayim or that those chasing religious little girls down the street while calling them filthy names are filled with the requisite ahavas Yisrael.
Second clue: the refusal of the self-styled kano’im to listen to daas Torah. Even Rav Elyashiv has been assaulted in Meah Shearim. Rav Aharon Feldman rosh yeshivah of Ner Israel once told me how he and a group of other distinguished rabbanim were laughed at and ignored by a group of kids throwing rocks at cars on the Ramot Road on Shabbos.
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