And the Lord said to Moses: "The plea of Zelophad's daughters is just: you should give them a hereditary holding among their father's kinsmen; transfer their father's share to them."
(Numbers 27:6)
When is it proper - a virtue, in fact - to stick to what one has said in the past, and when is it proper - indeed, a virtue - to change one's mind? This is just one of many arenas in life where there is not only clear path for the righteous, where we instead need to balance two opposing virtues in order to do the wise and moral thing.
In fact, if we stick to what we said in the past at all times, sometimes we are not only foolish, but downright harmful. If, for example, we continue to strive to keep someone alive even when doing so is doing the person more harm than good, our steadfastness in maintaining an important principle leads to our battering the patient. Similarly, if we insist on telling the whole unvarnished truth in every situation, we may insult and denigrate people for no good reason and may even violate Jewish law's bans on speaking gossip (rekhilut) and slurs (lashon ha-ra), both of which are prohibited even though what is said is true.
Conversely, if we routinely change our mind or fail to keep our word, we will rightfully become known as untrustworthy. People will no longer be able to depend on us, and so we will not be asked to do anything where it is important to follow through. So, for example, if we one day say that we will aid a particular cause and the next day say that we cannot do that or, worse, will not do that, people will be rightfully angry with us.
So judgment is the key to acting wisely and morally. We need to learn when to stay with what we said in the past and when to change that. Erring in either direction - staying with what one said all the time, no matter what has changed, or constantly changing that to which one committed oneself in word or deed - are both vices, not virtues.
This kind of thinking may be familiar to some readers from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, in which he explains and advocates the Golden Mean - or from Maimonides's Hilkot De'ot (Laws of Ethics), in which he does the same thing. Interestingly, though, God Himself models this behavior.
Aside from Creation of the world, God's central act in the Torah is undoubtedly His creation of a Covenant with the People Israel. That act can be trusted as the basis for the relationship between God and the People Israel if, and only if, the Contractor, God, can be trusted to keep His word. As the Torah says, "Know, therefore, that only the Lord your God is God, the steadfast God who keeps His covenant faithfully to the thousandth generation of those who love Him and keep His commandments" (Deuteronomy 7:9). Even in less central parts of the Torah's stories, God is described as One who does not change His mind but rather keeps His word. In last week's Torah reading, for example, Balaam tells Balak: "God is not a man to be capricious, or mortal to change his mind. Would he speak and not act, promise and not fulfill?" (Numbers 23:19).
At the same time, we have seen in past stories how God does indeed change his mind or regrets what he has done. We have seen this, for example, when God regrets having created humans (Gen. 6:5-8) and brings the Flood to destroy almost all the humans and animals He had created. We saw this also when God gets so angry with the Israelites that He decides to destroy them and start over again with a different nation, but Moses convinces him to change His mind (e.g., the Golden Calf, Exodus 32, esp. verses 9 and 14; the spies, Numbers 14, esp. verses 11-12 and 20-24).
In this story of the daughters of Zelophad, however, we see something new - that God also changes His mind about a law. There are several times in the Torah when Moses does not know what to do about a given situation and asks God to rule on a new situation (e.g., Leviticus 24:10-23; Numbers 15: 32-36). Here, though, in the story of the daughters of Zelphad, we find God changing the laws of inheritance in response to their plea that the law as it stood was unjust.
That this action by God is to be a model for human judges as well becomes evident in later sections of the Torah. On the one hand, in Deuteronomy 4:2 and 13:1, Moses tells the Israelites that they may not add nor subtract from the laws that he, Moses, is announcing to them in God's name. On the other hand, in Deuteronomy 17:9, God tells us to adjudicate our disputes before the judges "in charge at the time." The Rabbis (Tosefta Rosh Hashanah 1:18; Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 25a-25b) later interpret this verse in this way:
Can we imagine that a man should go to a judge who is not in his days? [Why, then, do we need the phrase "at the time"?] This shows that you must be content to go to the judge who is in your days. It also says, ‘Say not, how was it that the former days were better than these" (Ecclesiastes 7:10).
Following this lead in our case, Rabbi Moses Isserles, author of the authoritative Ashknazic commentary on the 16th-century code of Jewish law, Shulhan Arukh, rules that fathers may give their daughters a gift of half of their sons' share in their estate (S.A. Hoshen Mishpat 281:7, gloss), and according to an amendment (takkanah) of Chief Rabbi Herzog of the Palestinian Jewish community in 1943, in Israel daughters inherit on an equal footing with sons.
Thus in our decisions about both life and law, we must learn the critically important skill of judgment so that we know when we should stay with what we said before and when we should change that. Only then can we be both wise and moral.
Shabbat shalom.
Readers of this commentary may be interested in Elliot N. Dorff, For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007), Chapter 5, "Continuity and Change in Jewish Law.