The Courage to Change Your Mind

What the Daughters of Zelophehad teach us about leadership, listening, and why certainty may be the greatest danger of all- Parashat Pinchas

In our political culture, changing your mind has become almost unforgivable. Public figures cling to old positions long after reality has shifted, terrified that admitting a change will be framed as weakness, inconsistency, or betrayal. Social media has only amplified the problem. Every tweet is archived, every past statement weaponized, every evolution treated as hypocrisy rather than growth. Yet perhaps the greater failure is not changing our minds-but refusing to. Moshe Dayan famously quipped, “Only a donkey never changes its mind.” Beneath the humor lies a profound truth. The ability to revise one’s thinking is not evidence of poor judgment. It is evidence that one is still paying attention.

This week’s Torah portion, Pinchas, offers one of the Bible’s most extraordinary, and surprisingly radical, moments. And remarkably, it is a lesson taught not by kings, prophets, or priests, but by five women who dared to ask one simple question. As the Israelites stand on the threshold of the Promised Land, Moses announces God’s blueprint for dividing the land among the tribes. It is a perfectly reasonable system for its time: inheritance passes through male family lines. Then five women quietly step forward. The daughters of Zelophehad: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, stand before Moses, the High Priest, the tribal leaders, and the entire community. They ask a question that cuts through centuries of accepted assumptions:

Why should our father’s name disappear from among his family simply because he had no son? Give us a holding among our father’s brothers. (Numbers 27:4)

Notice what they do not do: They do not rebel. They do not insult the system. They do not reject tradition. They do not march the streets. They do not wage a social media campaign They simply reveal something the system failed to see. They bring new information.  They expose a blind spot. And then something almost unimaginable happens: Instead of defending the existing law, Moses does something many leaders today struggle to do: he admits he does not know.

וַיַּקְרֵב מֹשֶׁה אֶת מִשְׁפָּטָן לִפְנֵי ה – Moses brought their case before God.

Then comes the sentence that, in my eyes, is one of the most astonishing verses in the Torah:

כֵּן בְּנוֹת צְלָפְחָד דֹּבְרֹת- The daughters of Zelophehad are right. (Numbers 27:7)

God changes the law. Not because the previous law was wrong. Not because Moses had failed. But because listening revealed a reality that had previously gone unheard. This is nothing less than a theological revolution. Many people imagine perfection as never needing correction. But perhaps the Torah imagines perfection differently.  Perhaps true greatness is the capacity to listen deeply enough that new understanding becomes possible. If God, in the biblical narrative, can respond to a human cry by expanding the law, why do we imagine that our own opinions should remain frozen forever?

The Talmud famously teaches that every argument pursued for the sake of Heaven ultimately endures. It does not say that one side must silence the other. Jewish civilization was built not upon unanimity but upon conversation. The page of Talmud itself is an architecture of disagreement, preserving minority opinions alongside accepted rulings because today’s rejected voice may become tomorrow’s indispensable wisdom. Perhaps that is why I often describe the Talmud as the finest gymnasium ever built for the human mind. It trains us not merely to defend ideas, but to examine them, stretch them, challenge them, and sometimes let them go. Our societies today desperately need that muscle.

Israel is once again approaching another election cycle. Democracies across the world are becoming increasingly tribal. Every camp has its own media, its own experts, its own facts, and often its own version of reality. Algorithms reward certainty and punish curiosity. We are encouraged to defeat one another rather than to understand one another. But certainty is seductive precisely because it frees us from the burden of listening. The daughters of Zelophehad remind us that history is changed not only by those who speak courageously, but also by those who are humble enough to hear.

Their story is also, unmistakably, a story about women’s voices: For generations, much of history was written by men, about men, for men. Yet throughout the Hebrew Bible, extraordinary women repeatedly emerge from between the lines, not demanding privilege but insisting that justice become more complete. Their courage does not destroy tradition; it enlarges it. They do not abandon Judaism. They invite Judaism to become more faithful to its own deepest moral aspirations. That, perhaps, is the enduring lesson of Pinchas. Changing your mind is not surrender. It is not weakness. It is not an admission that everything you believed yesterday was wrong. Sometimes it is simply the evidence that you have listened well enough to discover something you could not see before. And perhaps the greatest act of leadership is not always having the right answer. Perhaps it is having the courage, when truth arrives in an unexpected voice, to say:

כן… דוברות.- They are right.

• One last thought. If Torah portions were named today, I have a feeling that Bnot Zelophehad would make a pretty good title. Perhaps in the world we are still trying to build, there will also be a  reminder that history is shaped not only by those who wield power, but also by those who find the courage to question it. What do you think?

Shabbat Shalom!