Torah This Week
Parashat Emor
A very few words about this week’s Torah portion.
This week’s portion is called Emor - here Hashem is commanding Moshe to speak to Aharon his brother and to all Aharon’s family. Aharon and his sons are the ritual functionaries in the Mishkan (Tabernacle) and it is they who perform the sacrifices and fulfill this aspect of the relationship between Israel and Hashem. While there is a certain honor involved in this, it is difficult and very exacting work, and mistakes can be deadly (two of Aharon’s sons were killed in a “work accident” like this). The vast majority of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is focussed on the serving Hashem in the MIshkan (Tabernacle), detailing what types of sacrifices are offered when, how they should be slaughtered (if it is an animal sacrifice), what parts burned onto alter, which eaten by the cohanim (Aharon an this sons and family), which returned to the person offering the sacrifice to be eaten by him and his family, and which are to be burnt whole on the alter. It is a difficult subject for us to understand or relate to , and I’m not going to attempt an explanation here. Others have already done so, with more knowledge and greater jnsight than I could provide.
Last week’s parasha was a shift from all this. Rather than just the cohanim being characterized as holy, Hashem commands all the people, all the nation of Israel to be holy, “for I, Hashem am holy.” As I suggested last week, that commandant is aspirational, it sets a high bar for human behavior and also expects that we, base material that we are, will do our best to fulfill that goal.
It’s a strange concept to command the whole nation to be holy, for usually that which is holy is set apart. Cohanim are set apart by their jobs, by their need for ritual purity, by whom they marry and what they eat. How can a nation be set apart inside itself? The obvious answer is that we need to be separate from other nations to be holy, but I think the point is better made that we should know how to distinguish between the holy and the profane in our own lives, in our own world.
After last week’s parasha that described aspects of personal and especially social life that create holiness for the nation, this week’s reading focusses on how the cohanim establish and maintain holiness. Most of the mitzvoth concern how cohanim conduct certain aspects of their personal lives. Then there is a long section that describes the cycle of Jewish holidays throughout the year. Though one might expect this book to focus on the sacrifices for each holiday, in fact the text here emphasizes what makes each holiday holy. Finally, this parasha ends with a most unusual story, one f the only two narrative pieces in Vayikra. The story is one of a son of an Israeli woman and an Egyptian who gets into a fight with an Israelite man. In a moment of hatred or pain, or emotional stress, the son of the Israeli woman curses (his opponent?) using the name of Hashem. Or curses Hashem? The text is ambiguous on this and many other details here. The curser is held in detention until Moshe can inquire from Hashem what is to be down with him. The determination is that the man should be put to death, and so he is, stoned by those of the community who heard him curse.
What is there to understand here?
The first section dealing with preserving the sanctity of the cohanim warns against the opposite of sanctity, which is called hilul. Hilul is the verb of the word hol which means profane, ordinary. It also means sand, which is ubiquitous and though as a mass can take a form (a dune) or delineate a border (a beach), as individual grains sand is pretty useless and inconsequential, unless it’s in your eye.
Hol is also related to the word for emptiness, an empty space (like the empty area inside a pit), or the empty expanses of outer space. It is not that these spaces have no function or place in our experience, rather that in and of themselves they are placeholders to be filled with meaning.
The six days of the workweek are hol. They exist, we fill them with work and shopping and living and creation: doing. Shabbat is not hol, it is kodesh, holy, set apart for connection to transcendent experience. The cohanim are exhorted 12 separate times not to profane their lives, families, work, but to keep the holy part of their lives separate, holy, on a different level.
The Jewish people were granted the opportunity to partake in what the Torah says are the holy times of Hashem. This is done on one level by being sanctified by the Sabbath itself. Yes, in someways we sanctify the Shabbat, but the Shabbat is part of the intrinsic structure of our reality. Other holidays, denoted as mikre-ay kodesh, even though commanded us by Hashem, are times that we sanctify.
The final story, of the curser, is troubling, not because of the story itself, but because of the desire in some to profane the holy.
The idea of the holy can be scary. If the life and the world and humanity were just one thing, day after day, person after person, the demands upon us would be relatively small. We would live our lives in our profane materialist reality and never need to think about what it means to have a life, how we are connected to each other, to what do we aspire. Interacting with people or places or ideas that intimate something transcendent can make one uncomfortable.
And there are those who take pleasure in destroying the holy.
The Hamas attack on Israel last October was not planned to achieve any long-term military objective. They were not going to take Tel Aviv with a few thousand terrorists. Had that been their plan, they would not have spent time as they did, sowing terror and destruction, turning a music festival into a killing field. Mutilation, raping of corpses, uploading the execution of family members onto that person’s phone so that relatives could see…. no, the objective was to corrupt, desecrate, profane. To take a kodesh and turn it into hol.
Commentators note that the language of the text is that the curser kilel, (which also means curse in modern Hebrew), which is based of the root kal, which mean to make light, to make light of. He used the most holy of language, Hashem’s name, as a profane curse. You can see the similarity of the word kilel to the work hilel.
The word kadosh, holy, is similarly related to the word hadash, which means new, to renew.
There is much to learn here, but you can think it out for yourself. I would only say that we can rely upon the holiness of our people as a source of renewal. Perhaps the willingness to renew is the essence of holiness itself.