The Blessing of God

The Blessing of God
D’var Torah for Parashat B’har
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

At the end of the first book of the Torah, Genesis, Jacob, weary with age and with all of life’s experiences, blesses his sons.

At the end of Exodus, with the Tabernacle completed exactly as per God’s instructions, a sacred task that involved all the Israelites, Moses is filled with exultation. Seeing it all there, every piece precisely crafted and set in its place, Moses simply turns to the people and, in a state of spiritual ecstasy, blesses them.

Now, pretty much at the end of the third book, Leviticus, it is God’s turn. However, God’s message isn’t so much a blessing as it is a living will.

So what does God say to the Israelites now? They are ready for the rest of their journey into their future. The Tabernacle has been activated, its powers tested and proven: As the People of Israel march forward, God’s presence will appear as a cloud in the day and as a pillar of fire at night—to guide them, to inspire them, to make sure they always look up. What final instructions does God have for His people at this point?

B’har , “At the mountain,” refers, of course to Mt. Sinai. It is a short portion that contains only one chapter, Chapter 25 (OK—and the first two verses of chapter 26, but who’s counting?). But in this concise parasha, God—not unexpectedly—has a powerful message for us. We are in a special relationship with God, and because God is holy, so must we must be holy.

The portion builds on a truism that is so magnificent that we often fail to fully comprehend it: As the Creator of the universe, God owns the land. The earth does not belong to us but rather to God. We are here at God’s pleasure. What that means is that we must treat the earth with the same kind of respect and sanctity that we show God. Just as we human beings must observe a day of rest, Shabbat, once a week—extending its blessing to one another as well as to the animals we use for work the rest of the week—so must the Earth be granted, every seven years, a year of rest. We must give the earth the opportunity to replenish itself, to restore its normal rhythm, to return to an existence without a taskmaster—save for God, who only willed it to exist and bear fruit. On the 7th year—called sh’mita, “letting go,” we may not till the ground or prune our trees; we may not plant, seed or sow. We may glean—take what we need for the day’s journey—but no more than that, and certainly none to be used in any commercial venture whatsoever.

Sanctifying the seventh part of Time, in days or years, teaches us that Time is no more ours than the earth is. We are granted a limited span of it within which to exit. Sanctifying Time—the holidays, the years, the days that are bound by our birth and death—means filling our tiny share of eternity with meaning and purpose.

But there is yet more. We must strive for holiness even further, beyond time and space. The image of God is imprinted within each and every one of us, and therefore our relationships with one another must be held sacred. Abuse, taking advantage, cheating and ultimately shedding blood lie at the extreme opposite of the way of holiness that God wants us to follow. If we learn nothing else from our helpless dependence every seven years on the Earth’s natural yield, it is that we are all gleaners, all of us homeless, all of us essentially renters of the parcel of land we live on. And that means we all are equal before God, our Creator. Our value lies not in our material goods, but rather in how well we carry out our charge and responsibility to redeem the fallen and help the needy. That’s what holiness—being in a relationship with a holy God—means.

The highest ideal of all comes early in this portion (Lev. 25:10): “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” This is the ultimate gift of God: The right to exist, to think and choose, to be free to be ourselves—a right not only reserved for oneself, but rather for all life.

That is our blessing from God.

As in everything else, however, we human beings have tremendous power over what we choose to do with this blessing: We can choose to bestow it further, to imbue our life, in all its contexts, with holiness. We can share the blessing with one another. We can bless the land and make it work with us, not against us. And we can fill the time of our life with blessing, as we infuse it with meaning, direction and purpose. Life, along with all its complications and failures, is filled with marvelous prospects and possibilities. What we make of it can turn it either into a blessing or else a blight for ourselves, our children, and everything else around us.

©2011 by Boaz D. Heilman

L’chayim! “To Life!”

L’chayim! “To Life!”
D’var Torah for Parashat Emor
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman


Parashat Emor (Leviticus 21:1—24:23) has God addressing Moses with regulations for Aaron and the priests.

At first reading, the restrictions regulating basically every aspect of a priest’s life seem overly harsh. Parashat Emor (“Speak,” Leviticus 21:1—24:23) begins with God instructing that a priest that may not show mourning in public, including accompanying the dead and going inside a cemetery, for anyone but his immediate family. For the High Priest, the restriction was even tougher: The High Priest couldn’t go inside a cemetery at all, not even for his immediate family! In fact, he couldn’t stir outside the Temple while he was grieving!

Why such tough measures on a human being? Could God be so stone-hearted as not to allow a person to grieve or express his grief?

The key to understanding this paradox is in the word “public.” The priest was not to show his mourning in public. For the High Priest, staying within the confines of the Sanctuary symbolized two things: First, his seclusion from the community, from the public; and secondly, his total immersion in God’s holiness and presence.

As Judaism began to emerge (around the 13th century BCE), it was an outgrowth from three prevalent cultures and religious systems: The Egyptian, the Greek and the Mesopotamian. At least in the first two cultures, there was strong emphasis on the afterlife. In rejecting this nihilistic belief, Judaism chose to focus instead on the present, on this life. The restrictions on a priest’s way of mourning (Lev. 21:1-6 and 10-12) make clear this distinction. Ordinarily, the priest’s role was to teach, to show where God was. Death somehow diminished the priest, dimmed his vision. Beset by grief and mourning, at such times the priest was not qualified to discharge his duties toward the community.

The belief that Leviticus teaches is that God, the source of life, is Life itself. God’s presence is evident in Creation, in the universe we see around us. The unformed, the void and the chaos that lie before Creation and beyond it, were understood to be where God wasn’t, where God’s presence simply did not reside.

Death was No-God’s-Land.

With the focus thus shifted to this world, Emor teaches us to value the time that we have as our portion of Life, our share in God’s eternity. Sanctifying life means appreciating the days and the years we have been allotted, filling our time on Earth with meaning and purpose. Because that’s all we have.

If human beings have their sacred times, certainly so does God.

God’s appointed times are the holidays. Chapter 23 defines and gives the major rules of the Biblical holidays. Beginning with Shabbat, we have Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, each with its own customs and rituals. Jewish celebration of these calendar events—primitive and pagan religions understood them as agricultural and fertility festivals—turns them into days of remembrance. We draw memories from the past, from days of long ago, of people long gone. We remember our past, our heritage and our traditions; we remember our own commitment, made perhaps many years earlier, say, at a bar mitzvah, or perhaps at Confirmation. And finally we remember our vows to carry our heritage forward into the future—through our own life, through our children, through our legacy.

And at such times we celebrate, we raise a glass and shout out, L’chayim! “To Life!”

The belief in an omnipresent God—a God whose presence suffuses not only what is, but also what was and what will be—has long replaced the archaic belief in No-God’s-Land.

The priests we read about in this portion were forbidden from venturing into a place they could not understand. Their job was to teach about Life, about the here-and-now. And perhaps the real lesson the Torah tries to teach us is that our answer to death, our positive response to no-being is holiness and meaning. The High Priest, though forbidden from leaving the Temple during his days of mourning and grief, despite his isolation from a loving and supportive community, was finding healing the only way he could—by immersing himself totally in God’s holiness.

The Kaddish, the prayer said by a mourner throughout his or her days of grief, has us common folk do something similar. In exalting and praising God’s name (in a prayer that never mentions the word death) we show our determination to imbue life with holiness. It is the only alternative to no-being. With our life we challenge death. With acts of holiness, with mitzvot, we defy and stand up to the chaos we see around us. We dare to be like the High Priest and like God: Wrapped in a cloak of holiness.




©2011 by Boaz D. Heilman