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.
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
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