The Road Ahead: Emor.2020

The Road Ahead

D’var Torah for Parashat Emor

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

May 9, 2020

This week’s Torah portion, Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23) is the fundamentalist’s bible. Not only does it contain the strictest laws possible, regulating whom a priest may or may not marry; how he may or may not mourn (and for whom); but also such beauties as “If a priest’s daughter becomes desecrated through adultery… she shall be burned in fire” (Lev. 21:9); and the ever popular “A fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Just as he inflicted an injury upon a person, so shall it be inflicted upon him” (Lev. 24:20).

Listing the holidays along with their proper sacrifices, Emor not only prohibits any fault or blemish in the animal offered as sacrifice, but also forbids any deformity in the body of a priest who would offer these sacrifices.

And just to cap it all off, the portion makes an example of a person who blasphemes (utters a curse, using God’s sacred name), and has the entire Israelite community stone him to death.­

More than 3000 years later, this portion is an embarrassment. How can it still be there in our sacred texts, we wonder. And why do we keep returning to it, year after year? No matter that most of these laws are now moot (no sacrifices now that the Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed). No matter that already by the early years of the Common Era, some two thousand years ago, the Rabbis had already agreed to ban capital punishment.

And besides, doesn’t the constant repetition of these dreadful laws only bolster those among us who would see them as God’s immutable word and misuse them to prop up their own bigotry and prejudice?

When the Five Books of Moses were completed and sanctified, around the year 500 BCE, the injunction was made that not a word should be taken out or added to the text, and that serves as one reason to keep this portion where it is.

However, Jewish Law continued to evolve. Through commentaries, through discussions and laws quoted in the Talmud, and through responsa issued throughout the ages, Jewish law (the Halacha) has continued to develop, reflecting progress in human understanding and knowledge.

So why return, year after year, to these antiquated laws?

Certainly there are lessons still to be drawn from this portion. Transgressions bear consequences; holiness—God’s powerful and mysterious energy—can be dangerous and must not be trifled with; those who lead by example must not be sidetracked by temptations—they set an example and must therefore adhere more strictly to law and tradition than the general population. These are but some of the lessons we can learn from these chapters.

But there is more.

Why, when we recite the Passover Haggadah, do we begin with the humble origins of our people? Why, even when we stop believing in the stories of Creation as literal truth, do we still read them?

One reason is that these stories tether us to history and to our evolution as a people. We were not born—as some pagan gods were reputed to be—fully formed. Our pedigree is no more noble than anyone else’s. That is the lesson we find in the rabbinic explanation of why Adam and Eve are seen as the progenitors of all humanity—to remind us that no one is born more noble than another. We share the same humble beginnings. The foundation of even the greatest civilization is never without its flaws and failures.

But there is another lesson we can take from this portion, and it has to do with our own role in the constant evolution of our culture and heritage. When we read the fundamentalist laws of Emor, when we find ourselves shocked and appalled by their apparent intolerance, we are also simultaneously moved to fix the wrong, to right the injustices and unfairness, to ease the harshness by which we judge ourselves and each other.

We constantly seek to better ourselves and our lives. How to do that unless we have some basis for improvement? What standard or bar do we use to measure how far we have come, and how much further we still have to go?

Emor serves to remind us of our origins, of the laws that we knew at the earliest days of our formation into a people.

To see these laws as the end-all of the Torah’s teaching would do a great disservice to our humanity. The great ideal that we must all be “a holy people, a nation of priests” (an ideal expressed several times in the Torah) cannot be realized in light of the harsh conditions that Parashat Emor imposes on us. We would fail from the start, doomed even before we began.

This seeming conflict and paradox must therefore be seen in a different light.

We aren’t born holy; we become holy. It’s a process, a journey that begins with ignorance but progresses to enlightenment and understanding.

It’s OK to start at The Beginning, no matter how often or frequently we do that. Looking at the past enables us to evaluate our progress forward. Along the path, it’s OK to make mistakes, even to fail. As long as we don’t lost sight of where we are headed, as long as we remember to rise again—and to help others, to extend a hand to those who might need it, to shed light on faults and cracks along the path, and throughout it all, to be more forgiving and accepting of faults we see in others. Just as we hope they will be of us and ours.

And perhaps that’s why Emor is there, and has been all along: To remind us of where we started. We are all participants in the progress of our humanity. Looking at our past should serve to remind us of where we are going; it should encourage us, inspire us, and give us our moral north.

And that’s why we read this portion, year after year, and why we find it so objectionable time after time again. It can only serve as a reminder of where we came from, not where we are headed to.

© 2020 by Boaz D. Heilman