Radical Torah

Listen up all you suburbanites with your perfectly manicured lawns: it’s time to let the edges run wild!

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“One shallow babe,” is how we might describe our god in this parsha (were we not so respectful). She lays out the rules for the kohenim, or priests, of Her temple — rules which have no spiritual or moral requirements whatsoever. YHWH’s priests just need to be high gloss. Having established that, She takes Her merry Hebrew band on the road (are we interpreting it too literally?) Then, the half-Egyptian son of an Israelite woman commits the Torah’s first case of BLASPHEMY. There was no specific law against blasphemy at the time, but YHWH swiftly declares one, for which the punishment is… three guesses.

SHABBAT SHALOM! - a & s

The Lord spoke further to Moses: Speak to Aaron and say: No man of your offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food of his God.

No one who has a defect, Torah tells us in parashat Emor, may offer the korbanot, the offerings which draw us near to our Source. No one who is blind, or lame, or has a limb too short or too long; no one with a broken limb, neither a hunchback nor a dwarf, no one with a growth occluding his eye, no one with a scar. No one who has suffered from scurvy or had his testes crushed. Such a one may eat the the bread set-apart to God, the holy and the most-holy — but he may not draw near to God.

These verses make up a kind of list-poem, an incantation of physical maladies, bookended with the refrain reminding us that anyone who has a defect of any kind must not play a role in making offerings to God. This is forbidden, and would profane the holiest place.

It’s tempting to read these verses allegorically. No one who is blinded to the difficult realities of suffering, one might say — no one who is unwilling to walk a mile in the shoes of another — no one who twists her being into imbalance may be permitted to make offerings to God. No one who understands himself to be irredeemably broken. No one hunched by anxiety and fear, no one shrunken of spirit, no one whose vision is impeded by the unwillingness to see. None of these people may act as priests on our behalf, because they do not allow themselves to be whole.

That’s certainly one way to read this passage. It’s one I even like. But it doesn’t feel like enough.

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In this week’s Torah portion, Emor, we read a series of instructions pertaining to grain-offerings. When the Israelites enter the land, they are instructed to bring the first sheaf of harvest to the priest, to be elevated before Adonai. Then begins a period of counting:

And from the day on which you bring the sheaf of elevation offering — the day after the sabbath — you shall count off seven weeks. They must be complete: you must count until the day after the seventh week — fifty days; then you shall bring an offering of new grain to the Lord.

We’re in such a period of counting even now. From Pesach to Shavuot, the festival of our liberation to the festival of God’s revelation, we count seven times seven weeks. On the fiftieth day our ancestors brought grain to the Temple in Jerusalem. Because we are no longer grain farmers, and no longer operating in the old sacrificial paradigm, we bring the offering of our open hearts to a meeting with God wherever in the world (wherever in all the worlds) we are.

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More than almost any other parshah in the Torah, Parshat Emor is packed densely with commandments. ((Parshat Emor has 63 of the 613 mitzvot (24 positive and 39 negative). Only Ki Tetze (with 74) has more.))

Coming fast and furious, there are commandments which define the requirements for the ancient priests, commandments which define the purity of the animal sacrifices in the Temple and commandments which establish the holiday calendar. But tucked among the 63 commandments of Parshat Emor, there is one which the rabbinic tradition elevated to an unusually high status. The Torah says that a Jew “must leave the edges of his field and the gleanings of his harvest for the poor and the stranger,” and the Talmudic tradition decided that this commandment in particular is an indispensable part of the process for conversion to Judaism. ((Leviticus 23:22; see also Yevamot 47a; Mishna Torah, Isurei Bia 14:2, Tur, Yoreh Deah 268:2. Thanks to Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed, NY for highlighting the importance of this tradition.))

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