EMOR
Emor (Chapters 21 through 24) begins with two chapters focusing on maintaining the sacrality of the priesthood and the sacrifices by avoiding any kind of pollution of either the priesthood or the sacrifices. Chapter 23 then turns to the reiteration/ establishment of sacred time in a Biblical context, enumerating the times of holy assemblies. The final chapter begins with a commandment to establish an eternal flame accompanied by 12 loaves of bread and frankincense in the mishkan, in front of the ark. (24:1-9). Then there is a radical shift to a narrative story about someone who profanes the name of YHVH. YHVH then demands that he be stoned to death, but only after all who have heard him blaspheme transfer their guilt or unintentional sin by laying their hands on his head. How have they unintentionally sinned? They were within earshot of his blaspheming against YHVH.
I want to discuss four themes.
Should we hold religious leaders to a higher standard?
Wounded healer in Judaism
Characteristics of sacred time
Why is the profanation of YHVH’s name so dangerous that it results in communal stoning as a punishment?
Emor focuses on the obligation of the priesthood to avoid pollution in Chapter 21. Priests are holier than common Israelites and are therefore subject to more restrictions including not coming into contact with corpses with whom they are kin by marriage. Nor can they marry divorced women “because they are bringing forth YHVH’s offerings by fire…so they shall be a holy thing.” (21:6). Then the high priest has even more restrictions in terms of possible corpse contamination and must wed only a virgin (and not a widow whom other priests may marry) because the high priest, following JPS, enters the Mishkan daily.
These kind of restrictions on the priesthood are common enough cross culturally. Priests have a designated role in society and they must be able to fulfill it. The expectations for priests are higher than they are for lay people, even if the priesthood is hereditary as is the case here.
We don’t do priesthood or sacrifices anymore, but most of us have a sometimes tacit expectation that Rabbis or other religious leaders are supposed to live more moral lives or follow Jewish law more than the rest of us, for instance. This expectation particularly kicks in when clergy or gurus act in ways that victimize their followers. The guru who sleeps with his students, the rabbi who watches naked women in the mikvah seems to most of us to be worse than if it is someone who doesn’t present him (and it is almost always him) self as morally superior commits the same sorts of acts.
The deeper issue, it seems to me, is that immoral behavior on the part of a priest calls into question all of the ethical claims of a religion. If all this religious practice you are advocating doesn’t actually make you a more ethical person, but just provides you opportunities to indulge in your immorality, how efficacious are all of these religious claims? The logic of following Jewish law or spending hours a day with your legs crossed in mediation is to make you holier, in some sense of the word. Why do it if it doesn’t make a difference in your moral behavior? The idea of following e.g. Jewish law to the last detail while abusing immigrants or running drugs to fund yeshivot seems utterly wrong headed to me.
This begs the question of whether what these priests counts as holy should count as holy. I don’t see why a virgin is holier than a widow, and I acutely disagree that contact with corpses should be polluting. I’d much rather have a priesthood that embraced the cycle of birth and death, rather than maintained its distance from it. Is celibacy for traditions that embrace a celibate priesthood actually a higher calling than being a householder with a family?
I’m not sure that moral and holy should be viewed as synonymous. There are people who lead very virtuous lives but don’t seem to have much connection to some kind of deep spiritual practice. Are they holy? There are people who lead exemplary lives amongst humans, but fully participate in the dehumanizing and destruction of the more than human world. Are they holy? There are people who have deep spiritual practice, and even scrupulously follow the letter of the law, but aren’t particularly charitable. Are they holy?
What counts as holy, in your mind? Do you believe that religious leaders should have higher moral obligations than non leaders?
The perspective of a wounded healer is an authentically Jewish perspective and is in direct contrast to view of holiness offered in Emor.
Levites, descendants of Aaron, who are injured are still Levites. They partake in communal life as Levites, but they can’t offer sacrifices because they aren’t pure or holy. The list of injuries includes someone blind, crippled, mutilated, one limb longer than the other, a man with a broken leg or arm, hunchback, dwarf, someone with spotting in their eye or with scabs or scurvies or has crushed testicles. (21:17-20). Then sacrifices can’t be offered if you are polluted (22:2-9). This connection of purity and holiness is extended to sacrificial animals who have to be unblemished. (22:19-25).
The constant fear is that any of these imperfections will negatively impact the holiness of the system. It is as if the profane or the unholy spreads like measles or Covid, and the only way to preserve the health of the sacred is to quarantine it from the profane.
But there is another approach to the relationship between the sacred and the profane that I want to contrast and that is authentically Jewish. Many cultures have the idea of a “wounded healer.” This is highly common in shamanic cultures in which a major part of how people become shamans is through healing crises. We too have an authentic indigenous tradition of wounded healers.
Isaac Luria, the most prominent Kabbalistic mythologist believed that brokenness was at the very heart of the creation of the world. His cosmogonic myth was that God was lonely and wanted other creatures, so he poured the divine light into vessels--only the light overwhelmed the vessels and they cracked. Thus the job of Jewish mystics became to repair the Godhead and thus the world through “rectifications” (tikkun). As Leonard Cohen wrote “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” (lyrics to Anthem)
This belief in brokenness as an offering to the divine as opposed to offering only purity is also manifested in early Hasidism. The Kotzk, a 19nth Century Hasidic master is famous for saying "there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” Nachman of Bratzlav urged his followers and himself practiced spending time every day pouring out his problems to the divine in the vernacular language. This sensibility is radically different than the sensibility of the priesthood in Leviticus. Wounded healers believe that the profane world is already suffused with sacrality. The path to sacredness is to uplift the profane, rather than separate it from the sacred. The wounded healer is a path that embraces the cycle of birth and death and the imperfections of the world.
Can the sacred be contaminated by pollution (the belief in Leviticus) or is the sacred strengthened by the confession of imperfection (the Hasidic belief)? In your view, does the divine prefer purity or brokenness?
Emor’s concept of sacred time has three specific characteristics. It always involves:
A specified time,
A holy assembly,
The prohibition against work.
“Speak to the children of Israel and you shall say to them: YHVH’s appointed times, which you shall call holy assemblies, these are my appointed times” (23:2). The text also says “You shall not do any work” or “any act of work”, a grand total of nine times. (23:3,7,8,21,25,28,31,35,36). We are told sacred time is observed every shabbat, the three pilgrimage holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. These aren’t the first time these sacred times are mentioned, but it is the first time they are all collected together. Indeed, these are the main components of our current Jewish holiday calendar. We’ve added post Biblical holidays of Hanukah, Tu B’shvat, Purim and Tisha B’av, but quite remarkably, we still celebrate the holidays outlined in this parsha some 3,000 or so years later.
Is this an exclusive definition of what counts as sacred time? We might also think of sacred time as the time during which we had a sacred experience. I go on short hiking pretty regularly. Most times the hikes are nice; it is good to move amidst the more than human world. Sometimes something incredibly moving happens to me, a total accident. I think of that as an experience of the sacred, but it is an unpredictable experience that only can be labeled as sacred afterwards. Another example: I go on a retreat based on the schedule of the presenter. Is this sacred time? It isn’t fixed as an eternal law that I will go every September to Vermont, there is no holy assembly, though it is true that I’m not working. Sometimes I have a sacred experience, and sometimes it’s just a nice time.
My experience of the hike or the retreat as sacred isn’t the concern of Leviticus, as far as I can tell. There’s no fixed time and I just happen not to be working; I’m not avoiding work because of a commandment to avoid it. Lastly, there’s no human assembly. The Bible in general recognizes the possibility of spontaneous sacred experience if you recall the story of Jacob’s dreams and wrestling.
I want to offer three specific comments about Leviticus’s conception of sacred time.
First, while spontaneous experiences of the sacred are recognized, the preoccupation of the priesthood and later on the law giving Rabbis is to regulate and organize the experience of the sacred. I tend to think that this regulation actually decreases the chances of an experience of the sacred, since I don’t think the sacred lives in a box.
The second point is that this approach seems to me to pay far too little attention to the contributions of the more than human world to the experience of the sacred. I’m not saying that the experience of the sacred can only take place in the wilderness. I’ve had powerful, sacred experiences in hotel ballrooms. Bernie Glassman, a Zen Master who was Jewish, had his enlightenment experience in the back of a car, to give two examples. We can experience the sacred anywhere, and we can experience it alone or in groups. But we don’t talk much, for instance, about the rock Jacob used as a pillow and its contribution to the story. And we should.
The third point is that it is unclear to me if we can experience the sacred while doing conventional work. It’s hard to imagine experiencing the sacred working in a fast food restaurant. But if you are a nurse, or social justice organizer, maybe? Is there such a thing as sacred work?
Does sacred time have to be specified beforehand, be collective and involve no mundane work? What were the circumstances under which you have experienced the sacred? Is there such a thing as sacred work?
Why is the profanation of YHVH’s name so dangerous that it pollutes even those who hear it and the punishment is communal stoning?
It is remarkable to me that even the people who hear the blasphemy are polluted by it. That’s why they have to put their hands on the blasphemer’s head, to transfer the sin of having heard the blasphemy away from themselves and onto the object to be sacrificed. In this case, the blasphemer is going to be sacrificed to maintain the purity of the congregation. This is akin to the scape goat sent out to Azazel. “Take out the one who cursed to the outside of the camp, and let all who heard lay their hands on his head and all the congregation shall batter him.” (24:12)
But why is the mere hearing of the blasphemy so polluting? On the one hand, maybe what they are hearing is so terrible that this causes the pollution. Look, when I hear Donald Trump speak I feel polluted and rapidly turn off the volume so that I don’t get further polluted. Am I any different than my ancestors? How do I get rid of the pollution that comes from hearing him or his acolytes talk? That’s certainly unclear to me. I’m inclined to think I need some kind of ritual cleanse, and that taking him to jail and incarcerating him wouldn’t actually cleanse me of the pollution, but I certainly understand the need to eliminate the source of pollution.
I also believe that anthropologist Mary Douglas can help us here. There’s a direct correlation between how secure a people feel and the flexibility of their edges, including the behavior of their deities, following Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. Douglas’s argument would be that the insecurity of the people calls for an extreme assertion of boundaries, as manifested in the (unfollowed) commandment to take the blasphemer out of camp and stone him.
I can totally understand that blaspheming against the group’s deity (whatever it is) gets you an invitation to leave the group, an invitation that can be expressed with more or less grace. I do think that groups that can’t fundamentally agree on basics are in trouble. This is akin to our current situation in the United States where what some of us think are facts, others regard as fantasy. If you are no longer speaking the same language, it is difficult if not impossible to function as a group. But being invited to leave is just a bit different than being stoned to death.
I have long believed that those who can brook no dissent secretly or not so secretly feel miserable and insecure about themselves. And I also have long believed that the antidote to such insecurity lies in teshuvah, repentance or turning, and forgiveness. We need to acknowledge all we have done wrong and learn to accept ourselves rooted in the forgiveness of those we have sinned against (including ourselves). It also helps to forgive those who have sinned against you, not for their sake but for your own. Those who have sinned against you may or may not be suffering, but when you hold onto grievances for sure the person who suffers is the one you see in the mirror.
Does the blasphemy actually hurt the divine? While I don’t embrace the idea of a jealous God who needs to suppress dissent, what if we took a less literal approach to what is meant to blaspheme. There’s a part of me that believes that I blaspheme against the divine whenever I don’t tell the truth, when I am closed off to the other, when I treat the more than human world as an it, when I buy into the bs characteristic of our society. There are a million ways to blaspheme. It’s not always as obvious as saying that God does not exist, a statement that might not even be blasphemy.
How might we approach the blasphemer? The opposite approach to stoning him is treating him with love. Or we can kick him out of the community, but preferably in a more gentle way than stoning him. Or we can ignore him, like we do the apocalyptic street corner preachers who dot our cities.
Are you polluted by hearing what you would consider blasphemy? How do you get rid of that pollution? What would your approach to the blasphemer be?
QUESTIONS
What counts as holy, in your mind? Do you believe that religious leaders should have higher moral obligations than non leaders?
Can the divine be contaminated by pollution (the belief in Leviticus) or is the divine strengthened by the confession of imperfection (the Hasidic belief)? In your view, does the divine prefer purity or brokenness?
Does sacred time have to be specified beforehand, be collective and involve no mundane work? What were the circumstances under which you have experienced the sacred? Is there such a thing as sacred work?
What would your approach to the blasphemer of Chapter 24 be? How would you implement that approach?
