Parashat Emor - Sat 18 May (Iyar 10)

Emor was my Bat Mitzvah parsha. There’s a lot that I don’t remember about the process, because it was more than a few years ago, but I remember very clearly what my Torah portion was about: holidays. Yes, Emor was the parsha where the Jewish calendar got laid out fully. That’s what I chanted proudly. That’s what I drashed about.

It wasn’t for years that I discovered that my parsha consisted of 4 chapters, not 1, and that I was given, well, the easy part. Chapter 21 is all about rules for priests, including some pretty unsavory ones like murdering any daughters of Kohanim who engage in harlotry. It also describes in detail every malady that disqualifies a priest from engaging with the sacred offerings, from temporary issues like a broken arm to permanent conditions. Chapter 22 continues in this vein, detailing the state priests must be in to make offerings and describing the condition of animals suitable for offering. Then there’s chapter 23– holiday central. And then comes chapter 24, which begins with instruction to the priests to beat olives for their oil and make sure to have 12 loaves of bread, but then swiftly pivots to a challenging, to say the least, interaction between a full blooded Israelite and the son of an Israelite and an Egyptian. After clarifying that the punishment for anyone who curses God’s name is death, we go Hammurabi with an eye for an eye, life for a life. The parsha concludes with the stoning to death of the half-Israelite half-Egyptian man.

When I learned that there was more to Emor than what I’d leyned, sometime in college perhaps, I remember having questions for my childhood rabbi. Why did he have me study and chant the happy part of the parsha instead of engaging with the complexity of chapters 21, 22 and 24? Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to ask.  He passed away far too young right around the time I thought to reach out. So I came to my own conclusion, namely that it must have been because he thought it was the least difficult part of the portion. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about priestly politics or murder with a 12 year old. Or he didn’t know, even, what to make of it himself. Or he just had too many B Mitzvahs that year and there wasn’t time to really delve into the deep end with me. And thus, my rabbi gave me the easy stuff, I gave a perfectly lovely drash, and that was that.

I never really questioned my own logic until more recently, when it occurred to me that — yes, chapter 23 was the “easiest” part of the parsha because it was about a highly relatable topic— but maybe that was the point. Not to keep me from delving into the complexities of the rest of the parsha but to offer me a direct reminder that some of the Torah remains directly applicable now.

Let’s look at chapter 23 in more detail. It begins with an instruction to keep Shabbat— something that, of course, we still do today. How the ancient Israelites and we define “work” is something that of course has developed and evolved over time, but the fact remains that every 7 days we shift, we step back, and we rest. In a commentary on 23:3, Sforno, a well-respected scholar from 16th century Italy, writes that even in this verse there is an understanding of the eternal nature of Shabbat across time and place. The verse ends “It is Sabbath to God, throughout all your settlements,” and Sforno interprets the line “all your settlements” to be a reminder that Shabbat is to be observed always and everywhere and that it is to follow the local time— not rely on a “central” clock. At the time of the Torah, the Israelites of course did not have settlements. They were all together, in the wilderness, camping side by side. Yet God instructed us even then for a future in which we would be all over the world, and all observing Shabbat.

The next holiday is Pesach. Although the specifics of how we practice Passover have indeed shifted over the millennia (we no longer bring a fire sacrifice to God, and we do have seders), it would be easy for most of us to recognize the festival of matzot as Passover. And, even though most Jews no longer treat Passover as a pilgrimage festival, many of us do travel to family at that time even today.

Then, we get the counting of the omer. This, perhaps, is where we have changed most from the time of the Torah to present day, but even in this relatively complicated ritual of grain waving and flour burning there is a kernel of modern practice: the counting of 50 days between Passover and the next pilgrimage festival— Shavuot.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur come next. In this case the latter is more recognizable. While Yom Kippur is named as the Day of Atonement, Rosh Hashanah is the day with the horn-blasting. And, to make matters more confusing, both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are described as being in the 7th month— not exactly where we’d expect a new year to fall. Still, once you understand that ancient Israelite calendars had 4 new years, Rosh Hashanah’s falling in the 7th month makes a little more sense.

The chapter ends with the holiday of the huts, with requirements extremely similar to our modern day celebration of Sukkot, aside from, of course, the fire offerings. The Torah even describes the the lulav and etrog— perhaps one of the oldest and oddest vestiges of Judaism’s pagan forebears.

So in one chapter, we get Shabbat, Passover, the Omer, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. And with a few exceptions, the holidays look like the holidays we celebrate. As Reconstructionists, we understand that Jewish practices evolve over time, through the generations. We are open to the possibility of traditions remaining constant over time, shifting, or becoming irrelevant. But we remain committed, no matter how our practice evolves, to our collective story— to the words of Torah. And, even as many parts of Judaism remain “unfixed,” our holidays as set down in Torah have not completely changed in 2000 years.

Much of the rest of Emor bears little resemblance to modern Jewish practice. Thank goodness, we don’t have animal sacrifices these days, and the system of priests that once animated much of Jewish life hasn’t been active for millennia. Certainly, we’ve moved away from draconian justice in at least many cases. But when we read chapter 23 of Leviticus, the “easy” part of the parsha, we see: we celebrate as they celebrated, at least mostly. We see the direct evolution from Torah to today.

Of course, our engagement with Torah in general shouldn’t be limited to the parts we can most relate to. We should wrestle with the parts that make us squirm and make us want to turn away. We should analyze the parts that don’t even make us squirm because we’re so confused we have no idea what’s actually going on. We should read the whole Torah and learn from each verse. Many of us are lucky to have our whole lives to do that, or certainly the years of our lives that we’re part of a Jewish community. Next year, maybe, we’ll talk about the half-Israelite half-Egyptian man and how we might improve on ancient justice. Or we’ll talk about how to metabolize the sexism of the priesthood. But, today? Today we get to see ourselves in the text. We get a mirror of our own Jewish lives as much as we do a window into our ancestors’.

So now, I’m grateful to my childhood rabbi for his choice of text. I’m grateful that he gave me a way in— a way to take the book most likely to induce winces during Torah study because of the endless parade of sacrifices, and make it relatable. I’m grateful that rather than encountering a text that might have made me wonder what Leviticus had to do with my life that he handed me a text I could see reflected on my family’s kitchen calendar.

A lot has changed in the world, and the Jewish world,  since I was 12. Some for the better, some maybe not so much. But just as the same kid who became Bat Mitzvah chanting this chapter is somewhere in this rabbi, the same holiday observances we have today are somewhere in this text. There’s a thruline more powerful than any individual Jew, shul, or community. It predated all of us, and I believe it will outlast all of us. We’re just lucky to be here for this stage of its journey.