Emor
Leviticus 21:1-24:23
Ezekiel 44:15-31
As a little girl I had a tremendous Barbie Doll collection. I loved to dress them in beautiful outfits, pick the perfect plastic high-heeled shoes to complement their lovely dresses and brush their shiny blond hair with a small pink hairbrush. Barbie, with her literal dream house, was emblematic of the perfect grown-up life. My friends and I would make up endless scenarios in which Barbie and her friends would enact imagined grown-up scenarios: our Barbies went to the beach, drove sports cars, shopped at the mall and threw parties. Without knowing it, we had internalized the message of Malibu beach perfection. Had we known then how our lives would turn out, we might have been disappointed to find out that adulthood rarely looks like the beach party we once imagined.
Parashat Emor teaches about a different kind of perfection. The priests are held to a higher standard of purity than the rest of the Israelite community. The parashah details restrictions regarding proximity to a corpse, whom they can marry, the growth of their hair and disqualifications for physical impairments. The list is long. As the conduits between God and the community, the priests are held to a very different standard than the rest of the people. The Israelites understood that one needed to attain a godly level of purity in order provide acceptable sacrifices to the Perfect One. Even the animal itself had to be without blemish in order to be worthy of offering.
Shulamit Reinharz offers words of warning about these priestly rules: “…ideas in Emor continue to have subtle ramifications for general society. One example is the stress found in Emor on the ideal of physical ‘perfection.’… Physical imperfection, it seems, impairs holiness. While the priest’s bodily perfection may no longer be a Jewish necessity, the idea and expectation of bodily perfection have become a cultural goal of the wider American Jewish population, with terrible consequences — particularly for women, regardless of age” (“The Torah: A Women’s Commentary”). She goes on to cite examples of girls and women seeking perfect bodies through plastic surgery, eating disorders and other drastic measures. According to Reinharz, this section of our ancient text comes with dangerous implications for the modern day.
It is crucial that yesterday’s understanding of perfection not be a source of today’s destruction. Our Torah, of course, offers us the opportunity to seek the lesson we need. If we turn to the book of Exodus, we find another teaching that can help us understand the way the priesthood was originally imagined, before there was a Temple. Exodus 19:6 teaches that the Israelite community should be a Mamlechet Kohanim, a Kingdom of Priests. In other words, the original priesthood was not a separate class. Instead, in the book of Exodus, each person who stands at the foot of Sinai contributes to the ongoing sanctity of this holy nation.
Today, in the absence of the Temple and a priestly class we return to this designation. We no longer carry the burden of perfection. This went up in smoke along with the sacrificial cult. Our job is not perfection, but potential. We seek, we strive and we soar as we do our best to bring holiness into the world through kindness, mitzvot and heartfelt Jewish living. In doing so, each one of us serves as a conduit to God — warts and all.
If you go to your local toy store today, you’ll find that Barbie now comes in a variety of shapes, colors and sizes. Barbie can now be ‘curvy,’ ‘tall’ or ‘petite.’ And in addition to driving a pink corvette and living in a dream house, she can be a computer engineer, a paratrooper or a presidential candidate. There are limitless scenarios to make-believe, innumerable dreams for a child to imagine.
Perfection is multi-vocal. The Torah begins to teach us, and we expand on its lessons. What was perfect for the priests does not have to be what is perfect for us. What is perfect for you is not perfect for me. And we are all made, perfectly, in the image of God.
Rabbi Sara Mason-Barkin is an associate rabbi and educator at Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo. She can be reached at [email protected].