Emor
Leviticus 21:1-24:23
Ezekiel 44:15-31
I’ve never seen my friend Joanne as angry as she gets each year when we read Parshat Emor. I would come into her living room and, before I had a chance to remove my jacket, she was scolding me: “How can you claim that the Torah is a teaching of compassion? How do you explain a loving God instructing Aaron that ‘No man of your offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food for his God.'” (21:17)
This is a powerful question when asked by anyone.
But when Joanne raised it, the question became even more weighty.
Joanne is wheelchair mobile, suffering from a degenerative disease that causes increasing amounts of pain and some paralysis. Remarkably, Joanne took great solace in her rediscovery of Judaism and found the inner composure to accept each worsening of her condition.
God’s presence in her life meant everything to her. To think that God would reject her presence in the temple because she was disabled caused her more pain than her physical afflictions. My explanation that the Torah’s instruction applies only to priests, and only in the temple in Jerusalem, was of no satisfaction.
The Chassidic master Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk taught that the Kohen needed to be removed from the material world into a realm of extraordinary holiness so that he has no connection whatsoever to the physical. In such a state of spiritual perfection, his body also had to be perfect and free of blemish.
Sacrificial animals also reflected this perfection. The defects that exclude a Kohen from performing the service of the cult in the temple — blindness, being lame, a limb too long or too short, broken bones, hunchbacked or dwarfed, an abnormal growth in the eye, boils, scars or crushed testes — are exactly the same defects that disqualify an animal for sacrifice.
But why, Joanne would ask, does spiritual perfection require physical perfection? Isn’t it possible that a broken body might be spiritually unblemished? Couldn’t someone with disabilities attain a level of higher consciousness?
The Zohar, the mystical midrash on Torah, understands the priest’s blemish not as a physical state but as an inner deficiency of faith, which causes a lack of wholeness, or shlemut. The Maharal of Prague explains this to mean that the suffering a person experiences, whether physical or spiritual, often becomes one’s sole focus of attention and consciousness. It grabs the mind, and we become identified with it. We turn it into a hateful blemish. Shlemut is achieved when we turn to the Divine in faith, shifting consciousness to make room for this blemish as part of the totality of human experience.
Faith need not mean that God will remove our pain. It does mean that we are aware of ourselves as one conscious drop of water in a cosmic ocean, with waves that constantly ebb and flow. We are reconnected to the wholeness of life, and that wholeness reflects in our hearts. We give up the battle for control and embrace, with courage and enthusiasm, the possibilities of our life.
I have to admit, in the years I visited Joanne in her home and watched as her disease caused her increasing amounts of pain, I learned more about faith than I ever had from professional theologians.
Joanne didn’t resonate to the notion of hope. As far as she was concerned she had no hope of ever being pain free. But she had the deepest faith that, in God’s presence, she would manage. Her body was relegated to a wheelchair, but her spirit soared.
Each one of us is blemished in some way. We have physical defects, emotional blind spots, psychological wounds, spiritual anguish. This is the way of the world, and the experience of being human. Yet, when faith is whole, we, too, can be whole.
And that’s an idea I think Joanne could live with.
Rabbi Lavey Derby is the senior rabbi of Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon.