Drash for Parashat Emor

Meaningful - and Not-so-meaningful - Distinctions

Many of us know a story about a Jewish man, with the surname Cohen or some variant, who goes to an Orthodox rabbi with his fiancé.  The rabbi sits and talks with the beaming young couple, listens to their stories of how they met and so forth.  Then he pronounces, perhaps regretfully, that he cannot marry them to one another.  Why not?  Because the woman is not a ‘fit’ partner for the Cohen, usually because she has been previously married and divorced.  This, despite that she has brought her Get to show the rabbi that she was divorced in the proper manner and is therefore allowed to re-marry.

          I’m not thinking of someone in particular with this story.  Rather, this is something that actually plays out with some regularity.  The young couple has run smack into the laws of priestly purity, still enforced in Judaism’s more traditional sectors.  The young man probably knew that his being a Cohen gave him the first Aliyah often at a traditional synagogue.  Perhaps he knew that, if he attended the synagogue on a major festival, he would perform the Duchenen, the blessing of the congregation, from beneath his tallit after having his feet washed by one of the Levi’im.  Maybe he had, once or twice, been asked to receive tribute from the father of a firstborn son who would redeem that son ceremonially from him when performing Pidyon Haben.  But chances are that he did not know he was forbidden to marry a divorced woman.  Doing so would result in his being ritually defiled, and would have prevented from performing his priestly duties in case the Temple and its cultus were re-established.  But more importantly, his offspring would then not be fit to act as Cohanim.

          Just to make it clear; in Progressive Judaism we do not recognise either priestly perquisites or priestly requirements as being operative in our age.  Just as we do not reserve the first Aliyah for a Cohen and the second for a Levi, we do not send marrying couples away because the man is a Cohen and the woman is divorced.  After all, family legends of Cohanic or Levitical descent are almost never provable.  Given that, and given that we wish to bring down barriers that divide members of our congregations, you can be sure that progressive rabbis would not refuse to marry any two Jews because of the relationship of surnames to previous marriages.  It simply is not an issue in our circles.  But it is in traditional Judaism.

          And please don’t construe this as a criticism of the customs of our more traditionalist cousins.  Many Jews who affiliate with Orthodox Judaism bristle over this law or that law.  Sometimes their bristling over such law, drives them into Progressive Judaism.  That is certainly the case with a handful of our members here.  And many of our number do criticise Orthodox Judaism over these laws, but I choose not to.  It simply isn’t necessary.  Orthodox Judaism is what it is, just as Progressive Judaism is what it is.  What’s to criticise?  But the laws of priestly purity, enforced even today, are probably one of the most misunderstood areas of traditional law as they affect the Jew today.

          As this week’s Torah portion opens, we are instructed in these laws.  The entire people Israel was to consider themselves a nation of priests, a nation set aside for a specific witness among the peoples of the world.  But the entire tribe of Levi were further set aside for service to God and the people Israel in the Ohel Mo’ed – the Tabernacle.  And the sons of Aaron, brother of Moses, of the tribe of Levi, were set aside yet further for the priesthood.  This service was not voluntary.  All the Levi’im were compelled to work full-time in the service of God, and the Cohanim had a very specific, and honoured, position.  In order to maintain his ritual purity to perform his duties, the young Cohen had to marry a woman not previously married, nor one ‘defiled by harlotry.’ He was also not to defile himself by contact with the dead, except in the case of a close relative, as that would make him unable to perform his duties for a time.  He was not to make himself unfit in any number of ways, such as shaving his head or being tattooed.  These were practices that, while being forbidden of all Jews, did not carry the same degree of taboo for them.  And although the daughter of a Cohen was not designated in the same way as her brothers, she was under similar scrutiny; should she transgress such laws of purity, it was as if she had defiled her father.

          So what are we to learn from all this?

          At its essence, the Torah is about boundaries.  The entirety of Jewish law is about distinctions.  Between Israel and the nations.  Between sacred and ordinary.  Between male and female.  Between the permitted and the forbidden.  Between kosher and treif.  This definitely clashes with contemporary sensibility whose goal is often to eliminate barriers and boundaries.  As a baby boomer, it seems that my entire lifetime has been characterised by the societal tendency to tear down one boundary after another. 

To be sure, some barriers needed to be torn down, and we are better off for their elimination.  For example, racial boundaries that divided us sharply based on the superficial distinction of skin colour.  Or class distinctions that dictated that we limit our associations to those of a particular economic class.  I’m not saying that these distinctions no longer exist.  But when we cross such boundaries, we are not invoking the same degree of taboo that we once did.  Perhaps one day in our lifetimes, nobody will care any longer about such things.  There is plenty of evidence that we are moving in that direction, and I believe that’s a good thing.

But if I were to stand in front of you and proclaim that all boundaries and distinctions are obsolete, I would not be authentic to Torah.

          For example, the distinction between Israel and the nations.  If the people Israel are not set aside for a unique role among the nations, then why bother to have a synagogue?  Why not join our neighbours in church?  Why care whether Jews marry one another?  Why accept holy proselytes who are called to take on the distinction of Jew?  Why not send them away and tell them to be good people and that’s it?  Because, deep in the kishkas, most of us in this room this morning believe that we Jews have a Divine purpose for being Jews.  This distinction does not mean we think ourselves better than any other human beings.  Or that we don’t relate collegially to our neighbours who are not Jewish.  At least, it shouldn’t.  We should no more think ourselves superior to others because we are Jews, than we should eschew friendships with those who are not Jewish. 

And it doesn’t mean that all of the children of Noah – that is to say, all the inhabitants of the world – don’t have a sacred purpose in their lives.  But the Jews do have a unique and sacred purpose.  Of course, any Jew can sidestep it without much trouble.  One can easily opt out of Jewish life altogether.  Or, one can remain on the margins of Jewish life where one is probably not serving much apparent purpose in one’s Jewishness.  But that doesn’t change that it matters that we affiliate as Jews, and that we behave as Jews.  That we accept that our being Jews carries some level of obligation.  Far more obligation, than privilege!

Our task is to embrace the boundaries that matter.  To use the distinctions that those boundaries create, to being meaning to our lives.  To bring meaning to our world.  And, at the same time, to reject meaningless or unnecessary boundaries.  And embrace the crossing of the latter.

Do the boundaries between Cohen, Levi, and Yisrael fall into the former, or the latter category?  In Progressive Judaism, most of us hold that they are an example of the latter.  We have decided as a movement to ignore tribal distinctions.  We also advocate the elimination of other distinctions, while preserving others.  But our selective retention of distinctions does not call into question the very enterprise of making such distinctions.  It simply means that we must be careful about the distinctions we draw.  And about how we translate such distinctions, into the way that we relate to one another.  There are religious philosophies extant that would have all of humanity thrown together in one amorphous mass.  One can see the attraction in such a vision of absolute egalité.  But there are distinctions that are meaningful.  We should not be in such a hurry to erase them.  Shabbat shalom.