Shabbat Shalom: Parshat Emor Leviticus 21:1-24:23

By Shlomo Riskin

Efrat, Israel -When I received my rabbinical ordination forty years ago, a close confidante of mine who was well placed in Yeshiva University’s Community Service Division urged me to go into teaching and scholarship rather than the practical, officiating rabbinate. His reason was based on the opening verses of this week’s Torah reading: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Say to the Kohen-priests the sons of Aaron and tell them that they may not defile themselves by coming into contact with a dead body from one of their nation’” (Leviticus 21:1). He cogently argued that much of the task of a modern-day American and European rabbi is officiating at funerals and performing grave-stone "unveilings". Indeed, the answering phone-service of many modern rabbis detail which cemeteries they will be at and at which time on that particular Sunday so that the caller will know in advance if there is a possibility of his receiving that particular rabbi’s services for the upcoming “unveiling” of a loved one. Since I was a Kohen, the representation of Community Services Division explained, most congregations wouldn’t be interested in hiring me. After all, since a pastoral rabbi is intimately involved in “matching, hatching and dispatching,” and since only the third activity inevitably occurs to everyone, a Kohen-Rabbi barred from funeral parlors by Biblical law suffers a real disadvantage when standing before a Rabbinical Selection Committee.

Apparently I have managed to maintain a rabbinical career despite my kehunah; but the prohibition of a Kohen coming into direct contact with a corpse (unless it be a parent, sibling, spouse or child) has always fascinated me as to its significance. And I have come to believe that this Biblical directive has an especially important message for us today, in the war against terrorism which is fast overtaking our global village.

One of the most important and novel contributions of Biblical Judaism to religious and even general philosophical thought is its profound acceptance of life in this world as being good, salutary, and fraught with the possibility of repair (tikkun), improvement and even re-constitution. Our Bible ringingly declares that all that G-d created is good, that the human arena of concern and challenge is specifically this world, and that repentance and redemption will take place in this world as a result of our acceptance of the Biblical commandments. Plato, on the other hand, declares that soma sema, the physical body in a prison house, and sees death as the positive liberation of the soul (see the Apology and Pahedo); Greek mythology and the Egyptians “Book of the Dead” see religious prescriptions as the means of easing the passage of the individual from this world to the next, aiming thereby to lessen individual fears concerning that mysterious unknown which is death and stressing the importance of using one’s stay in this world as a preparation for the eternal after-life.

The major teachings of Jesus, the founder of Christianity, although rooted in Jewish Rabbinic thought, inordinately emphasizes the “Kingdom of heaven” in the other world, a theme constantly underscored by the Church fathers. Indeed, one need only contrast the passion of Jesus with the binding of Isaac in order to highlight the profound difference in attitude between the two religions: Kirkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” notwithstanding, the final denouncement of the binding is that Isaac lives, that the Almighty commands Abraham “not to lay a hand on the lad, not to do him any harm;”(Genesis 22:12) according to Joseph Ibn Kaspi, the entire message of the akedah is to teach Abraham that our G-d opposes child sacrifice, that our religion wants us to “live by these our laws,” and not to die for them (Leviticus 18:5). Our menorah is a stylized “tree of life.” Christianity seems to express a very different message by having as its major symbol the cross of Jesus’ death and as its central theme the salvation brought about by Jesus’ martyrdom. The entire force of Gibson’s Passion movie is precisely its detailed depiction of the suffering of the Founder of Christianity portraying him welcoming martyrdom by embracing the crucifix as a lover would embrace his beloved. Certainly Fundamentalist Islam urges its adherents (and even pays their families) to seek martyrdom with the promise of a blissful other world and seventy-two virgins. The Fundamentalist Moslem press glorifies every Shahid (martyr), their school system teaches even kindergarten children to emulate the shahid model, the Fatah-Hamas leaders at least give lip-service to their desire to die as martyrs for the faith.

The Jewish Bible provides a very different perspective. Our Kohen-Priests must distance themselves from death, because corpses (and even carcasses, dead reptiles, reproductive emissions which do not result in fertilization and birth, and human flesh in decay) lead to ritual impurity or tumah. There is no more blatant ways to emphasize the Jewish attraction for life and the prevention of life, for our religious emphasis on this world and not on the world to come, than by forcing our teacher-priests to disengage from death and be occupied with life.

To be sure, there is room for martyrdom when necessary (Leviticus 22:32 ), but only in the face of three of the most severe prohibitions (idolatry, adultery and murder) and as a last resort in time of Gentile persecution. Maimonides even opens his laws of Kiddush Hashem (Sanctification of G-d’s name, a usual code-phrase for martyrdom) with the times when one must transgress Biblical law rather than allow oneself to be murdered, and he absolutely forbids dying as a martyr when it is not religiously necessary to do so (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Torah Foundations, 5, 1). I often think that the “strange fire” offered by Nadav and Avihu in the midst of the Sanctuary dedication and the transgression for which they were consumed by a Divine fire may well have been the “fire ritual” with which the idolators of Moloch sacrificed their children (Deuteronomy 12:31). In the final analysis, our Torah is a Torah of life, which holds aloft as the greatest value the preservation and perfection of life in this world!

Shabbat Shalom.