Ready And Prepared: A Drash on Emor

Emor

By Trisha Arlin

This week's parsha is Emor, Speak, a command to Moses from God, Eh-mor el haCohanim, Speak to the priests.  What follows is a series of rules that Moses must pass on. In chapter 21, God has Moses lay down the rules for the priests, the cohanim, on how not to defile themselves, lo yee tama,  to remain ritually pure, tahor.

The idea of ritual purity for priests or women usually has very negative connotations for me, since I, like most people, tend to think of purity as good and impurity as bad.  Clean is good, and dirty is bad, right?  But often what the Torah calls impure is to me the normal stuff of life, the normal goopy viscous liquids we encounter, that every human being must engage in or with...I leave the specific goop to your imagination...and I just can't see that as bad.  But that's my modern English speaking interpretation because that's not what Jewish ritual purity is about.  I think it's about readiness, about preparation, about being ready for holiness.

Remember that, readiness and preparation.

For the cohanim, the priests, that would have meant becoming ready to do the sacrifices and rituals of the temple.  For the High Priest, that would have also meant readiness to enter the Holy of Holies,  Kadosh HaKodashim, the small building that only he entered and then only entered once a year, on Yom Kippur, to meet God in the most sacred and separate place and beg forgiveness for himself, his family, and his community.  I say sacred and separate place because though we often translate the word Kadosh to mean holy it actually means, separate.  We make something holy by separating it from the everyday, the khol.    Another name for God is HaMavdil, the One who seperates.

And that's how I think of ritual purity, as a holy separation, a readiness for sacrifice in the Torah and today, a readiness to prepare us for tefillah, prayer, gemilut chasidim, acts of loving kindness and tikkun olam, repair of the world. 

In this parsha, in chapter 21, there are a series of acts and rituals that a priest must perform to maintain his, and it's always HIS, holy separation.    How he relates to the dead, how he shaves, what kind of women he can be with , what he wears on his body, what shape his body is in....these are restrictions of their time and I don't feel a need to list them, or obsess and be angry about how they are sexist and elitist.  We can stipulate that about half the Torah if not more.    I'm interested in now.

One way we can purify ourselves in modern times is with water, like washing your hands before a meal.  To really purify yourself you  to go to the mikveh.   You do a full immersion in water, your entire body, and say a prayer.  Traditionally observant men and women go to the mikveh for many reasons, for women once a month, or after a birth, or for a wedding or for conversion, but liberal Jews often go for other reasons , to ritually acknowledge life changes and events  like a B'nai Mitzvah, a graduation, menopause, a divorce, a gender transition, all sorts of things. 

What else is there to be ritually pure for?  I'm a Kohen.  Or, to traditionally observant Jews, a Bat Cohen, a daughter of a Kohen.    In the Conservative synagogue I grew up in, that meant my father, certainly never me, got called up to the Torah first, because a Kohen is supposed to always have the first of the traditional seven aliyot.

My father also would get called up to do the special blessing of the priests during the High Holidays, something we have done and not done at Kolot.  Perhaps it makes us a bit uncomfortable, to think that somebody, simply because of his or her genes,  might be able to somehow channel God and holiness and facilitate redemption and teshuvah.  It makes me uncomfortable, but I have to admit, when I have done it it's been very cool,very mystical and special.   You cover your face with your tallit, put you hands up in a mystical sign, and it's like you become a conduit for holiness.  It's profound.  Now I know, as a good leftie progressive, that I'm not supposed to feel this or to like it, but i do.  I feel the responsibility, I feel separate and holy and somehow even a little tahor, ritually pure.  It is good.  And why should I keep all that good feeling to myself?  Especially in this time that calls for some much action from us, wouldn't it be great if you each could  imagine yourself as the Cohen Gadol in your own Kadosh HaKodashim, the High Priest in your own Holy of Holies, immersing in your own mikveh, to imagine yourself as a holy vessel, pure and ready for inspiration and holy action.

(This next paragraph is a short version of a guided meditation)  So I invite you to cover yourself with your tallit and imagine that everything outside your tallit is mundane and everything inside it, especially you, is kadosh, holy and separate.  Today we are all kohanim.   Close your eyes, breathe regulary, imagine that every breath is a prayer to and for life.  Think of yourself as stepping out the door of this room and finding yourself in a meadow, where you see a small house in the distance, a house of one room, with a door but no windows.  You walk towards it and realize, this is your Holy of Holies, where you are the Kohen Gadol.   You go inside, there is a small pool of running water there, this is your mikvah.   You are completely yourself here, and you step into this mikveh and go under the water. Baruch atah adonai elohainu ruach ha olam, asher kidishanu bemitzvoav, eetivanu al hatevvilah.  Bless the One-ness, God, Breath of the Universe, sanctifying us with God's commandments and commanding us on immersion.  Dunk yourself again, and make up your own blessing, one for your family and friends.   Dunk yourself again, and make up another blessing, one for your community and your world.  Come out of the water.  There's a lovely fluffy towel.  Dry yourself off.  Imagine that now you are ready for holiness, for action, for change.   When you are ready, stand, come out of the Holy of Holies, walk out the door through the meadow, back to yourself with the tallit covering your head.

Blessed One-ness

We give thanks for the cleansing water

That makes us ready and prepared for prayer and action.

We are all holy vessels

Made in the image of God.

We give thanks for the ones who offer prayers.

We give thanks for the ones who take action.

We cannot heal the world without both,

Amen.

Shabbat Shalom

Tzav, a drash

Tzav, this week's parsha, establishes some of the sacrificial duties of the professional high priest, the Kohanim,  along with some of their perks and ends with the ritual of their consecration.  There is an obvious parallel between these duties, perks and consecration and those of the modern Jewish religious leader. 

In Tzav, God tells Moses how to conduct a series  of religious rituals that only the Kohanim can carry out, specifically the rituals of Burnt Offering, meal offering, offerings for purgation, reparations, sacrifices for well being and the prohimbitions regarding fat and blood, and then the insturctions for ordination of the priests.  We are told what the priests should be wearing, how they kill, burn or otherwise consume the food or creatures being sacrificed.

The purpose or efficacy of sacrifice is taken for granted.   If done correctly, the ritual will evoke well-being,  sin will be purged, God will be placated.  The acts are not without meaning and effect, but to me the obligation seems  paramount and is perhaps an ends unto itself.  One wonders how the high priests managed to escape corruption and cynicism and one assumes many did not.   But noneless, they – and we - we brave alll the possible pitfalls, because they and we need the rituals.  Why?

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer wrote in The Torah, A Women's Commentary,

As we learn about ritual as a human phenomenon, we come to understand it as a language of it's own, uniquely meaningful.  

But what gives it that meaning? Is it the ritual itself, is there some magic in the specific act, or is it enough that it is separate and repeatable and and we have all agreed to assign meaning to it?  And in our own time, is group or private prayer an adequate substitute for an orchestrated and dramatic public offering of value to God?  Or is the system of halacha and all the attendent sacrifices one makes in comfort and ease if one is halachically observant, the only true substitute for a fire on a high altar?

Or are those special creatures, the hereditary high priests the only ones who can perform the rituals correctly so that we may be made whole and holy?  If so, can these Kohanim serve as models for a moden rabbinical student?  How should we approach the learning and carrying out of our rituals?  Is there is the inherent value to a ritual even if is divorced from its history, or meaning?  Where can we find our fire?

Arthur Green writes in his interpretation of the Se-fat Emet's commentary on Tzav,

We long for a perfect act of worship, one in which there is no distraction, no doubt, no holding back, no wandering of the mind, nothing but the pure gift of love.  But we miss the point.  Our worship is all about struggle, an ongoing inner process of transformaiton

I would like to tell you what was, for me, a perfect act of worship and a transformation.

My father was a kohen.  When I was young, I knew he was special, and he got to do stuff other people didn't do because of it and that made me special.    

One day my father came home with this wooden box, and inside were five beautiful silver coins, which were for the pidyon ha ben,   the ritual of redeeming the first born son from service in the temple.  My father would "sell" these coins to the parents of the child for the price of a donation to the temple, he would then perform the pidyon ha ben, whatever that was, and they would pay him with the coins.  My father was very proud of these coins and I really wish I still had them.  We bonded over the coins, until he told me that I could never do this ritual because I was a girl, and only boys counted as kohanim, and only boys needed to be redeemed.  Not fair.

Years pass, I am an adult feminist and completely alienated from Judaism and I move to Seattle and then discover Judaism ain't so bad after all and move back to Jewish New York, but  as drawn as I was to the Jewish community, I still couldn't help feel that religion was irrational and not for me.  But then, friends of mine had a baby, their first, and a boy, and they knew I'm a Kohen, I don't remember why, and they asked me to perfrom their son's pidyon ha ben.

Me?  But I'm a woman?  You mean, I can be a Kohen now? Or at least act as one? Yes, I can.  It was so exciting!  I hadn't read Hebrew out loud in a long time, but Rabbi Sami Barth stood next to me at the ceremony while I enabled Debby and Wrolf to redeem the infant, Jeremy.  And myself.  Because in that act, that perfect act of ritual, both Jeremy and I were redeemed.  My fear and doubts were nothing next to the connection I felt to Aaron, to my father, to every woman who ever wanted to lead and study and pray as a full human being and a Jew, and most of all, to my authentic self.   A perfect act of worship and transformation, indeed.

That baby, Jeremy,  is going to college next year.  And I am applying to rabbinical school, though not because I'm a kohen.  I belong to a congregation that considers such hereditary status to be beyond anachronistic, no, more like repulsive and un-American and we never, and I mean never, do aliyot by Kohen, Levite and Israelite, but I still, whenever I hear the priestly blessing recited by the rabbi and sung by the cantor, I still think, that's mine to say, not yours, mine, though I don't tell anyone, well I just told you, because I know I'm not supposed to feel that way, and I know it's not real but I do.

But I have come to know that any leader of ritual can be that k'li kodesh, sacred vessel.   Rabbi Shefa Gold, writing about this parsha in her book, Torah Journeys, says:

We are commanded to be a nation of priests, to take responsibility for the holiness of our world, to be healers, and when necessary to stand between Life and Death, bridging the finite and the infinite.

The ritual leader, kohen or rabbi or not, lights the holy fire, whether it's a burning pigeon or a powerful metaphor, and creates the bridge between the past and the future.