Two Minute Torah Podcast

Emor 5768 by Joanne Palmer

Hi. I’m Joanne Palmer, editor of CJ:Voices of Conservative/Masorti Judaism, and this is Two-Minute Torah.

Like the parshiot that flank it, Emor instructs us about separations – to be holy is to be set aside, and in the book of Vayikra there is a dizzying number of ways to separate almost everything from almost everything else.

The instructions here are the result of more separations – of priests from the people, and of the high priest from the others. Here, priests are confronted with a long list of women they may not marry and actions they may not take.

This rigid structure is built on hierarchy. Some people are born into higher positions than others. That is an immutable truth in the Torah. It is true that some younger brothers can steal their older brothers’ birthrights, and that some men of uncertain parentage can climb fairly high, but overwhelmingly where you are born is where you stay.

You have to assume that the need for hierarchy is so stressed because just as it is deeply human to crave structure it is deeply human as well to struggle to overturn it.

To us, born to Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, this approach is impossible. On no level do we accept that our rung on the social ladder when we are born is the rung on which we must stay. We are born to climb.

But when we examine the Torah and Jefferson more closely we realize that both describe abstract conditions. If the harshness of the Torah’s delineation of status implies some discontent with it, then the assumptions of Jefferson’s can be shown to be clearly untrue. Jefferson was free to pursue happiness, as well as other passions, because the accident of his birth into a wealthy family freed him from having to pursue a living. Women were not given those inalienable rights directly and slaves were not given them at all. And if all men were born equal, Jefferson would not have been born with the talent to combine and shape and polish words that allowed him to write the declaration.

So perhaps the truth for us now is somewhere in between those extremes. We yearn for structure and we yearn to break free of it. We might be most holy when we are most separate, but that separation might part us from what we most desire. Here as everywhere else in life, tension between competing ideals is inescapable. Being adult is coming to terms with that.