One of the Most Embarrassing Passages In the Whole Torah – Parashat Emor
Do you ever pay attention when Parashat Emor is read?
And if you do, are you as embarrassed by it as I am?
Leviticus, chapter 21, beginning with verse 16 and continuing to the end of the chapter, is a long list of those kohanim who because they have a physical defect of some kind are not allowed to officiate in the sanctuary. It is a long list. There are a dozen defects listed. Just as there are 12 defects that make an animal unfit to be offered as a sacrifice, so there are a dozen defects that make a kohen unfit to offer up a sacrifice. “If a kohen is blind, or lame, or if he has a limb that is too short or too long, or if he has a broken leg or a broken arm, or if he is a hunchback or a dwarf, or if he has a growth in his eye or if he has a scar or scurvy, or if his genitals are injured, he is not qualified to offer the food of his God. He may eat of the food that the rest of the kohanim eat — he may eat of the holy food and of the most holy food as well -- but he may not enter behind the curtain or come near the altar, for he has a defect. He shall not profane these places that are sacred to Me, for I the Lord have sanctified them.”
What is your reaction to these words? How do you feel when you listen to them?
And let me ask you a more embarrassing question: how do you think the person sitting next to you feels when he hears these words if he is a person with a disabilities?
What shall we make of these verses that seem to discriminate against and diminish the dignity of the person with a disability?
Down through the centuries, and in our own time as well, people have tried to understand this passage.
Some have explained it historically. They have said: That was then and this is now. And they have pointed out that since the fall of the Temple and the end of the sacrificial system, these laws no longer apply. Today, a kohen who is a person with a disability can duchan, can get the first aliyah, can officiate at a pidyon haben, and can do anything and everything that any other kohen can do. And that is somewhat comforting.
Others have explained it practically. A kohen who was blind or lame or a little person would have difficulty doing some of the heavy work that the kohen performed in the sanctuary and therefore he was excused. That too is comforting, but it does not explain all of the impairments on the list. Why can’t a person who has a scar do the work that the kohanim did in the sanctuary? And it does not explain the strong expression that appears at the end of the list: “vilo yichalel et mikdashi”—he shall not profane these places that are sacred to Me, says the Lord.
Is the presence of a person with disabilities a desecration of the sanctuary? And if so, why?
Rabbi Bradley Artson explains it this way: He says that this law is a reminder to us that none of us but God is perfect, and therefore that we must come before our God with the shleymut, the completeness, that comes from admitting our imperfections. That is a wonderful spiritual insight, but I don’t see how it comes out of this verse. If that is what the Torah meant to teach us, should it not have spoken more clearly, and not in a way that hurts the feelings of the person with disabilities, as this verse seems to do?
Rabbi Judith Abrams explains it this way: She says that the sanctuary was a special place. It was the place where heaven and earth met, and so it was dangerous. The kohen stood at the meeting place between two worlds, between the world of mortality and the world of eternal life, between the world of supreme purity and the world of imperfection, between the world of order and the world of disorder, and therefore he had to be healthy and strong and pure in order to serve there. That is comforting too, but it still leaves us with the question of how do the people with disabilities feel when they read this passage.
My answer to this question is: I don’t know. I really wish I did, but I don’t know. After reading all the historical explanations, or the explanations that try to explain this passage practically, or theologically, I simply do not know what it means or why it is in the Torah. I wish I do, but I don’t. And I do not want to give you any answer that is glib or facile or dishonest, for that does no honor to the Torah.
And therefore, what I want to do today, if I can, is study the treatment of people with disabilities in this passage in light of the way that the disabled were treated in the rest of the Greco-Roman world within which ancient Judaism was located, and then study with you two passages from the Jewish tradition that show how later generations of Jewish teachers felt about the disabled. And then, I have several proposals that I want to make to you for your consideration.
Let me begin with the Greco-Roman world:
I think you will agree that Plato and Aristotle were among the giants of Greek philosophy. Listen to what they say about how we should treat people with disabilities:
Plato says: “This is the kind of medical provision you should legislate in your state. You should provide treatment for those of your citizens whose physical constitution is good. As for the others, it will be best to leave the unhealthy to die, and to put to death those whose psychological condition is incurably corrupt. This is the best thing to do, both for the individual sufferer and for society.” And Aristotle was in full agreement with Plato on this. He said: “Let there be a law that no crippled child should be reared!”
Plutarch goes so far as to provide details on how the decision should be made as to who should live and who should die. He says that the decision should be made by the leaders of the community and not by the father, because the father may not be objective. Notice that the idea that the mother might have a say in this decision is not even considered.
Read these statements by Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch, and you really appreciate the Jewish tradition. For nowhere, nowhere at all, not in the Torah and not in the Talmud, and not anywhere else in Jewish literature is infanticide ever considered, even as a possibility. On the contrary, the sources are unanimous: the disabled, like the able, are made in the Image of God, and are entitled to respect and reverence. They can’t officiate in the sanctuary, but nu, compared to what was done to them in the Greco-Roman world, that is not so bad. The rabbis of the Talmud learned many, many things from the Greco-Roman world, but this, the murder of people with disabilities, this they did not even consider. And that is a context that makes our passage seem not quite as harsh as it did at first. Isn’t that so?
Now let me show you two passages from rabbinic literature that speak to our issue of how people with disabilities should be treated. The first comes from the Yerushalmi:
“Rabbi Yochanan said: Each of the 40 days that Moses was on Mount Sinai, God taught him the entire Torah. And each night he forgot what he had learned. Finally, God gave it to him as a gift. If so, why did God not give it to him as a gift on the first day?
In order to encourage the teachers of slow learners.”
Think with me for a moment about what this midrash means. Moses had the best teacher that there could ever be -- God Himself. And yet God had to teach him, and then re-teach him over and over and over again until he grasped the full meaning of the Torah. And God had to modify the way in which He taught. And if God did so, then surely so must we. We human teachers have to be patient, and more than patient if necessary, when we teach those who are learning disabled.
What a powerful midrash this is! It speaks not only to teachers but to parents and siblings and nurses and doctors and caretakers and all those who deal with people with disabilities. It teaches those who teach and those who feed and dress and care for people with disabilities that your efforts sometimes require enormous patience, but if God could do it, then so can you.
And now let me show you one more midrash about people with disabilities. It is a midrash that you are probably familiar with already, but Rabbi Judith Abrams has taught me to see it in a new light.
The midrash deals with the age-old question of where is the messiah. Its answer is that the messiah is sitting at the gates of Rome, together with the poor and with those who suffer from dreadful diseases. And how can you tell which one he is?
All the others take off all their bandages at one time, and then put them all on again at one time. But the messiah takes his bandages off one at a time, and puts them back on one at a time, just in case, so that if he is called he will not be delayed.
This midrash I knew, but I never saw the nuance in it that Rabbi Abrams catches. She says that this vision of the messiah is almost the exact opposite of the image of the kohen that we saw in today’s Torah reading. The kohen cannot serve if he is ritually impure. The messiah is ritually impure by his own choice, by choosing to live among the lepers at the gates of Rome. The kohen cannot serve if he has a physical impairment -- the messiah is chosen because he has a physical impairment. The kohen puts the lepers outside of the gates of the community when he enters the sanctuary. The messiah chooses to stay outside the gates with the lepers instead of entering the sanctuary. And yet it is he, and not the kohen, who will bring the final redemption!
Could there be any more dramatic expression of the dignity and the status of a person with a disability than this -- that the Messiah lives with them, and may even be one of them!
Look at how we have come full circle, from the passage that says that a person with a disability cannot do all the work of the kohanim to this midrash, where the person with a disability will do the work of the messiah! Perhaps this midrash is the answer to the embarrassment that we all felt when we first looked at these laws in our sedra.
And now, one more thing:
It is easy to pass judgment on the laws in the Torah and to claim that we are morally superior to it, but we can only do that if we first face up to our own practices. And so let me ask you these questions:
If Yitzchak Avinu, Father Isaac, who became legally blind in his old age, were to come into our synagogue and want to daven with us, would we have a large print prayer book available for him?
If Yaakov Avinu, Father Jacob, who was injured in an encounter with a mysterious stranger and limped for the rest of his life as a result, were to come into our synagogue and want an aliyah, would he be able to get up to the bimah here? And if not, if we don’t have a ramp that makes the bimah accessible to the people with disabilities, what would we say to him?
If Moshe Rabeynu, Moses our teacher, who had a speech defect, were to come into our shul and want to read from the Torah that he gave us, could we handle it without becoming embarrassed if he were to stutter?
We say that the Shema is the central prayer in our faith. If that is so, then what do we do for those people in our midst who are unable to hear the Shema, or who are even unable to hear the shofar, because they have a disability? Do we have people who can sign the sermon and sign the service so that these people can understand and hear the Shema? And if not, then who are we to dare to judge the Torah that we have heard today when we treat people with disabilities much, much worse than it does?
I have heard synagogue leaders say: Why should we buy large print books for those who cannot see well, or arrange for someone to sign the service for those who cannot hear well, or provide a ramp up to the bimah for those who cannot walk well when there are so few such people in our congregation?
The answer to that is obvious. If we do not provide these things that they need, why should they come? If we do not provide these things, the message that we send to these people is that we have no need for you and no concern for you in our synagogue. And that, it seems to me, is the opposite of the message that the Torah wants us to send.
And therefore, let us judge ourselves before we judge the Torah, and let us do what we should to make all Jews, including those with disabilities, welcome in our midst.
