Two Minute Torah Podcast

Emor 5769 by Joanne Palmer

To understate dramatically, parshat Emor is full of rules.

We learn how the priests are to behave. Spontaneity is not to be their guiding principle. Rigid rules govern their relationships, their clothing, their grooming, and the routines of their lives. No visible imperfections are allowed.

So what are these priests, these models of perfection, secure in their place atop the great chain of being, actually doing? They are at work in the Temple, the place into whose service they are born. They are overseeing sacrifices.

So pull back for a second, then, and consider the Temple. It is a place of paradox. It is rich in beauty; its furnishing have been described in detail, deep reds and purples and majestic blues, smooth stone, glittering gold, and thick twists of cloth. It echoes to the sweet songs of the Levites and is perfumed by the fat burning on the altar. It is also a place of terror and death; animals are led in to be slaughtered – does the music mask their bellows? Does the smell of barbecue cover the stench of the slaughterhouse?

At the heart of the Temple, at the center of the circle of priests, is the mystery of life and death. All that rigidity is guarding something that by its nature cannot be controlled. Taking a large healthy animal and killing it is messy. The passage from the world we know into the one we cannot know, no matter how much we try to persuade ourselves otherwise, is not easy.

Just as Abraham was able to replace Isaac with a ram, so did our ancestors give an animal over to death in place of themselves. The reprieve was only temporary, they knew that, but still, for that moment, it worked. After the sacrifice, they still lived.

This tightrope balance, this tension that holds the cord that is our lives taut and high as sometimes we teeter and other times we do fancy tricks on it, is just a dramatic version of the tensions and tradeoffs that make up daily life. There is much that we cannot control, so we try to control what we can. We form structures whose rigidity seems to protect us, whose walls shelter us, that give form and meaning to our lives. Those rules are important; they define us as people and as a people. But in the center of those rules, the truth those rules guard is uncontrollable and unknowable. We must live with that tension.