Dvar Torah on Parshat Emor

This week's parsha, Emor - which means 'speak' - ends with a tragic story: And the son of an Israelite woman, who was the son of an Egyptian man, went out among the children of Israel, and they fought in the camp - the son of the Israelite woman, with an Israelite man. And the son of the Israelite woman spoke the divine name and cursed, and they brought him to Moshe - and his mother's name was Shlomit the daughter of Divri, of the tribe of Dan. And they placed him in a guarded place, so that the thing could be explained to them by the word of God. And God spoke to Moshe and said: Remove the blasphemer to outside of the camp, and all those who heard him shall put their hands on his head, and the entire congregation shall stone him. And to the children of Israel you are to speak, saying - any man, any man who curses his God, he shall bear his sin. The story is fairly cryptic. Who is this son of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man? What did he fight the other Israelite about? Why did he blaspheme, and what did he say?The Rabbis fill in the gaps. Picking up on the phrase "and they fought in the camp", the Rabbis tell us that the fight was about issues pertaining to the Israelite's encampment in the desert; this son of an Egyptian man wanted to pitch his tent among the members of his mother's tribe, Dan. The other members of the tribe stopped him, with the claim that, since his father was not Jewish, he was not a member of their, or any, tribe, and could not be part of the encampment of the people of Israel. His anger at this rejection was the trigger for the fight, during which he apparently cursed the God who's laws were discriminating against him, and denying him a place among his people. According to the Midrash, he cursed the ineffable name of God, which he, along with the rest of the Jewish people, had heard at Sinai. The tragedy of this story of rejection is expanded upon by another Rabbinic Midrash. The Rabbis attempt to understand the roots of the blasphemer's behavior, and use what little information we have about him - his mother's name and the fact that she conceived him with an Egyptian. The Rabbis identify the Egyptian as the one whom the young Moshe, back in Egypt, confronted and killed when he was beating a Jewish slave. According to the Rabbinic embellishment of the story, the Egyptian was having relations with the wife of his victim, whom he was beating in order to frighten him from doing anything about it. The Rabbis do not see the wife, Shlomit bat Divri, as a victim, as we might, but rather as a loose woman. In an attempt to find the roots of her and her son's sins, they focus on her name - Shlomit the daughter of Divri, and tell us that she was extremely talkative, and that she would speak ('l'daber', similar to her father's name, Divri) to anyone and everyone she bumped into, saying "Shalom, shalom" (hello, hello), like her name, Shlomit, to whomever she met. Her son, therefore, logically sins with a transgression of the mouth, and curses God. The web of interconnected behavior here is very interesting. The Rabbis attempt to root the behavior of the blasphemer in the behavior of his mother. I would like to take a moment to look at Shlomit's actions. Clearly, the Rabbis link her relationship with the Egyptian with her earlier speech acts - her speaking indiscriminately, promiscuously, to everyone she met, mirrors, perhaps causes, her sexual promiscuity. I am reminded here of something that happened to me in 8th grade. After lunch, we used to go out back behind the lunch-room and play Chinese hand ball against the lunch-room wall - it's like hand ball but you all stand in a line and hit the ball so that it bounces before it hits the wall, then it hits the wall and goes down the line into some other guys 'box' or area and he has to hit it to a different guys box. My day school had both boys and girls in it, but we went to separate classes, ate separately, and by and large did not see each other all day. It was a big deal for any of us to talk to one of the girls, and most of us did not have the nerve to do so. One day, when about 8 or 10 of us were lined up playing Chinese handball, a girl from our class, who shall remain nameless and who is now, I'm sure, a wonderful wife and mother, walked past the entire line and said hello to each of us, one at a time, by name. I can still hear her "hello Jonathan, hello Richard, hello Brian, hello Arden, hello Larry, hello Stuie (that's me), hello Yossie" as she walked past, smiling, so much more mature, adult, and daring than any of us little boys. I remember being excited that she said hello to me, and then feeling cheated, because, after all, she said hello to everyone, how meaningful could that be, how could it mean anything personal? Shlomit's behavior, as understood by the Rabbis, was also promiscuous in this way. It is a mark of the importance the Rabbis place on the act of speech that they prefigure her act of adultery with the Egyptian by an act of promiscuous speech. I once heard something in the name of the founder of Chassidut, the Baal Shem Tov, to the effect that relations between friends and neighbors occur in the world of action, between husbands and wives in the world of speech, and between parents and children in the world of thought. Shlomit, with her behavior, debased the act through which men and women initiate, cement, and develop their relationship, the act with which God created the world, and with which that world was debased by the serpent - the act of speech. The disloyal, promiscuous, frivolous use of the power of speech by Shlomit was mirrored by her sexual behavior, and was subsequently assimilated by her son, who, in a similar act of disloyalty, debased speech by using it against the Creator. Just as the man/woman relationship is defined by what we say to one another, our relationship with God is, to a large degree, a product of things we say. The blasphemer, the son of a woman who debased relationships by debasing their essential currency, speech, when angered, when frustrated in a relationship, instead of using speech to solve the problem, to salvage the relationship (after all, he could have asked Moshe what to do, where to camp, as others in the Bible, when denied justice, used the power of speech to ask and thereby maintain a relationship, rather than curse and destroy it), used speech to destroy a relationship. The fact that the Midrash tells us that the blasphemer used the name of God which the Jewish people heard at Mt. Sinai underscores this understanding. At Mt. Sinai, God revealed Himself to the Jewish people, and made a covenant with them. The mechanism for creating that relationship was speech, especially God's revelation of His Divine Name. The use of that name to blaspheme, and curse, is the ultimate act of disloyalty, a kind of adultery.Speech is the tool we use to create relationship. The story of the blasphemer, and his mother Shlomit, which concludes the parsha of Emor - speak - underscores for us the dangers of thoughtless, violent, and disrespectful speech, and illustrates the slippery slope from Shlomit's promiscuous speech, which only mimicked real relationship, and thereby debased it, to the violent anti-speech of her son, which destroyed relationship, rather than built it.Shabbat ShalomShimon Felix