Dvar Torah on Parshat Emor

Of all the issues facing the Jewish community in America, Israel, and the rest of the world, there are two which stand out as central and critical. One is the gap between those who, to varying degrees, follow Jewish tradition, and those who do not. The gap between Jews who call themselves religious, orthodox or traditional, and those who call themselves secular, unaffiliated, or not religious, seems to be widening daily, in spite of BYFI's best efforts, with the level of discourse sinking lower and lower as the tones of the conversation seem to be getting higher and higher. The other issue, which is clearly related to the first, is the question of Jewish identity - who is a Jew? The decision taken by the Reform movement to recognize patrilineal descent, and the non-recognition by the Orthodox and Conservative movements of Reform conversions, is, in the opinion of many, leading to a split in the Jewish people which may prove irrevocable and irreconcilable. At the end of this week's parsha, Parshat Emor, there is a sad, seemingly straightforward story. On the face of it, this story has little or nothing to do with these two pressing issues. The Rabbis of the Midrash, however, read it as having a direct bearing on these questions. The story goes like this: And the son of an Israelite woman, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the children of Israel; and this son of the Israelite woman [whose father was an Egyptian] and a man of Israel fought together in the camp. And the son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name, and cursed; and they brought him to Moses. And his mother's name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan. And they put him in custody, that it might be declared to them by the mouth of the Lord [what to do with him]. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 'Bring him that has cursed outside of the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him. And you shall speak to the children of Israel, saying: Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. And he that blasphemes the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall certainly stone him; the same for a stranger as for a citizen, when he blasphemes the Name, he shall be put to death...And Moses spoke to the children of Israel, and they brought forth he that had cursed out of the camp, and stoned him with stones. And the children of Israel did as the Lord commanded Moses. Sad, and, when you think about it, difficult to understand on a few levels: what were they fighting about, this 'son of an Israelite woman, whose father was an Egyptian', and this other 'man of Israel'? How relevant is it that he was the son of an Egyptian? Who was he? What does it mean that he 'went out among the children of Israel'? Out from where? To where? And what got him so worked up that he cursed God? The Rabbis, never slow to fill in the gaps, present us with a fabulous story, one which speaks directly to today's most pressing Jewish issues. According to the Midrash (and here I will use Rashi's distillation of a number of Rabbinic approaches to the story), the son of the Egyptian man 'went out' from the text, that is to say, he came directly from discussing the Biblical text which immediately precedes our story. That text is the law of the show bread, 12 loaves which were baked weekly, placed on a table in the Tabernacle, and then, at the end of the week, eaten by the priests. It was from a discussion of this ritual that the blasphemer was coming. According to the Rabbis, he heard the law of the show bread and laughed at it: this is a silly ritual! If you are feeding/honoring God with the show bread, then what could he possibly want with week-old bread? What sort of Temple service is that? An alternative or additional understanding is that he 'went out' of Moshe's court, where it had just been determined that, because his father was Egyptian, he could not be considered a member of one of the 12 tribes, nor claim a share of the land of Israel. It was this decision that angered him, and triggered his aggressive walk through the Israelite camp. It was during that walk that he went against Moshe's halachic decision, and tried to pitch his tent among the Israelites, among the tribe of Dan, his mother's tribe. He was stopped from doing so by 'a man of Israel', and that's when their fight, which ended in his cursing God, began. The two themes that emerge here, the two issues at stake, are the ones we spoke of above, which are so critical to the Jewish world today: the blasphemer's negative attitude to traditional ritual ('having this show bread sit around for a week, getting stale, is silly'), and his personal status among the Jewish people. That status, by the way, is tremendously unclear. The commentators do somersaults trying to determine this fellow's halachic standing - Jew (he does have a Jewish mother), non-Jew (perhaps, when this guy was born, which was before the giving of the Torah, non-Jewish law, which is patrilineal, prevailed, rather than Torah law, and he is legally an Egyptian, like his father), half Jew (Jewish, but not a member of any tribe, making him some kind of second-class citizen), or maybe a convert? The final determination is far from clear, so much so that it seems fairly unrewarding to go into it in too much detail. The important thing is that it is unclear, and he was excluded precisely because of that lack of clarity as to his status as a Jew. What clearly emerges from this story is a sense of tragedy, a sense that this need not have happened this way. Although the Torah seems to take sides against the blasphemer - he is executed, and no mitigating circumstances or explanations are offered in his defense - I would like to reclaim him, to see him as the tragic hero of the story, a victim, as much as, if not more than, a criminal. Driven to distraction by the rejection of his fellow Jews, by his inability to find a place within the Jewish community and the Jewish tradition, the blasphemer is pushed into expressing the most profound alienation from Judaism imaginable. His rejection of tradition and halacha, as exemplified by his attack on the show bread, seems to me to have been prompted by the negative reception he received from his Jewish brothers. The critique itself, while perhaps missing the point when it comes to ritual, is actually a reasonable one, one that I think we can see as a possibly legitimate question to ask, and which could have been productively and positively answered and discussed; it might even have prompted an interesting conversation about the nature of symbol and ritual. Instead, it is seen as an example of his status as an outsider: not only is he not really Jewish, he also doesn't understand or appreciate our laws and customs. It is this negative response which drives him to curse God. I would like to think that the lesson that one should not blaspheme is really only the simplest and most superficial message here. More important for us today is the challenge that this story presents to the members and leaders of the Jewish community, when they interact with those who are in situations like that of the blasphemer - not comfortable with Jewish tradition, and not accepted by the broader Jewish community, a community which actually challenges their essential Jewishness. This story demands that we make sure to not reject them or their questions, for if we do, we run the risk of leading them into blasphemy - into a total break from and rejection of their Jewish heritage, in the way that this poor fellow in our story was pushed by the rejection he encountered. The blasphemer was born into a tricky situation vis a vis his relationship with the mainstream Jewish community, but he wasn't born a blasphemer; he was made one. Shabbat Shalom, Shimon Felix