May 7, 2009
The theme of the priesthood, explored in Emor, is further amplified in the haftara, where we read, “And [the priests] shall teach My people the difference between the holy and the common, and cause them to discern between the ritually impure and the ritually pure….” (Ezekiel 44:23-24)
The priests were the religious leaders of the Israelites. However, there are a number of problematic issues regarding their status and function. One of the great mysteries in the Torah concerns the laws of the Red Heifer, whereby the priest is commanded to conduct a complex ritual so that a person defiled by contact with the dead is returned to a state of purity. (Numbers 19) At the same time, the priest discovers that while facilitating the impure person’s return to purity, he himself has become impure.
A further difficulty emerges from the Torah’s commandment not to give the Levite tribe, which includes all priests, an ancestral share in the land. Their housing problem was solved by transferring 42 cities from the other tribes’ inheritance to the Levites and priests; these cities and six additional “cities of refuge” were all islands of protection for anyone who killed accidentally and feared revenge by the victim’s relatives. (Maimonides, Laws of the Murderer, 8, 9)
We have to remember that all sorts of unsavory types fit into the category of the accidental killer; even someone who intended to maim someone but not to murder was called an accidental killer (shogeg) and had a right to asylum. Such individuals certainly cannot be counted among the elite of serious Jewry. Is it not strange that the Torah commands the priestly class to have their lives intertwined with such criminals and lowlifes?
Finally, the kohen-priest ascends the “bima” to ask the Almighty to bless the Israelites with the words: “Blessed art Thou…who has sanctified us with the sanctity of Aaron and has commanded us to bless His nation Israel with love.” Do we have another instance in our laws of benedictions wherein the individual bestowing the blessing must do so with love?
To understand the true role of Jewish leadership, we must remember that Abraham was not the first person after Noah to devote himself to God. Noah’s son Shem really qualified for this preeminent position. According to the midrash, it was he, with his son Ever, who established the first yeshiva. When Rebecca, Abraham’s daughter-in-law, felt unwell in her pregnancy, Rashi explains, she sought the spiritual advice not of Abraham but of Shem. Several verses later, after she gives birth to twins, Jacob, the younger son, is described as “dwelling in tents.” (25:27) Again, Rashi tells us that these are the tents of Shem and Ever. Rashi also explains that the guests of honor “at the great feast Abraham made on the day that Isaac was weaned” (Genesis 21:8) were “the greatest of the generation (gedolei hador): Shem and Ever and Elimelech.”
But if this is true, why does the historic chain of the Jewish people begin with Abraham and not with Shem and Ever?
This question is raised by the Raavad (1125-1198) on his gloss to Maimonides’ Laws of Idolatry, when the “Great Eagle” describes how even “their [gentile] wise men…also thought that there was no other god but the stars and spheres. But the Creator of the universe was known to none, and recognized by none save a few solitary individuals, such as Enosh, Methusaleh, Noah, Shem, and Ever. The world moved on in this fashion until that pillar of the world, the patriarch Abraham was born….”
But where, asks the Raavad, is Shem in all of this? “If Shem and Ever were there, why didn’t they protest this idolatry?”
Rabbi Yosef Caro offers an answer to this question: “Abraham would call out and announce [to all the peoples] belief in the unity of God. Shem and Ever taught the path of God [only] to their students. They did not awaken and announce the way Abraham did, and that’s why Abraham’s greatness increased.”
Said simply, Shem and Ever were Torah giants, but they were deeply involved only in the spiritual progress of their students, the intellectual and religious elite.
Abraham, on the other hand, understood that the mitzva “And you shall love the Lord your God” means that one must make God — the God of righteousness, compassion, and peace — beloved by all humankind by going out and teaching the masses. Indeed, this is what Abraham did. Only an Abraham could have been chosen by God as the first Jew.
This element of the Abrahamic personality was codified by the Torah into the priesthood. The kohanim had to love every single Jew and demonstrated their love by living with the dregs of Jewish society in the Cities of Refuge. The kohen had to love his fellow Jews so much that he would gladly be willing to defile himself so that another Jew could become pure. This is the secret of the mystery of the red heifer.
Shlomo Riskin is the chief rabbi of the city of Efrat and dean of Ohr Torah Institutes in Israel.
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