31: Emor
Welcome to TLDR Torah: a synopsis of the weekly parsha based on Robert Alter’s translation, plus a question to spur your Shabbat dinner (or any!) conversation.
Parsha Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23)
TLDR:
After we read about priestly purity laws, high holidays, and bread preparation customs in the sanctuary, this Parsha gives us a rare (for Leviticus) narrative about a blasphemer. Below is William Blake’s take.
Priests should not touch dead people (with exceptions), shave their heads, or rip their garments; these actions they shouldn’t do are all signs of mourning.
Priests must also marry virgins and not have any disfigurements. This harks back to the purity laws in earlier parshas.
Like priests, sacrifices must also be pure. The Torah describes all the animal defects; blind, broken, lacerated, scabbed, skin flaked, etc. The bar is high.
The Torah summarizes all of the Jewish holidays, starting with Shabbat, Passover, and Shavuot (7 weeks following Passover, though debates about the exact start date led to large historical schisms between Jewish sects).
It then covers Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, “a festival of huts.” These passages mostly summarize what we already know.
And now for the story of the blasphemer. The son of an Israelite woman and Egyptian man brawls in the Israelite camp. It’s unclear who he fights with or why, but the verb is the same one used when Moses breaks up the fight in Egypt. Regardless, he “invokes the Name.”
Everyone who heard him places their hands on his head and then stones him. God sets a policy against even invoking his Name (versus “vilifying” it).
Question:
What’s in a Name? Ancient cultures imbued names with power (see here for a modern take). Saying a name did something. The “stick and stones” adage specifically does not apply. Have we lost something in the separation of language and physical action? We still imbue meaning into our own names (e.g. in remembrance of an ancestor), so why not imbue other things too?