Emor אמור
Parashat Emor deals with two kinds of holiness: that of person and of time. Chapter 21 relates to holy people: priests, and above them, the High Priest. Their close contact with the Sanctuary means that they must live with certain restrictions: on contact with the dead and whom they may marry. Chapter 22 recaps similar laws relating to ordinary Israelites when they seek to enter the Sanctuary, as well as defects in animals that bar them from being offered as sacrifices. Chapter 23 is about holy time, the festivals of the year. Chapter 24 speaks about the Menora, lit daily, and the show bread, renewed weekly, and ends with a story – one of the only two narratives in Leviticus – about the fate of a man who blasphemed in the course of a fight.
The first of the essays that follow is about the laws, whose source is in this parasha, of sanctifying and not desecrating God’s name. The next four are about the list of festivals in chapter 23: what makes it different from the Torah’s other lists, why Shabbat is described here differently from anywhere else, the great controversy about what the Torah means when it says that the Omer should be offered on “the day after the Sabbath,” and why Sukkot is different from all other festivals. The last essay is about the story of the blasphemer: what is it about and why is it here?
Sanctifying the Name
Two of the most fundamental principles of Jewish law make their appearance in Parashat Emor:
Do not desecrate My holy name, that I may be sanctified among the Children of Israel. I am the Lord who sanctifies you. (Lev. 22:32)
From this verse come the twin commands of ḥillul Hashem and kiddush Hashem, the prohibition against desecrating God’s name, and the command to sanctify it. These are ultimate values in Judaism, one negative, the other positive. Ḥillul Hashem is the only transgression for which there is no atonement during a person’s lifetime.1Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 1:4.
Kiddush Hashem is the supreme act of faith, even to the point of laying down one’s life for it. The meaning of these terms has a fascinating history, unfolding over time.
In the first instance, a plain reading of the verse as given by Ibn Ezra suggests that it be understood in the context of the chapter in which it appears. It has been speaking about the special duties that attach to the priesthood and the extreme care the priests must take in serving God within the Sanctuary. All Israel is holy, but the priests are a holy elite within the nation. It was their task to preserve the purity and glory of the Sanctuary as God’s symbolic home in the midst of the nation. So the commands are a special charge to the priests to take exemplary care as guardians of the holy. It was their failure to do so at a later age that led to Malachi’s stinging charge in the name of God: “From the rising of the sun to where it sets, My name is great among the nations…. But you profane it” (Mal. 1:11–12). The slovenliness of the priests in bringing injured and ailing animals as sacrifices, says Malachi, is a kind of lèse-majesté, a contempt for the honour of God, that no other nation would show. That is a desecration.
The next level of meaning appears in the prophets, Amos and Jeremiah, for whom it is a description of immoral conduct that brings dishonour to God’s law as a code of justice and compassion. Amos (2:7) speaks of people who “trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground, and deny justice to the oppressed…and so profane My holy name.” Jeremiah uses the notion of ḥillul Hashem to describe those who circumvent the law by emancipating their slaves only to recapture and enslave them again (Jer. 34:16). The sages2Genesis Rabba 49:9. suggest that Abraham was invoking this same idea when he challenged God on His plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, if this meant punishing the righteous as well as the wicked: “Far be it from You [ḥalila lekha] to do such a thing.” God and the people of God must be associated with justice. Failure to do so constitutes a ḥillul Hashem.
A third level of meaning appears in the book of Ezekiel. The Jewish people, or at least a significant part of it, have been forced into exile in Babylon. The nation has suffered defeat and the Temple lies in ruins. For the exiles, the result was a human tragedy. They had lost their home, freedom, and independence. It was a spiritual tragedy: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”3Psalms 137:4.
But Ezekiel, in a devastating series of prophecies, sees it as a tragedy for God also:
Son of man, when the people of Israel were living in their own land, they defiled it by their conduct and their actions…. I dispersed them among the nations, and they were scattered through the countries; I judged them according to their conduct and their actions. And wherever they went among the nations they profaned My holy name, for it was said of them, “These are the Lord’s people, and yet they had to leave His land.” (Ezek. 36:17–20)
The very fact of exile constitutes a desecration of God’s name because the fact that He had punished His people by letting them be conquered was interpreted by the nations as His inability to protect them. This recalls Moses’ prayer after the Golden Calf:
“Lord,” he said, “why should Your anger burn against Your people, whom You brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that He brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from Your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on Your people.” (Ex. 32:11–12)
This is part of the divine pathos. Having chosen to identify His name with the people of Israel, God is, as it were, caught between the demands of justice on the one hand, and public perception on the other. What looks like retribution to the Israelites looks like weakness to the world. In the eyes of the nations, for whom national gods were identified with power, the exile of Israel could not but be interpreted as the powerlessness of Israel’s God. That, says Ezekiel, is a ḥillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name.
The fourth sense emerged in the late Second Temple period. Israel had returned to its land and rebuilt the Temple, but they came under attack first from the Seleucid Greeks in the reign of Antiochus IV, then from the Romans, both of whom attempted to outlaw Jewish practice. The assault was more than military and political: it was religious and cultural. For the first time, martyrdom became a significant feature of Jewish life. The question arose: Under what circumstances were Jews to sacrifice their lives rather than transgress Jewish law?
The question was real and deep. During the great revolt against Rome, in the years 66–73, there were several tragic cases in which Jews committed collective suicide rather than be taken captive. Similar events took place in Northern Europe during the age of the Crusades. On the one hand, Judaism has a strong bias towards life. The sages understand the verse, “You shall keep My decrees and laws which a person shall keep and live by them” (Lev. 18:5), to mean “and not die by them.”4Yoma 85b.
Saving life takes precedence over most of the commands. But there are three exceptions: the prohibitions against murder, forbidden sexual relations, and idolatry, where the sages rule that it is necessary to die rather than transgress. Even so, they also say that “at a time of persecution” one should resist at the cost of death even a demand “to change one’s shoelaces,” that is, performing any act that could be construed as going over to the enemy, betraying and demoralising those who remained true to the faith. It was at this time that the phrase kiddush Hashem began to mean the willingness to die as a martyr.
One of the most poignant of all collective decisions on the part of the Jewish people was to categorise all the victims of the Holocaust as “those who died al kiddush Hashem,” that is, for the sake of sanctifying God’s name. This was far from inevitable. Martyrdom means choosing to die for the sake of God. That is what happened in previous persecutions of Jews. Faced with a choice between life and abandonment of the faith, or death and fidelity to it, many chose death. One of the demonic aspects of the Nazi genocide was that Jews were not given the choice. By calling them martyrs in retrospect, Jews gave the victims the dignity in death of which they were so brutally robbed in life.
There is a fifth dimension. This is how Maimonides sums it up:
There are other deeds which are also included in the desecration of God’s name. When a person of great Torah stature, renowned for his piety, does deeds which, although they are not transgressions, cause people to speak disparagingly of him, this is also a desecration of God’s name. For example, a person who makes a purchase and does not pay for it immediately, although he has the money to do so…or someone who jests immoderately, or eats and drinks among the common people, or whose conduct with other people is not gentle, nor does he receive them with affably, but is quarrelsome and prone to anger, and so on. All this depends on the stature of the sage.5Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 5:11.
The converse, adds Maimonides, is also true. If a sage “speaks pleasantly to others, is affable and gracious, receives people pleasantly, never humiliates others even though they humiliate him and honours others even though they disrespect him…with the result that all praise him, love him, and approve of his deeds – such a person sanctifies God’s name. Of him, Scripture (Is. 49:3) says: “And He said to me: Israel, you are My servant, in whom I will be glorified.”
On this view, kiddush Hashem and ḥillul Hashem are not specific commands, but rather the result of a life taken as a whole, especially on the part of people who are or should be role models for others. If they act and bear themselves in such a way as to earn the respect of others, it is as if the honour of God were raised, and vice versa. If people “of great Torah stature” behave in a way that incurs the disdain of others, it is as if God’s honour were diminished.
So we can trace a progression from ḥillul Hashem meaning carelessness on the part of a priest, to immoral behaviour, to the exile of a nation, and kiddush Hashem from priestly vigilance, to exemplary conduct, to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself in the name and for the sake of God. The common factor in all these cases is the concept of “name.” In many languages, “name” is a metonym for reputation. A “good name” means being admired for integrity, honour, and high principle.
The drama behind the idea of kiddush and ḥillul Hashem is that by linking His presence in history to the Israelites, God, as it were, has taken an immense risk. If Jews bring disgrace on themselves, it is as if they had done so to God. God has placed His reputation in our hands. That is why ḥillul Hashem is the gravest of sins – it brings disgrace not just to the sinner, or even the Jewish people as a whole, but as it were, to God Himself.
Isaiah said: “‘You are My witnesses,’ declares the Lord, ‘that I am God’” (Is. 43:12). On this there is an extraordinary midrash that adds: “And if you are not My witnesses, it is as if I were not God.”6Pesikta DeRav Kahana, 12; Midrash Tehillim 123:1.
God is God whatever we do or fail to do. But God, having set His image on every human being, took the risk of identifying His presence in history with one small people with whom He made a covenant in a lonely desert long ago, and that fact has charged Jewish existence with immense responsibility ever since. We are God’s witnesses. How the people of God behave affects how God Himself is perceived.