Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23) May 1, 2021/19 Iyyar 5781

This week's parashah, Emor, starts off pretty dry. God instructs Moses and Aaron in the special laws governing the conduct of kohanim in order to preserve their special holiness as the priestly caste. This includes things like who they may marry, the sorts of ritual impurity they must avoid, how and by whom the different sacrifices are to be eaten (most animal sacrifices were not burnt in their entirety, but rather most of the animal was eaten by the priests and/or the donor), and which conditions can disqualify a kohen from service. From there, the procedures for the celebrating of the various holidays of the year are expounded. We are commanded to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, to fast on Yom Kippur, to wave the Four Species on Sukkot, and to count the Omer in the seven weeks following Pesach. And, of course, there are the details of the special sacrifices to be offered on each holiday. The instructions are recorded for lighting the eternal light in the Tabernacle and for the setting out of the showbread (12 loaves of unleavened bread which were displayed in the Temple and replaced every Shabbat). And then, quite abruptly, we shift gears back to the narrative in the Israelite camp. 

There is a fight in the camp between two men, one a full-blooded Israelite and the other the son of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man. The latter individual pronounces the Explicit Name of God in a curse. After consulting with God about how to proceed, Moses directs that the blasphemer be taken out of the camp and stoned to death. There is a whole discussion of criminal penalties, including the famous verse in which injuries are commanded to be punished "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." It should be noted that the rabbis, from antiquity to today, have understood that verse to refer not to physical meaning but to monetary compensation. But that's a topic for another d'var Torah.

After recounting what it was he had done, the Torah identifies the blasphemer not by his own name but as the son of "Shlomit, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan." The relevance of his mother's name is not immediately clear, and some commentators divine from its inclusion a statement on how blasphemy brings discredit upon not just oneself but one's family and clan and tribe. But there's a more interesting explanation to be found in the midrash. According to the Midrash Tanhuma, the fight which provoked the blasphemy was over the legitimacy of the blasphemer. The other party criticized his half-Egyptian peer for having set up his tent among the tribe of Dan. Because tribal affiliation, unlike Jewish status, is inherited patrilineally, the son of Shlomit had no tribe and should not have been encamped with the Danites. But that wasn't all, because he denounced the unnamed blasphemer as a bastard. You see, Shlomit had been the wife of Neriah, one of the Israelite foremen in Egypt. The Egyptian overseer to whom he was subordinate had raped Shlomit, and when Neriah found out, the overseer became even more abusive towards him. According to the midrashic interpretation, Neriah was the Israelite slave who Moses observed being beaten, provoking him to kill the overseer. The suggestion is that the use of the Explicit Name was intended to kill the insulter, just as Moses had killed the Egyptian overseer by speaking the Name.

Now, someone mocking you is not a justification for attempted murder or blasphemy. But mocking someone in public for their origins is also not proper behavior, even if the thing for which you are mocking them is true. This is important because although we typically think of lashon hara as slander, the Jewish concept is not perfectly matched to the English meaning of the word. Judaism recognizes two separate types of derogatory speech. On the one hand, there is "hotza'at shem ra", literally bringing out an evil name, which is untrue defamation of another person. On the other hand, "lashon hara", evil language, is speech that is defamatory in nature without regard for its truth. Even a true statement, if it causes one's neighbor to be brought into disrepute, is something we are called to distance ourselves from. In this parashah, we see the real-world consequences that the proliferation of lashon hara brings. The whole business of fighting and blaspheming and attempted supernatural murder could have been avoided if the Israelite member of the dispute had not felt the need to use his opponent's parentage as a weapon against him. That the blasphemer was the product of rape and a full member of the tribe to which his mother belonged is both terrible and in no way his own fault. If that means that camping arrangements need to be changed, that is something that can be addressed respectfully and privately. However, by making the matter into a public mockery, the whole thing became escalated to the point that extreme actions ended up being taken.