D'var Torah in a Minute

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 ...

This week, we have another parashah double feature with Acharei Mot and Kedoshim. Split between the two portions is a set of laws known to biblical scholars as the Holiness Code. This code details many different ways in which the Israelites are to behave as God's chosen nation. These laws run the gamut from equality before the law to appropriate handling of sacrifices to laws about prohibited mixtures. And then there's all the sexual ethics. Twice in the course of the Holiness Code, there appears the commandment not to "lie with a male as one lies with a woman," a verse that finds its way into American public policy discourse in 2021. But this d'var Torah is not about sexuality per se. It's about how our perceptions of sexuality affect our world. Although there are undeniably people whose anti-gay positions are based on the abovementioned verse from this week's parashah, that alone is not enough to explain their attitude, as the verse only proscribes one t...

In 2015, I spent nine months teaching English to middle school students in Weifang, Shandong Province, China. Part of my responsibility was to also teach about English speaking culture and American culture in particular. To that end, near the end of November, I taught my students about Thanksgiving. On the title slide of the PowerPoint, I had a clipart image of a dancing turkey. As soon as I opened the presentation, in nearly all 14 of my classes, I was greeted with choruses of "fire chicken, fire chicken." You see, the Chinese word for a turkey literally translates to "fire chicken" (from the vibrant color of the bird's head). Turkeys, being native to the Americas, don't play a big part in Chinese cuisine. However, despite not being native to the Middle East either, Israelis eat more turkey per capita than almost any country in the world. It might, therefore, come as a surprise that turkeys were not always universally accepted as being kosher. In the sixth ...

So, for the past half a year, I've been posting every week about the weekly Torah portion. This week is a little different. Because this Shabbat falls during Pesach, the weekly cycle of Torah reading gets put on pause. For that reason, I chose to write this week's D'var Torah on a different topic. During the six weeks between the end of Pesach and Shavuot, it is customary to study Pirkei Avot, one chapter a week, every Shabbat. In the Ashkenazi world, this study takes place at Mincha, but the Sepharadim study right in the middle of the morning services. I had been exposed to quotes from Pirkei Avot growing up, with such highlights as Hillel's tripartite maxim: "If I am not for myself, who would be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" But until a few years ago, I had never really explored the actual text, even though it is pretty short, so I had only a superficial understanding of what it actually was. Pirkei Avot is a compendium o...

This week's reading, Tzav, details the ceremony of ordaining and installing Aaron and his sons as priests. Part of the ceremony involves the slaughter of a ram which was offered as an ordination sacrifice, and the meat of which the newly ordained priests were to eat during their week-long seclusion in the Tabernacle. The description of this slaughtering is unique not in word choice or in spelling, but in the metatextual function of the cantillation. When the Torah is read publicly as part of the synagogue service, it's chanted using a system of notation developed in the tenth century (different communities developed different musical motifs, but the symbols are consistent). In addition to indicating the melodies used for the words, the markings - called "ta‘amim" in Hebrew, which means something like "sense" or "meaning" - indicate where the stress in a word falls and also function as a sort of punctuation. There's a whole taxonomy of different...

Welcome to the Book of Leviticus! Parashat Vayikra is mostly concerned with the specific procedures surrounding the most common sacrifices offered by Jews up until the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70. While most of us know that offering animal and vegetable sacrifices was pretty common in the ancient world, the idea of worshipping God by slaughtering and burning animals is still a little odd for us in the 21st century. Why would God command such a bloody and sometimes wasteful (the standard daily sacrifices were burnt in their entirety, meaning that each day, at least two lambs were going to waste, not to mention any special offerings for holidays) form of worship? And if sacrifices are so important to God, why would they be discontinued in the absence of the Temple? It's quite perplexing. Thankfully, the Jewish bookshelf has a guide for us. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides discusses the origin of sacrifices in Judaism. He explains that God never really  w...

In this week's double-feature parashah, we read about the construction of the Tabernacle. In the last couple of weeks, we heard about God instructing Moses as to what to do, and this week, Moses puts those instructions into action, appointing master artisans to oversee the project. But first, he repeats the command to keep Shabbat. Many commentators understand this juxtaposition as a demonstration of the fact that even the sacred work of building the Tabernacle does not take precedence over Shabbat. Others use this verse to derive the understanding that each of the 39 categories of "labor" prohibited on Shabbat are connected in some way to the tasks surrounding the construction of the Tabernacle. But perhaps there is something to be learned here as well about the role of Shabbat in our lives. The great theorist of cultural Zionism, Achad Ha'am, famously opined that "more than the Jews have kept the Shabbat, the Shabbat has kept the Jews." While there is room...