Emor -- 5776

The priest’s primary work is to make distinctions:  between holy and profane, between ritually pure (“tahor”) and ritually impure (“tamei”), between legal and illegal, between healthy and sick, and, as the one who sacrifices animals for God, between life and death.  Emor, this week’s parsha, describes the priest’s duties and responsibilities.  He must wear linen clothing, he can only marry a Levite woman, he must not come into contact with a corpse.  If he does, he becomes “tamei,” and cannot do his holy work until he is once again purified.

Distinctions such as these are helpful because human life is messy.  Boundaries create a mental map of the world, and help us navigate it.  Nonetheless, they are never absolute.  Life sometimes requires that the rules be broken.

Case in point:  the priest may not come into contact with a corpse, but can if the deceased is his parent, brother, unmarried sister, or child.  In these cases, the Torah understands that human empathy requires even the priest to mourn properly.  The contact, at the funeral for example, will change his status and mean that he cannot perform his duties.  But that status, tamei, can be reversed – after the proper ritual and with the passage of time, he will be tahor once more.

Our society draws many such distinctions:  minor or adult, true or false, clean or dirty.  All people who are literate in their culture know them and generally observe them – even if the “five second rule” doesn’t accurately promote food safety, and even if some minors can care for themselves and some adults cannot.  Some distinctions are based in nature (“day/night”), some appear to be (“male/female”), and some are products of their culture (“work/life”).

To navigate our culture, we must know the boundaries.  To navigate life, we must know when to cross them.