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.

K'doshim -- 5776

“You shall be holy for I, God, am holy,” we are told in Leviticus 19:2.  Such a grand theological statement!  We, earthly creatures descended from Adam, share a common trait with God.  Created in God’s image, we can aspire to emulate the Epitome of Holiness.  Our lives, usually filled with baseness and banality, can be rendered sacred.  We can be more than we are.

Parshat K’doshim describes the “Holiness Code” – rules for developing holiness in our lives. 

The directions are scarcely spiritual, however.  There is no discussion of fasting or prayer.  Rather, the rules deal principally with human interaction.  They are grounded in ethics:  Revere your parents.  Keep Shabbat.  Don’t turn to idols.  Provide for the poor and the stranger.  Don’t steal or deal deceitfully with each other.  Pay people on time.  Don’t insult the deaf or place a stumbling block in the path of a blind person.  

For the Jew, ethical behavior IS religious behavior.

How can we make our lives meaningful, special, holy? By treating other people well, even in the small moments.  Divinity is in the details.

Acharei Mot -- 5776

The priest places his hands on the goat’s head and then, with a smack, drives it into the wilderness.  While another animal is sacrificed, this one is spared that fate, scampering over the rocks into freedom:  the original (e)scape goat.

It’s human nature to find a scapegoat, someone to blame for our own problems and shortcomings.  It’s easier to point the finger at another than to look in the mirror.  We create human scapegoats rather than take responsibility for our actions, rather than acknowledge our short comings.  When someone else is to blame, we feel pristine and our ego remains unbruised.  The mess we’re standing in?  Someone else made it.

“My father didn’t support me, so I didn’t pursue my dream to graduate school.”  “Why don’t you go now?”  “It’s too hard.”

“My daughter got a C in Spanish because the teacher was mean.”

“I didn’t get the promotion because my boss wanted someone he could push around.”

“I’m angry that you didn’t invite me!”  “Why didn’t tell me you wanted to come?”

Scapegoating is a form of bullying.  (Note the animalistic reference in both terms.)  So is gaslighting, a term I recently learned.  Gaslighting is a suite of behaviors intentionally designed to challenge another person’s perception of reality.

Classically, gaslighting is the practice an abuser uses to make his partner doubt her own sanity: secretly moving things in the house, denying something she knows to be true, repeating a lie often enough that it becomes ‘fact.’  The gaslighter makes his victim feel uncertain, unworthy, or irrational.

I’ve met a few gaslighters.  Not knowing the term, however, I couldn’t define what was happening.  

Every time I’d point out something they were doing that was inappropriate, they’d turn it around without acknowledging the observation.  “But what about you?  You…”  By doing that, the gaslighter’s own shortcoming is overlooked.  A gaslighter may present as sweet in public, but bitter in private.  That’s incredibly disconcerting.  Was I missing something?  Why didn’t everyone see what I saw?  A gaslighter can play the martyr, creating an image of victim even while victimizing others.  Someone else is the cause their distress, not their own failure to perform.

Human beings are complex animals.  We protect our own self-image, at times, even if it hurts others.  It is helpful to recognize these tendencies in other people, and also in ourselves.