Holy Bodies and Holy Mail Carriers (And Our Appointed Rounds) Daniel Cotzin Burg Parashat Emor 5.9.15 ~ 20 Iyar 5775

On Wednesday, one of our 6th Grade students from the Jewish Discovery Lab walked into my study. He had an ethical dilemma he wanted to ask me about. There are two people in a vicious dispute and one person is about to shoot and kill the other, he said. Your position is too far from the assailant to interfere with his shot but also too far from the imminent victim to push him out of the way. The only way to prevent his death is for you to jump in front of him, taking the bullet and, therefore, sacrificing your own life for his. As I was thanking Eric for bringing me such a cheery topic to discuss, the rest of his class wandered in to my office as well and pretty soon we were having a hearty debate over how to determine worth of a life: Age? Occupation? Intelligence?

In the end, I shared with them a famous debate in the Talmud (Bava Metzia 62a) quite similar to their dilemma. Say you’re walking through the desert with a friend. You are carrying the only canteen and there is only enough water in the canteen for one of you to live long enough to reach the next oasis and fresh water. If you drink it you will live, but your friend will die. If you give it to your friend, you will die. And if you share it, you’ll both die, but a bit more slowly. Who gets the water? Ben Petura taught, “Better they should both drink so that neither has to witness the death of his fellow.” Rabbi Akiva, however, quoted Vayikra (25:36) “v’chay achicha imach, your fellow should live with you.” Rabbi Akiva understands this to mean, “chayecha kodmim l’chayei chavercha, your life takes precedence of that of your fellow.” For, after all, how can your friend live with you if you yourself don’t live? In other words, it’s not about whose life is more valuable, not about what each does or doesn’t do for a living. Nor is it about one’s age or stage of life. According to Rabbi Akiva, it’s about who’s carrying the canteen!

So what’s going on here? A central concern at the core of our students’ ethical dilemma is: What is our obligation to our bodies? In our parasha we read: “They [the priests] shall not shave smooth any part of their heads, or cut the side-growth of their beards, or make gashes in their flesh” (21:5). What’s the connection between shaving and cutting? It could be that shaving can lead to unintentional cutting. But, recall the context is about mourning practices, the things kohanim can or cannot do when recalling the dead, and it seems that shaving and pulling out one’s hair were typical Canaanite expressions of grief. On some level this makes sense. Think about a time in your life you experienced loss. I don’t mean failing a test or losing your keys; I mean the kind of loss that turns you inside out, that dashes the joy, all the good in your life upon the rocks. Maybe you’ve even been so sad that, chas v’shalom, you’ve wanted to hurt yourself? Maybe you did? The Torah understands this impulse, and says, no matter how dark things get, don’t take it out on your body. Why? Because our bodies don’t really belong to us. Who owns them? God does. We have a “commitment,” writes Rabbi Gordon Tucker, “to be as careful as possible to preserve the integrity of the body with which each of us is gifted by God” (The Observant Life, P. 385). The halakhic principle is sh’mirat haguf, the protection of the physical self. Our bodies are a gift, or more accurately they’re on loan, and we are expected to return them in good condition. That’s why we can’t pass the canteen to our friend. Because we ought to not deliberately forsake the gift of one precious body, our own body, for another.

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But you might ask why? Why is the body so important? Why do we Jews have prohibitions against cutting or tattooing or ascetic practices like sustained denial of food? Even when we fast, it’s the exception to prove the rule. We do it rarely and in such a structured way so as to give only limited voice to the impulse for self-immolation, just enough to remind us how blessed we are to have food, to have bodies, to not take these things for granted. And the reason for our devotion to the physical self is that we are created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image. This principle is so important to our faith that, according to Ben Azzai, it trumps even what Rabbi Akiva considers to be the central tenet: v’ahavta l’re’acha kamocha, “love your neighbor as yourself.” Why? Because, says the Yerushalmi (Nedarim 9:60), knowing that we are created in the image of God leads us to honor other reflections of that same image.

But here’s the problem: I don’t know about you, but I find the logic to be a bit circular. Our faith ought to inspire us to treat ourselves well, even in moments of utmost despair. But it’s in these moments of utter despondency that we struggle most with our faith, when we get angry at God or even question God’s existence. So how is simply being told to honor our bodies – because God wants them back – sufficiently compelling? This approach, though, shows we may be misunderstanding what it means to be created b’tzelem Elohim. After all, a tzelem is a depiction. In Modern Hebrew a tzalam is a photographer. The second commandment is abundantly clear: no graven images, no depictions of God are permitted. So we can understand this in one of two ways. On one hand, the fact that God creates us in God’s own image may be exactly why we are not permitted to do the same. Because, not being God, our efforts would inevitably fall short. “A man strikes many coins from one mold and they all resemble one another,” says the Gamora (Sanhedrin 37a), “but the Supreme Ruler of Rulers, the Holy One of Blessing, stamped every human in the stamp of the first human being and yet not one of them is like another.” We, in our diversity, are somehow a collective reflection of the divine. We can’t duplicate that, nor should we even try.

But another possibility is that tzelem Elohim has nothing to do with how we look but what we do and who we are. The secret may lie in Moses’ appointed role. We read in B’Midbar, Vanitzak el Hashem vayishma koleinu, “we cried to the Lord and He heard our plea.” Vayishlach malakh vayotzieinu mimitzraim, “and He sent an angel [a messenger] who freed us from Egypt” (20:16). How is it possible, asks the “Rav,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Master of All Worlds, the Inscrutable Unknown, the Ruler of All, the Ein Sof, the Lord, Life of the Worlds, appoints a flesh and blood mortal [like Moses] as God’s agent?” There’s a principle, Rav Soloveitchik explains, that, “a person’s messenger must be [just] like himself” (Mishna Berachot 5:5). And this, he says, is what it means to be created in God’s image. “The fact that someone lives in a certain time, in a specific era in a defined place…we can only understand this if we accept the essential concept that every human is a messenger.” Rebbe Nachman of Bretzlov puts it this way: “The day you were created,” he says, “was the day God decided the world could not exist without you.” To have been created b’tzelem Elohim is to have a purpose. But to be a human messenger, explains Soloveitchik, unlike a heavenly angel, is to have a choice. Angels have no ethical dilemmas. They are created for a singular purpose and they must fulfill it. We, too, are created for a purpose. The difference is we spend our lives trying to figure out what it is. And then we must choose, like Jonah standing at the port of Yaffo: do we flee from that purpose or do we run toward it?

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Why are kohanim forbidden to hurt themselves? Why are all of us forbidden to harm our bodies? Because these bodies are sacred vessels, each and every one of them on a glorious and holy mission. Canaanite worship included desecration of the self. Jewish worship is a celebration of the self. We even have a prayer for it. Baruch ata A’nai Elokeinu Melekh HaOlam asher yatzar et ha’adam b’chochma...God, you should be blessed for fashioning the human being in wisdom, designing the organs of our bodies to open and close in their time. Sh’im yifataeach echad m’hem oh yisatem echad m’hem, for if one of them were to open or close at the wrong time, ee efshar l’hitkayem v’la’amod lifanecha, we would scarcely be able to exist let alone stand before you.” When do we say this prayer? After going to the bathroom! Our bodies are so sacred we bless them even, perhaps especially, when they accomplish the most ordinary task. To paraphrase the famous book title our bodies are ourselves. They’re two sides of the same divinely manufactured coin, ancient in lineage but unique in composition.

Put another way, a living body animates the soul within it. And our soul, like Moses’ soul…or like Jake and Elwood Blues, is on a “mission from God.” Which brings me to a final critical point. Because the ethical dilemma our students brought me this week wasn’t just about injuring the body, damaging the goods, it was about loss of life. Did you ever wonder why kohanim can’t be with a dead body? Why, except for the immediate relatives delineated in our parasha, must they avoid death? Remember, priests are not , they impart wisdom but their primary designation is not educational nor pastoral, it’s ritual and it’s metaphysical: priests, in their day, were a bridge to the Godhead; they served as a conduit between humanity and the divine. So to understand the Torah’s aversion to connecting priests and death, we have to understand something about the nature of God. Whereas many ancient religions, and some modern ones, focus primarily on death, Jews and are nearly obsessed with life. The Torah commands u’vacharta bachayim, choose life, that you and your children may live.” We write checks in bizarre multiples of chai, the numerical equivalent of life. And we say while Shabbat observance is central to our faith, pikuah nefesh doche et haShabbat, “saving a life trumps even the Sabbath.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean, as some people say, that Judaism is only “this world focused,” that we don’t believe in an afterlife. That’s inaccurate. We do believe in an afterlife, but we apply little dogma to the world to come; the nature of Olam Haba is subject to much debate. But the reason we say each time we do the Amidah, Baruch Atah Hashem M’chayei haMetim, “blessed is the One who gives life to the dead” is because God, in our view, being firmly ensconced in life, Makor HaHayim, the very source of all life, is the ultimate counterpoint to death. In fact, according to Jon Levenson, the Harvard bible scholar, God is a “Warrior for Life” and through the notion of resurrection demonstrates power over death, ultimately conquering death itself during the messianic era. “Given the reality and potency ascribed to death through the Hebrew Bible,” Levenson writes, “what overcomes it is nothing short of the most astonishing miracle, the Divine Warrior’s eschatological victory…That transformation replaces sterility with fertility, childlessness with new descendants…hopelessness with a radiant future - death with life” (Resurrection and the Restoration of : The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life, P. 216-217).

The point is that priests, being a conduit to God, are to distance themselves from death so as to affirm God’s role as Creator of Life. And their bodies, holy vessels shaped in God’s image and charged with a sacred purpose, are to be treasured and respected. Kohanim, though, are no more sacred than any of us. Because being created B’tzelem Elohim is a universal human trait: Jew,

3 gentile, male, and female, black white or brown, we are all reflections of divinity on earth. And if that belief held true while the Temple stood in Jerusalem, it is certainly true with the advent of rabbinic Judaism and the democratization of Jewish worship. “If it is possible for Moses to be chosen to be the Kadosh Baruch Hu’s messenger,” writes Soloveitchik, “then it is possible for every Jew.” We, all of us, are holy mail carriers. And “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” (Postal Service Creed).

The ethical scenario I discussed with the kids was an extreme case as these dilemmas tend to be. Let’s hope none of us is ever in such a position. But the principles: that life is sacred, that the body is not, as Plato suggested, a prison for the soul, but rather a seaworthy vessel setting sail on a glorious adventure or a mail carrier going about her appointed rounds. These are the values that guide us in the most banal and the most excruciatingly difficult choices. t’hiyu, we read last week, “you shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.” We have been given an incredible gift – a life, a living body. Choosing life isn’t becoming something else, it’s affirming that which we have. And then deciding how best to dedicate our flesh, our blood, our souls, ourselves to something good.

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