Animal Sacrifice: The Priest Had to be Physically Perfect as Well as the Animal

D’var Torah 4/30/18

שבת שלום

We are nearing the end of Leviticus. Today’s parasha is אֱמֹ֥ר, which is Leviticus 21:1 – 24:23. The Book of Leviticus is considered to have been written mostly by “P”, the priestly source, an individual or group of people who were themselves Levites and mostly concerned with the laws that involved their tribe. So in this portion, we read rules that affect the Kohenim (Levites who are direct descendants of Aaron) – rules such as, they cannot be in the presence of a dead body, even to attend a funeral, and they must marry a virgin. The Sabbath and the three Festivals are also laid out in this portion. We see the concept of an “eye for an eye” here, and a person who profaned the name of God was ordered to be put to death.

I could talk about any of these topics and avoid the highly unpleasant one that is serving as the “elephant in the room” for me: Just as an animal must be physically perfect, without blemish, to be sacrificed, so too must a Kohen be physically perfect to serve. No Kohen who is blind or deaf or has a broken limb or is otherwise deficient can make animal sacrifices at the altar. This is so opposite today’s effort at inclusiveness in all realms that I find it reprehensible and would rather not talk about it at all. Indeed, when I consulted the founding rabbi of my synagogue about this topic, he said it’s no longer relevant, it’s meaningless and upsets me, and I should just choose something else to talk about. But I cannot turn my back on something that looms so large for me.

Any Kohen who had a blemish or anything abnormal in his appearance could not officiate at sacrifices. Since the whole Levite tribe had no land but was dependent on the other tribes, he could still eat the sacrificial food but could not himself make sacrifices at the altar.

This is so outrageously wrong for me that I had to find out what was behind it. We do have to remember that this was several thousand years ago. There were no chance occurrences, people believed; if you were born with some kind of blemish, you must have a blemished soul. If you became disabled later on in life, you must have done something to be punished that way.

Maimonides addressed this issue in The Guide for the Perplexed. He said that the Temple needed to have an exalted image before the people, and so the Kohenim needed to be distinguished from the rest. They had to be sober and gorgeously dressed and free of blemishes.

A Chabad rabbi, Adam Mintz, said that the Kohen represented the people before God, but he also represented God before the people. So it was crucial that he be perfect, without spiritual or physical imperfections.

Jonathan Sacks reminds us of what holiness means. The Jewish view of God is that God is beyond space and time, but we were created to live in a physical world of space and time. God is eternal and the created world is mortal. Even the redwood trees, even the earth, even the universe itself will come to an end. Interfaces of God and the created world can be found in Shabbat, the Tabernacle, the Temple. We do not want to be reminded of mortality in a holy space – that would contaminate the service and spoil the effect. But anybody with a visible blemish or disability would distract from the eternal by forcing mortality into our consciousness. Etz Chaim says that disabilities are a distraction to the worshippers and compromise the place of worship that was meant to be a place of perfection reflecting the perfection of God.

The Women’s Torah Commentary points out that we want to distinguish our Kohenim from all others. Pagan religions sometimes include women as holy leaders and sometimes involve sexual forms of worship. There were even rival priests within Judaism – while the Temple was standing, there was also worship in the northern kingdom at Dan or Shilo. To distinguish, the Kohenim at the Temple in Jerusalem had to be beyond reproach – a mystique about them, an elite status – physically, mentally, and spiritually unblemished.

I look at all of these commentaries and I still have shudders that I cannot repress. But then our founding rabbi reminds me that the focus has changed and that this was not what we became. The main ritual purpose of the Temple was expiation of sin – you made sin offerings, guilt offerings, then you were forgiven and were clean. When the Second Temple was destroyed, what were we to do? We no longer had a place to make animal sacrifices. How could God forgive us? The focus necessarily changed from sacrifice to prayer, but also ethical monotheism was developed – mainly by the prophets. Amos and Hosea both spoke in the Northern Kingdom just years before it was exiled and the ten tribes lost. They preached social justice; that what is required of us is not sacrifice but our ethical treatment of the people around us. It was not just proper individual behavior that was being demanded by God, according to these prophets, but societal behavior, behavior on a communal level.

We work consciously to have inclusiveness now, in our synagogues and places of work and every other place where human beings come together. We are horrified to hear that people would be banned – treated as unworthy and lesser – just because they had disabilities of some kind. We have come a long way in 3000 years. The Judaism that we cherish today is the ethical monotheism of the prophets, not the sacrificial rituals of the Temple. Just as it helps us to be better and more caring people if we remember that we were slaves in Egypt, it can help us to be better and more caring people to remember that there was once a time when people were discriminated against just on the basis of their physical imperfections.

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