Leviticus - Cycle One - 2101-2423 - Emor

To understand Emor, let’s review Acharey Moth and Kedoshim. In Acharey Moth we have the atonement for our separateness, the blood connection. In Kedoshim, consciousness expands; man can be holy like God is holy; he can deliberate and define the decrees. Now, in Emor, we are being made holy; in the sacred, the priestly. We can open our life spark in sacrifice, merge with the divine, keep prayer and holy days. Of course, these three portions are one moment, one speech, one law from one God. And Emor brings us so close we can almost touch Him. Almost.

Literally, in Emor, we are given the priestly laws, for high priests, all priests. There’s the question of contact with the dead, marriage and illness, daughters, slaves and the animal sacrifice. The crippled, hunchbacked, dwarfed, or blemished can’t make an offering. Neither can those who have leprosy, a male discharge or indirect contact with the dead without a ritual cleansing The good news is that given Acharey Moth, we can all be priests. The bad news is that given these decrees, we may turn down the opportunity.

Often in Emor, we hear a chant of expansion: I am God and I make you holy. And to be sure, if the goal of Torah is divine consciousness (and it is) we won’t get there if we don’t remember that chant when we are sick of heart, sick of soul, impure, not whole, confused, disconnected, disoriented, or stuck in ego-pain.

From sacrifice, we rise to the holy days, the observances on Shabbat, Passover, the Omer, Shavuot, Rosh Hoshona, Yom Kippur, Sukkoth. We are entrusted with a lamp, an eternal light-soul connection with God, with bread to offer God as a covenant, two stacks, one as a memorial portion. We are flying.

Then, enter the blasphemer.

We not only hear about him, we live his experience. We go from the shall and/or shall nots to the 3D scene. It gets intimate. We know who the blasphemer is, where he’s from, what he wants, who he fights and how he falls. This is a shock. But wait a second. We just heard about the eternal light and we’re not singing with angels and gilded seraphim. We’re getting a man being stoned to death. We are the man himself. And just like I love you can be said with a million different intonations, the divine intonation of this change of tone is a clean punch. The message is clear. The closer we get to God the bigger the blur, the less we see, the more we materialize Him, use Him in our words, our egos, our goals, try to own Him, own consciousness, stop listening, twist Him, forget Him, make Him us instead of us Him.

There are penalties for blasphemy, for the exchange of God for man. They lay in the world we therefore create; one in which man exchanges man, man forgets man, man kills man, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. These decrees are penalties in their mere existence, not in their application. We are being penalized with the very idea of them. The happy irony is that we are all equal in God’s eyes. We all live under one law in an eternal continuum on a million different levels if we have forgotten or not, if we are passive or active. Of course, the more we give the more we get. And this means (Kedoshim) we must define and deliberate. So, in short, in Emor, God grants us rebirth (and makes us holy) through the most difficult of deliberations. It’s a gift, a cosmic joke, however beautiful.

It’s beautiful that God, even in great intimacy, takes a distance to see us even if we only see Him almost, that He will help us be holy and in the holy days. Let us be like the priests, be the priests, no matter the pain or the work, the need to pay attention, the need to embrace not only our imperfections but our lowest moments. Let us connect in divine consciousness even as we expand to it, to the almost, beyond the almost, closer to listening, closer to Torah and into the mesmerizing light.