Leviticus - Cycle Two - 2101-2423 - Emor

Listen, God begins (and words of Torah rise in your blood like a million kisses). Here I am. See my soul-mirror. Please honor me by knowing your reflection in me as kadosh. Let me care for you, watch you, help you to accept that reflection.

Listen, you begin, to a friend. The love has spun into a glistening equation of spheres you can’t understand. You smile and cry in pain. You are both kadosh beyond human expression.

In simple language, this is what the parasha Emor is about. And not only about. It’s that fire of pain and love, the engraving between our eyes and on our hearts. God often tells Moses to say. Here, emphasized by its form, the verb emor….. v’amarta takes on an urgency that moves beyond translation. It propels us not only into a feeling of timelessness with the imperfect tense but intimacy with the 2nd person (you). Timelessness, urgency and intimacy, when superimposed, become the mirror of eternal reflection.

Let’s focus on intimacy.

As we travel through the parasha we experience a build-up of the use of you starting from line 21-8 ( V’kidashto ki et lechem elohecha. Hu makriv kadosh ki kadosh ani adonai m’kadishchem. You must keep him holy since he presents the food offering to your God. He must be holy since I am your God-I am holy and I am making you holy.) The 2nd person is first masculine, then feminine then plural. Until now we’ve only been referring to him. Why the sudden you?

Perhaps so you can learn something. Perhaps so you can be shown the path to evolution while the kohen is commanded to serve (Rashi). Perhaps so you can follow the kohen (real or not) experience him and reflect his soul-mirror. But who is you? The reference can be linked to just about anyone in Torah: Moses, the kohanim, the sons of the kohanim, the Israelites as a whole or separately (male and female), the reader (us) and even (not to take this too far) those beyond-human forms, all beings who reflect the kadosh of God. In short, you are a reflection of the words, the lines, chapter and book patterns, man to man, man to God. This pattern and creation of you culminate in the v’ahavta (Devarim 6:5) where we are striving through our actions to cause others to love the name of heaven (Abaye). You becomes clear. You becomes love in its cleanest manifestation.

Getting back to Emor, the poetic volley of 2nd person not only continues, it is entrancing. It escalates during the commandments regarding the holy days (which revitalize the ideas upon which our lives and goals are based…Horeb 2:3) focuses on our ancestry with the ner tamid (24:5) and disappears with the blasphemer. There, we can almost see the Israelites throwing shards of mirror to destroy not a being but the seeds of tamay. We don’t see you here. This is a reflection we want to keep out, push out, as we do with the dead, as we do with the dark consequences of past activity deadly to our body and soul (Horeb 2:3)

This idea of reflecting-out brings us to a punitive law that is not punitive at all, but God’s further quest for kadosh. Rev Papa (of Exodus 21:22-25) says that these lines refer to healing. Whether this applies to Leviticus (24:13-28) or not we see that the lack of 2nd person until the end of this section causes the use of it to become exponential in emphasis. We see that there is struggle. Evolution and reflection can hurt and that’s what this is really about. It can hurt a lot. That’s because kadosh cannot, by its very definition, find the reciprocal on this earth. It’s impossible. We can yearn and yearn. But true kadosh defies all thing-ness. Physical satisfaction of kadosh or retribution for errs of kadosh is impossible. Though try we must.

In the end, the use of you clinches the most sacred writing and carries us from destructive yearnings to a reflection- kiss. Imagine if we take two mirrors and place them on each other. They are still distinct and separate (22:2) but the distance is gone, the dead reflected-out, our healing the likeness of the infinite expansion to which we aspire.

That moment we are all kohens, and more. We have grown beyond kohanim to the one you. That moment, we feel the pain of expansion, the love of Torah, the fact that even the most questionable commandments revolve around love, that there is not any space in interpretation for vengeance, reciprocation, blindness, ignorance, weakness, or the act of ostracizing others. But this doesn’t mean that reflection is easy. As it says in Tehillan… Of you my heart has said, Seek My Face, Your Face Hashem, I seek.

So, may we seek the face of Hashem, the clean mirror. May we know that the pain of love is kadosh, that evolution can hurt, and that’s all right. May our hearts reflect our eyes reflect our lips reflect us all as one. May we help others who fear being part of the eternal you. May we carefully reflect-out the dead and deadly actions . And may we be brave and show our love, our you-ness, with compassion, strength, guidance, kind words, a kind touch and the soft glow of eternal reflection in the eyes of God.