Parashat Emor Being Jewish: a privilege or a burden?

Today is the 29th day of the Omer, four weeks and one day — Hesed shebeHod: loving-kindness within humility, or boundless gratitude and humility.

This resonates so deeply for me with what it means to be Jewish — Yehudim — a word that comes from the root of gratitude (hoda’ah), which is closely connected to humility.

As I was reflecting on this week’s parashah, Emor, for my friends at Shofar, I found myself wondering, in thinking about the role of the kohen (the priest):

Is being Jewish a privilege, or a burden?

At first glance, the plain meaning (pshat) of the text seems far removed from us. The opening of the parashah deals with the particular way of life of the kohen, the priestly caste within the people of Israel, and especially with a number of restrictions to which he is subject in his personal life.

What relevance can this have for us today, when there is no longer a Temple, and when most of us are not kohanim?

First of all, like most concepts in Jewish thought, the institution of the priesthood (Kehunah) can be understood on several levels. On a symbolic and collective level, the biblical text states unequivocally that the entire people of Israel is destined to be a “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6):

וְאַתֶּ֧ם תִּהְיוּ־לִ֛י מַמְלֶ֥כֶת כֹּהֲנִ֖ים וְג֣וֹי קָד֑וֹשׁ

“You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

The priesthood of Israel means that a Jew enters the world as part of a group that precedes and transcends him — a group that understands itself, for better or worse, as mekudash: sanctified for a mission — to serve Life on behalf of humanity.

The term kadosh (holy) does not imply a value judgment.

Hebrew thought is far removed from the common Western perception, shaped by Christian imagery, according to which a saint is like an angel — a flawless being crowned with a halo.

In Jewish thought, Holiness is a verb.

To be holy is to be set apart in order to be dedicated to something specific. This does not mean that we are perfect. It means that we are called to fully devote ourselves to what we do.

At a Jewish wedding, a man makes his wife his own under the chuppah when he says: “At mekudeshet li” — “You are sanctified to me.”

The rose in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is not unique in itself. But it becomes unique to him because it is the one he has chosen to care for.

Similarly, the Jewish bride, one woman among many, becomes set apart — sanctified — for her husband, because it is to her that he will devote himself, just as she will to him.

So it is with the people of Israel, often depicted in Jewish texts as the bride of the Divine.

The holiness of the kohen is therefore a way of life: the dedication of a people to the service of the Source of Life on behalf of the human collective.

Such a self-understanding comes at a social cost. The vocation of the Jewish people to be a “kingdom of priests,” as stated in the book of Exodus, is one of the oldest sources of basic antisemitism.

“Who does this miserable, exiled people think they are?” — this has been asked for millennia.

While some take pride in this contested idea of chosenness, forgetting that it implies service, and others try at all costs to erase a hereditary particularism that weighs heavily on their social integration, the priesthood of Israel — whether embraced or concealed — has in fact revealed itself through its contribution to human culture over the centuries.

Beyond striking statistics — such as the number of Nobel Prize winners and pioneering thinkers the Jewish people have given humanity in fields ranging from politics to art, literature to therapy — Israel’s vocation as a priestly people in service of humanity shines, in retrospect, in the wake it has left, like a ship across the sea, in the evolution of human thought.

Not only do the two great universal religions, Christianity and Islam, draw their roots from the Hebrew Bible, but contemporary secular cultures as well are deeply grounded in the Torah.

The central message of the Torah — as expressed in what are known as the Ten Commandments, along with the many ethical teachings throughout the biblical narrative — lies at the heart of modern Western cultures of human rights:from the prohibition of murder to the banning of incest, from respect for others to love of the stranger, from care for the vulnerable to protection of the slave, from systems of taxation that enable social solidarity to principles of financial compensation that prevent cycles of revenge.

In the end, the priesthood of Judaism for humanity is expressed through the central message it has offered the world:to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and to serve life.

No one chooses where they are born.But it is the task of every human being to assume who they are, and to give the world the best of what they have been given to be — each from their own culture, each with their unique talents, each with a singular spark to offer the world.

There is no need to take pride in a chosenness one did not personally choose or earn, nor to be ashamed of it and retreat into a universalism that rejects us.

Jewish universalism does not stem from any essentialism, but from the light of its message.

If the way of life associated with the people who carry it is particular, the message of the Torah is universal.

So if Koreans study the Talmud with passion, seeing in it a source of Jewish intellectual creativity behind so many innovations and startups;if Christian mystics marvel at gematria and the richness of Kabbalistic thought;if great empires that sought Israel’s destruction have collapsed, while this small people, stubbornly continuing to live by its own principles, still radiates its wisdom into the world —then perhaps it is worth it for each of us, heirs to this rich history and called to carry it forward in our lives, to draw from the treasures of our texts and traditions, to nourish ourselves from them, and to give what we have to give to the world.

If we did not choose to belong. But we can choose to represent — and above all, to contribute to building a better world, in the Kabbalistic sense of tikkun olam, the repair of the world.

Neither privilege nor burden — being Jewish, being a kohen for humanity, is rather a calling:to assume who we are, to honor it, and to offer what is uniquely ours to give to the world, each with our own talents, as individuals and as children of Israel.

And as it is said in Pirkei Avot, in this very time when we count the Omer:“If not now, when?” Tonight is going to be Pessach Sheni. We give ourselves a second chance to experience the day on which we were born to ourselves. May you say fully Yes to who you are.