YOU WILL SAY! This is the name of our parsha (weekly Torah portion). In Hebrew, it is called Emor.   Who will say, who is commanding, and what is needed to be said is not hidden from us.

HaShem (god) is telling Moshe (Moses) to tell the children of his brother Aharon, the cohen (priest) several laws around who they can marry, who they can bury, what condition they need to be in to make the offerings to haShem, and who can eat the food offerings that haShem has given to the priesthood.

Moses is told to include everybody when explaining how to insure favorable offerings to god.

After this important information, comes a detailed list of the holy days haShem wants the people to celebrate.

This is followed by with a few verses about lighting the menorah and the arrangement and dispersion of the show-bread.

We end with a story about someone who uses the name of haShem in a curse and what happens to him.

One of the beauties of the Torah is that we all see it a little differently, and hence we can learn something about it from others who study it. For example, to me this parsha seems to be made up of 5 disjointed sections. When I mentioned this to my friend, R. Julia Melanie Vaughns, she responded by showing me how she saw it as a unified piece centered on the theme of sacredness and epitomized by the holy days that are literally the centerpiece of the parsha.

As beautiful as her teaching is, today, I wish to narrow my focus to another important topic this parsha addresses: why in the world does the Torah exclude people who have “defects” that do not prevent them from doing their physical jobs?

Over the course of my life, I have run into a lot of people (myself included) who have fallen into the trap of thinking that when we talk of equality, we must be talking about sameness.

What I mean by this is that everybody must be given the same opportunities because everybody can do the same things. We are all created equal. Why should I be excluded from university or a job? Why should I not be picked to be on a sports team or not allowed to play? After all I must be as good as any of the other players, right?

This is the thinking, the line of reasoning for those who believe that equality means equal which equals same abilities.

The parsha Emor comes to tell us that this is not the case. If you are in the cohen (priest) family and you have a blemish, you are not allowed to make offerings on the altar. Blemishes include limbs of different lengths, or a cataract, or even just a single bar eyebrow that goes from one eye to the other.

Why in the world should these things prevent a cohen from doing a simple physical act like put a slab of meat on the altar?

Perhaps because this simple act is not so simple, and a blemish is more than something physical.

I already hear people ready to jump on me for this. Hold your horses. We need to make a small digression.

Let’s assume for a moment that is really supposed to be trying to tell us something on the symbolic level.

Maybe what we are supposed to learn is that people have different traits that enable them to do some things better and some things worse. What if we were not identical, physically, emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually?

If this were so, then it would make sense that one person might be better suited for one task that another is not suited for at all; that second person is better suited for another task.

Imagine if that second person, and his/her supporters, instead of fretting over why s/he is not allowed to do one thing, said good for the person who can do the task, and instead goes and finds the task that s/he is good at and pursues that instead.

Would we not all be happier?

This is one of the lessons that our parsha is trying to teach us. Maybe I am not suited for a job for what seems like a silly reason that I can’t understand? Why should I let that get me down and insist on being given the right to do it? Better to support the one who can do it, and find the job I am better suited for, than grumble and complain about what I have no control over.

Our sacred text talks of a cohen who had a defect and spent all his time complaining about only being able to bring wood to the temple for the altar and never going to the alter itself. What he didn’t know is that his task was to find the secret trap door that led to where the holy arc is. Because he was so busy complaining, he never noticed the door that only he could see, and to this day we don’t know where the arc is.

May none of us be so busy complaining that we miss seeing the door of opportunity for ourselves and for helping the world.

If you care to read what I wrote about this parsha last year, click here.

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.