This week’s parsha (Torah portion) is an interesting one.  It starts off talking about all the restrictions to a Cohen (priest), like who they can marry, who they can bury, or that only an unblemished Cohen can actually perform the sacrificial service.  It talks about how pure a Cohen must be in order to eat from the sacred food (here are my ideas on “pure and impure” from a parsha we read a few weeks ago ), and to bring an unblemished animal to sacrifice to earn haShem’s (god’s) favor.  It then says not to desecrate haShem’s name, and then goes into a new direction:  a discussion on sacred days and the counting of the omer (sheafs of barley brought as an offering to haShem).  We then finish with talk of keeping an eternal light lit via the menorah, the showbread, and finally a story about a man who curses using the name of haShem and what happens to him (he gets pelted with stones until he is dead).  What a busy parsha!
Now there are two things that struck me as I was reading this parsha.  One of them I also noticed last week, and since I didn’t blog anything last week, I will add it in here.  It has to do with Yom Kippor, the day of atonement.  Now a lot can and has been said about this day.  What I wish to touch on is the idea that you are supposed to afflict yourself on this day by doing things like fasting.  Specifically it says to afflict your soul.  Now the word for afflict has the same root as the verb “to answer,” and considering that we are referring to the soul, it seems to me that, on Yom Kippor, what we are doing is answering to our souls.  And given that are souls are the breath of god, we are really answering to god.  So. on this day, our souls are asking us, our bodies and our consciousness, if we did what we were supposed to do this past year.  And on Yom Kippor, we have to answer to our souls:  did we are did we not?  And if not, what can we do about it?  This is where the affliction comes in.  All year when we sin, we afflict what we eat (animals and flour) for our sins to the god outside of us.  On this day, we become our own sacrifice for the god within:  the soul.  And we do it by not eating, causing us to burn the fats stored in our bodies, much like the burning of the fats of the animal sacrificed on the alter.  So, why do we read this 2 weeks in a row, now, almost 6 months before Yom Kippor?  To remind us that what we do today we will have to answer to, to take responsibility for, in the not-to-distant future.
This leads nicely in to the second thing that struck me about the parsha:  why do we have this story at the end about a guy who curses using haShem’s name?  I think it has to do with the little bridge that divides the parsha between the priests/sacrifices and the sacred days:  we are told not to desecrate the name of haShem.  I also think we need to look back just a touch, for the last three weeks we have been talking about purity, and impurity, and sacredness of people, and that comes to an end with this bridge.  Up to this point, we have been *talking* about not profaning the sacred.  It is all in the head.  We don’t have it in our heart yet.  The punishment of being cut off from the people is still abstract.  What I see this story doing is taking the abstract and making it concrete.  It is graphically bringing the concept into our heart, into our being.  For here is a guy, could be any one of us, who in a moment of anger, profanes god.  And what happens?  The people, people like you and me, kill him.  We now see and know that haShem means business in regards to this.
All in all, I see this as a way of telling us that we need to always remember that we are responsible for what we do, even in the midst of a fight; we will have to answer for what we do.  So, we had better be paying attention and staying aware of what we are doing all the time.
I bless everybody with this awareness as they go thru the week and their lives.

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.