To rely solely on strict judgment to repair the effects of life’s inevitable unfairnesses exposes us to a chronic condition of disappointment and cynicism. We also need to find a way for our soul to be reassured that we are loved and valued.
View the study sheet here. Recording here.
A man bursts forth from beyond our view. Armed with guns and knives, he barrels forward into a lobby packed with police officers and Secret Service agents in his attempt to breach locked doors. Behind them are hundreds of journalists, celebrities, and government officials, including the President of the United States.
Once again violence has entered the world. And as a sign of our enduring humanity, we are yet again shocked at its irruption into our lives. The disorientation we experience is testimony to our refusal to become numb to, expectant of such outbursts. Our default behavior is to make our way through the world without meaning to harm others, and we assume that to be true of others as well.
Charges have been filed. Court proceedings have started. The protocols and language of justice have been initiated. One of the primary tasks of a prosecuting attorney is to take the shocking, norm-violating events that have occurred and shape them into a narrative that can explain them and narrow liability for them to the individual charged.
Such storytelling in a criminal trial serves to contain the shattering effect of violence on our sense of social order. It seeks to reassure us that an aberration has occurred. That the incident has been resolved. That the matter is settled. Order has been restored. Justice served.
In a criminal trial, the prosecuting storyteller seeks to remove confusion, clear up any narrative ambiguities, remove from the minds of jurors any reasonable doubt they might have about what happened.
In a literary work, the storyteller’s purpose is the opposite. There, the writer lures us not with promises of clarity and predictability, but with offerings of surprise, complexity and nuance. Instead of an argument which we must either accept or reject, we are drawn into a drama that stimulates our interpretive engagement. Rather than hear the story as detached jurists deciding the fate of another, we enter the tale as fellow human beings and live it with the characters.
Law dispels ambiguities with its decisive discourse. Literature promotes them with its explorations of human complexity.
Leviticus is the most legalistic text in Torah. It consists almost entirely of rules, protocols and instructions. The phrase “a law for all times” appears at least a dozen times in it. There is virtually no human drama. It contains only two narrative episodes. One of them appears in Parshat Emor (“say”).
Two men fight. One of them curses the name of God. He is placed in custody, brought to judgment and sentenced to death. Immediately following, the text affirms the rules: anyone who curses God’s name is to be put to death; anyone who kills another human being is to be put to death.
Incident. Arrest. Judgment. Execution of sentence. Announcement of criminal code and the punishment for its violation. On the surface the writing appears decisive, the hallmark of a law text. It clarifies communal norms. A social disruption is contained. Order is restored.
The early rabbis, however, refused to sanitize the incident of doubt, ambiguity and certainty about what happened, why and who is implicated in the explosion of violence. They began by exploring the background of the one who cursed God’s name.
His biological father, they deduced, was an Egyptian taskmaster who supervised ten Israelite officers. Their job in turn was to directly oversee the slave labor performed by their fellow Israelites. One day the taskmaster had sex with the wife of one of his Israelite officers. Some of the rabbinic storytellers describe the woman, Shulamit, as having smiled at the Egyptian. Others reject that notion. In any case, from the encounter will be born the individual condemned to death in Parshat Emor.
In that rabbinic telling, he is born amid a context of oppressor abuse, Israelite collaboration with Egyptian oppression, and possible sexual lewdness. But there’s more.
The Egyptian taskmaster notices that Shulamit’s husband has seen the encounter with his wife. He rushes over and begins to beat the husband and yells as a cover for the violence, “Work harder, work harder!” Oppression, collaboration, sexual violations, and, now, assault give detail to the background of the Emor incident. But there’s more.
Moses, then a prince of Egypt, sees the beating. He charges over and kills the Egyptian taskmaster. Years later Moses will sit in judgment in the case of the son of the man whom he slew. But there’s more.
In Parshat Emor Moses is incapable of drawing a legal conclusion in the case before him, which seems to hinge on the identity of the accused as half Egyptian, half Israelite. Moses too bears within him such a mixed upbringing. He was raised in Pharaoh’s palace as a prince of Egypt. Not until his flight from Egypt to Midian in order to escape judgment for his own act of violence does he begin to learn his true parentage. But there’s more.
The Zohar considers the Israelite who fought with the half Egyptian, half Israelite. It imagines that he had called the other’s mother a harlot and had publicly raised the whole scandal surrounding his birth. The legal issue had been narrowly defined as whether one of mixed parentage could set up his tent among the camp of Dan since one’s tribal status is determined patrilineally. Raising the issue of his mother’s conduct was unnecessary to determine the legal outcome. It was incendiary to so so, setting off the other. But there’s more.
The death sentence against the accused is to be carried out by the whole community. Even as each Israelite is picking up a stone to execute judgment, they hear the pronouncement: “If anyone kills another human being, he shall be put to death.” By carrying out divine judgment are they also violating a divine decree?
This rabbinic reading complicates seeing the incident as simply a clarifying legal text. There is a measure of sympathy for the accused, who raged against his displacement from a tribal camp, was infuriated by the insult to his mother and by the public identification of his mother’s husband’s as a collaborator.
The Israelite who participated in the fight is called to task for having emotionally exacerbated a difficult legal matter.
Moses’ past as an enraged killer is raised, as is his own mixed Egyptian-Israelite identity.
And, finally, the stones that end the life of the accused are imprinted with the hands of each and every Israelite.
The rabbis have excavated the terse Torah text and woven a tale that implicates everyone in the violence and has allowed for some sympathy for the accused. Why have the rabbis done this? And why is this story here, in the book of Leviticus and towards its concluding chapters?
The language of Talmud, the grand rabbinic project, is constructed of two different types of discourse: halacha and aggadah, law and story. The former enlists logic and narrows possibilities. The latter unleashes imagination and expands possibilities.
As we prepare to conclude our study of Torah’s most legalistic book, the case of the curser in Parshat Emor serves to warn us that a life lived only through rules, edicts and commandments is likely to produce the opposite of what was intended. Cruel and incomprehensible events happen to all. To the one who strictly adheres to the rules, observes the rituals and obeys the doctrines, the inevitable misfortunes of life can seem like a betrayal. Such a sense of betrayal can lead to outbursts, disruptions of the social order.
In such instances of life’s failure to provide what we had expected, resentment is a natural response, acknowledges the Hasidic sage known as Mei HaShiloach. Commenting on Parshat Emor, he writes: “The main reason for angry complaints in the world are as a response to the attribute of stern judgment, which creates experiences of loss and absence in the world.”
At such moments it is not the language of insistent obedience that can contain further fracture. That is why, Mei HaShiloach continues, this Torah portion uses the word “emor,” from the verb amar, rather daber. Both indicate speaking. But daber is weighted with formality and authority. It directs behavior. By contrast, amar expresses a more conversational tone. It is softer, enveloping, embracing.
Thus, Mei HaShiloach observes, God instructed that Moses “emor” to the priests. He is to speak softly, “to whisper” to them, as the Zohar describes it. The priests, the community’s spiritual guides and healers, will have their own fracturing experiences. They are to be trained in how to speak to others when a sense of complaint or grievance arises. Not with strident insistence of obedience, but with the language of embrace, of intimacy and the mystery it offers.
As the prophet Elijah will learn hundreds of years later, it is not within the mighty wind that splits mountains and shatters rock, or in the earthquake or the fire that God’s healing presence is found. It is within the still, small voice.
The Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko remarked, “A good painting whispers. A great one basks in silence.” His works do not portray the known, objective world. They were designed to help viewers explore the unknown world, that of one’s interior self. Follow that path deeply enough and one can experience the sublime.
Much of Rothko’s work consists of great fields of color, blocks of vibrancy often frayed at the edges and seemingly floating. He informed viewers that his paintings were best viewed at the intimate distance of 18 inches. To become an immersed part of the colors. No longer a detached judge but a participating artist. He made no prescriptions about what you must discover. His only hope is that you would enter into a state of being that would set you free.
Late in his career, Rothko was invited by Jean and Dominique de Menil, devout Catholics inspired by the inclusive principles of Vatican II, to create a sanctuary where art would facilitate a spiritual experience of human cohesion, integrity and peace. They wanted a space devoid of dogmatic certitude. A place that would hold in embrace those seeking relief from the noise, confusion and injuries of modern life.
For this project, Rothko created fourteen immense panels in the palette of plums, burgundies and black. Pictured here is one of them. The panels are an integrated part of the entire chapel experience: silent, contemplative, enfolding. Speaking about the panels at the inauguration of the chapel, Dominique de Menil said: “They are intimate and timeless. They embrace us without enclosing us. Their dark surfaces do not stop the gaze. . . . We can gaze right through these purplish browns, gaze into the infinite.”
Within the Rothko Chapel there is no prescribed ritual, no creedal prescription, no script of words to say. There is only an invitation to sit in the emptiness of both the physical space and the paintings. In that emptiness a sacred intimacy may reveal itself with whispered words of love, comfort and revival to a life that is uniquely and divinely yours.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday April 30 as we explore whispers of life.
Untitled Triptych from the Rothko Chapel by Mark Rothko
