I want to explore a concept that seems hard to understand, even though we have been learning about it throughout the entire book of Vayikra. And that is the concept of holiness. What does it mean to be holy? How does one attain holiness? Does it just happen, an automatic process, or can I make something holy? This question permeates almost every section of Sefer Vayikra, yet it can still seem fuzzy to us even as we read about it. The way I want to go about answering this question is to look at bread. That’s right, bread. Because bread appears at least three times in this week’s parsha, Emor, in completely different contexts, and somehow, it is always in the context of holiness. Maybe this will lend us a clue as to what holiness really means.
Let’s start in the very beginning of Emor, where the Torah discusses the rules of the Kohanim, how they should act. Vayikra 21:6 says, “Kedoshim yehiyu le’lokehem,” “They should be holy to their God,” “velo yechalelu shem elokehem,” “and they shall not desecrate their God's Name.” Why is this so? “Ki et ishei hashem lechem elokehem hem makrivim,” “Because” and pay attention here, “they bring the offerings to God, the bread of God,” “veyahu kodesh,” and they will be holy.”
Look at this altogether strange application of the word “lechem”, bread. What does it mean for an animal sacrifice to be the “bread of God?” And what does it mean when it’s applied to God? Does God need bread?
And the bread of God is mentioned as the reason for why the Kohanim are holy, with the all-important word, “ki”, because. They are holy and can’t profane God’s name, why? Because they offer the lechem. What kind of cause and effect is happening here between holiness and bread? We start getting the message that bread has a spiritual meaning, but we still don’t know what it is.
This relationship between bread and holiness comes up again and again with the Kohanim. Just two pesukim later, in Vayikra 21:8, there is another command toward the holiness of the Kohanim. “Vekidashto”, “You shall consider him holy,” we are told. Why is that? “Ki et lechem elokecha hu makriv,” “because he offers the bread of God.”
And the converse is also mentioned. What about a Kohen who is not considered part of Temple holiness because of some major blemish? The Torah emphasizes this in 21:17, “Daber el-Aharon lemor” “Speak to Aaron saying,” “Ish mizar'acha ledorotam asher yihyeh vo mum,” “A man of your lineage for generations, if he has a blemish,” “lo yikrav lehakriv lechem Elohav,” he shall not offer the bread of God.” It’s almost as if the Torah goes out of its way to describe the complete picture of holiness with bread. If you serve in the Temple, the Bet Hamikdash, you are holy because you offer the “bread of God.” If you don’t serve, you aren’t holy, and therefore the consequence of that is that you can’t offer the bread of God.
So again, we have to ask, what is the meaning of bread when we look at it in this context? How does it apply to holiness, and how does it apply to God?
As we mentioned, there are at least three different contexts in Emor referring to bread. We saw one, but another one that it comes up is regarding the Moadim, the holidays of Judaism. So, we see bread where you might expect it, that on Pesach you shall eat matzah instead of leavened bread. Vayikra 23:6 says, “UvaChamisha asar yom la Chodesh haze,” “And on the 15th day of this month,” “Chag ha Matzot laHashem,” “shall be a festival of Matzah to God”, “Shivat yamim Matzot tochelu,” “seven day you shall eat matzah.” So you are forbidden from regular bread, and this is emphasized by a few pesukim later, when we are told we cannot eat bread again until the Omer is brought, “Velechem vekali vecharmel lo tochlu,” “And bread and parched grain and fresh grain,” “ad-etsem hayom hazeh ad havi'achem et-korban Elokechem,” “ until this very day, until you bring your God's sacrifice.” And then about 50 days later, on Shavuot, we are told to bring bread as a literal sacrifice - “Mimoshvoteychem tavi'u lechem,” “From your dwelling places you shall bring bread…” Lastly, though not specifically about bread, we are told about Yom Kippur and fasting on that day, keeping from eating anything at all - “Shabbat shabbaton hu lachem,” “It should be a day of rest for you,” “ve’anitem et nafshotechem,” “and your shall afflict yourselves” and not eat on Yom Kippur.
Let’s also focus on the way these holidays are all introduced. Vayikra 23:2, “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: God’s holidays that you shall designate as holy occasions. These are My holidays.” “Mikraei kodesh,” these holidays are to be designated as holy. Why do we keep seeing holiness and bread so intertwined in this picture?
The last place of these three contexts of bread is the Showbread, which appears in Parshat Emor in the context of the Shulchan, the table in the Bet Hamikdash which would this bread. There, in Vayikra 24:5-6, we are told, “Velakachta solet ve'afita otah shteym esreh chalot,” “And you shall take fine flour and bake it [into] twelve loaves.” “Vesamta otam shtayim ma'arachot shesh hama'arachet al hashulchan hatahor lifney Hashem,” You shall place them in two stacks, six in each stack, upon the pure table, before God.” In verse 8, we are told, “Beyom haShabat beyom haShabat ya'archenu lifney Hashem tamid me'et beney-Yisra'el berit olam,” “Each and every Sabbath day, he shall set it up before God tamid, continuously, from the children of Israel an eternal covenant.”
As I’m sure you are catching, once again there is bread, and there is holiness, and the two seem to be integral to each other.
Let’s start explaining this by categorizing these three contexts of bread. The first is where the Kohanim are made holy, somehow through bread. The second is where days are made holy, and bread is central to that process as well. And lastly, the Showbread is presented, and this is holy as well, “for it is the holy of holies to him.” In short, we have the holiness of people, the holiness of time, and the holiness of place, in this parsha. And all of it, mysteriously, is centered around bread.
So let’s think about bread in these contexts. In all these places, who is the bread maker, and who is the bread consumer? At the beginning of the parsha, with the kohanim, who is the maker of the “bread”, so to speak? If you think about it, it’s God, ultimately, who made the animals, who is the Creator of heaven and earth. And at the end of the process, who consumes them? It’s the lechem hashem because God is described as the consumer of that bread. But something happens in the middle. The kohanim are creators, too. They breed the animals, they feed them, nurture them, prepare them as sacrifices. Ultimately, they take raw materials from God, domesticate them and form them, and then turn them back to God. In a certain sense, they transform regular animals, living beings, into God-centered beings of holiness.
This is the same for actual bread, with the Showbread and the Table in the Bet Hamikdash. Who makes the bread? Again, ultimately, the grain comes from God. But who grinds the flour? Who adds the water? Who bakes it? That’s people, the kohanim. And then it is placed “lifnei hashem”, before God. The bread of God is still presented to God, but is transformed through the process of humans. Now it is not just domestication of animals, but domestication of crops, of land, of place.
Can you see where I’m going with this? When we look at the Moadim, we find this paradigm of creation and domestication, but not with people and animals, not with agriculture and land, but with time. The holiness of time. Who is the time creator? Obviously that is God. How do we spend the time of Shabbat and the Moadim? God-focused. But in what way is that done? We domesticate it. We control it. We “call it holy,” we decide what to do at certain times and days. Some people say time is money, but the Torah tells us that time is bread. Like bread, time is a creation that we are allowed to control, and through this we make holy days toward God. This is what holiness is all about. The mundane, the recreation of the not holy, and making it holy.
There is a partnership between God and man. God says, here is the raw material, here is the animal, the land, the day. What will you do with it? Will you see Me in the everyday creation? How will you domesticate and transmute it toward holiness?
This is the beauty of the blessing we make on bread, “hamotzi lechem min haaretz,” “who brings forth bread from the ground.” Did God really bring bread from the ground? Wheat is what came from the ground! God might have been the one who made wheat grow, but aren’t we the ones who took the wheat, cut it down, ground it up, and on and on the processes of making bread, and eventually baked and eaten? The beautiful lesson of this blessing is that before we eat bread, we always remember that it is truly God who made the bread. We might have been the middleman, but it was all really God.
Bread, therefore, is the ultimate euphemism for the taking of raw creation and processing it toward God. People can be holy because they have a recognition of their true place as the processors of God’s creation. Places can be holy because of the recognition that they are used for that purpose. And time can be holy because of the recognition we have on those days of our status as transmuters of the divine creation.
Why bread, in particular? If you think about it, bread is the ultimate symbol of us being creative. Consider this: it is really hard to imagine how bread was invented. Who thought to take an inedible stalk, grind it up, add water, mix, cook it with fire, and then eat it? It’s an incredibly complex creation, and man is the only one to make this creation. Yet, the Torah is telling us to attribute it to God on an ultimate level. And you know what that is? That is true holiness. Holiness is a recognition and transformation of the mundane to the divine. Holiness is a mindset that has us act in a way of recognition to God.
This is what it means for a sacrifice to be the “bread of God.” God of course doesn’t eat bread. But what God wants from us is to recognize how we are the middlemen to His creation. That our own food, our own bread, is really “the bread of God.” Our creative task is to make the bread, but keeping to the realization that making is not the same as ultimately creating. Kohanim are holy because they are those closest to recognizing this, every day. They serve in the Bet Hamikdash, they are tuned into God all the time, and they are tasked with doing the transformation of raw to refined, from bred to bread.
We don’t often think of holiness in a practical way. The Torah is holy, the Temple is holy, but how can we be holy? The answer we find, from bread in this week’s parsha, is within a mindset of holiness that all creation can be transformed - by us - to God-created and God-consumed.
Interestingly, if we take this bread concept a step further, we find that there is a deeper meaning to the holidays. The holidays ask us to eat bread or not eat (in the case of Yom Kippur), but not to prepare bread - on those days, we step back from the process. The creative act, melacha, which is forbidden on holidays and Shabbat, is put on pause, so that we can look and say, that is God’s creation, not my own. And thus, we find in the parsha of the Moadim several references to sacrificing to God before we can eat lechem, bread. The way we can think of this is that if we are meant to recognize the fact that food is not what we create on our own, but in partnership with God, what is the thing you do with a partner? You split the proceeds. So if I recognize that God provides for me to eat, maybe the holidays are a way for me to provide for God to eat, in a manner of speaking, by offering sacrifices, which only reinforces the concept that we are partners with God in creation.
So when we look at Emor, at face value, you have a parsha that talks about Kohanim and how they’re holy, a parsha that talks about holidays, a parsha about the Lechem Hapanim. But underneath all of this, there is an underlying theme of a partnership between God and man that, at least in this parsha, centers around food. Food is what man brings to bear, but turns toward God, in a sense sharing a meal with God. After all, if you think about it, there’s nothing worse than two partners in a project, that when they finish the product, one of them thinks they did it all by themselves. There is nothing worse for a relationship than that. So we partner with God in a way, we take the created raw aspects of the world, and process them. That is our duty to be holy.
What an empowering concept! We are tasked by God to find holiness in the world, and in ourselves. We can become holy. Everything around us can become holy. Time itself is a holy matter. And it happens through us - through how we think about the world, and how we act in it. We are the bread-bakers of a created world, and that realization and recognition is true holiness.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many Jews around the world sing special songs on Shabbat, called zemirot. Written by many of our great rabbis, they are full to bursting with allusions to Torah texts and concepts, and it is so rewarding to pay attention to them. One particular zemer has always mystified me, as it puts together two important Torah ideas that we don’t normally associate with each other.
What if I were to ask you, why shouldn’t a Jew fast on Shabbat (or on Yom Tov, a holiday)? Halacha doesn’t like when Jews fast on Shabbat, it so rarely is allowed, but why should this be so? How I would think to answer this question is that Shabbat is for us to enjoy - it is to be holy and enjoyable, and it’s pretty hard to accomplish that when we fast. So central are enjoyment and relaxation to Shabbat that we are forbidden from preventing ourselves from them. We have to feast, we have to eat, that is the Jewish way of resting and celebrating, and so we can’t fast.
But one Zemer seems to say that this is not the reason. The Zemer is called, “Ki Eshmera Shabbat,” written by Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra in the 1100’s, and it is all about the importance of Shabbat. One stanza states:
“Resham bedat hakel, chok el seganav” - “It is written in divine law (the Torah), a decree to His appointed ones (the priests),”
“Bo laaroch lechem panim befanav” - “That on it (Shabbat) they should have the showbread set before Him”
“Al Ken lehitanot bo al pi nevonav” - “Therefore, to fast on it because of what the wise men say [i.e. a rabbinic fast]”
“Assur, lvad myom kippur avoni” - “It is forbidden to do so, except on the day my sins are atoned, Yom Kippur.”
So there you have it, the reason one cannot fast on Shabbat normally, even when there are ordained fasts by the rabbis that fall out on Shabbat, is, somehow, because of the Lechem Hapanim, the Showbread. What did Rabbi Ibn Ezra mean by this?
This pushes us to understand, what in fact is the Showbread? And once we understand that, what is its connection with Shabbat and not fasting on it? And, while we’re at it, why is Yom Kippur an exception to this rule?
So let’s start with the Showbread. The Showbread appears in Parshat Emor in the context of the Shulchan, the table in the Bet Hamikdash which would this bread. There, in Vayikra 24:5-6, we are told, “And you shall take fine flour and bake it [into] twelve loaves… You shall place them in two stacks, six in each stack, upon the pure table, before God.” In pasuk chet, we are told, “Each and every Sabbath day, he shall set it up before God tamid, continuously, from the children of Israel an eternal covenant.” Apparently, this would not even go to God. Pasuk tet tells us, the Priests, the Kohanim, would eat it, “And it shall belong to Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place.”
We can see clearly that Shabbat and the Showbread are connected, that the Showbread has to be set “tamid” on Shabbat. And we are starting to get a picture of eating and the Showbread, since the Kohanim got to eat the Showbread after it was replaced. But all this remains a mystery. What is the meaning of these connections?
What I want to do to answer these questions is to look at other contexts of bread in Emor. Maybe they can tell us more about what bread is, why it’s important to us. Interestingly, there are actually at least two more contexts in which bread appears, all in Emor. They seem to be very different topics, yet I think we will see they are in fact quite related to each other.
Let’s start by looking at the topic right before the description of the Showbread, and that is the Moadim, the holidays. Bread shows up where we might expect it - on Pesach we are commanded to only eat Matzah, so regular bread is forbidden there. Vayikra 23:5-6 states, “In the first month, on the fourteenth of the month, in the afternoon, [you shall sacrifice] the Passover offering to God. And on the fifteenth day of that month is the Festival of Matzah to God; you shall eat matzah for a seven day period.” So too, in the context of Shavuot, we are told to bring a literal bread sacrifice, Vayikra 23:17 “From your dwelling places you shall bring bread…” Lastly, though not specifically about bread, we are told about Yom Kippur and fasting on that day. And, important for us, is the way these holidays are all introduced. Vayikra 23:2, “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: God’s holidays that you shall designate as holy occasions. These are My holidays.” “Mikraei kodesh,” these holidays are to be designated as holy. But we have to ask ourselves, if we are being commanded to declare certain days holy, how do we do that? How do you declare days holy things? I get an object, the Torah, that’s holy, that’s divine. But how does time become holy? Do I just declare to the sky, make this day holy, and boom, it’s holy? And why is bread seemingly so important to this picture?
And then we find bread way at the beginning of the Parsha, in a place where we might not expect it. The Parsha begins by describing all sorts of purity laws for the Priests, the Kohanim, and several times it tells us a reason why they have to observe these laws. For instance, Vayikra 21:6 says, “They shall be holy to their God, and they shall not desecrate their God's Name,” - why is this so? It continues, “because they are the ones who offer up the sacrifices of God, which is the lechem, the bread, of God, so they shall be holy.”
So it seems that the offerings to God are called, “the bread of God.” And this is very interesting. This is emphasized over and over. Two pesukim later, it says, “You shall make him holy, because he offers up the lechem of God.” In Vayikra 21:21, we find the converse, that a kohen with a blemish, who cannot perform in the Bet Hamikdash, cannot offer “God’s lechem.”
It seems as if every time the word “holy” is used, you have to have bread involved. The kohanim are holy, and therefore offer “God’s bread.” The Shabbat is holy, it must have the Showbread. Holidays are holy, and therefore there is some interaction with bread and sometimes food in general.
Let’s think about this a different way. It almost seems as if there is this yin and yang with respect to bread in this week’s parsha, mirror images. If you think about it, there are two main processes in bread. There’s the creation of it, and there is the eating of it. So look at the Showbread. Who makes the bread? Who grinds the flour? Who adds the water? Who bakes it? That’s people, the kohanim. And you know what? Who eats the bread? The kohanim. So it’s almost as if bread, both processes, are emphasized as coming from people. Yet it is done in the Bet Hamikdash, which emphasizes God. It is done on Shabbat, presented, “lifnei hashem”, before God. So its purpose is for God, yet its of completely human making and eating?
And we have the converse of this. When we look at the first mentioning of bread in the Parsha, regarding the Kohanim being holy, who makes the bread then? Well, it’s the “bread of God” - it refers to an animal sacrifice, yet is called bread. So let’s ask the same questions we had for bread. Who made these animals? God did, that’s all of creation. Who eats the animal? It becomes a sacrifice to God, so God, so to speak, partakes in this food. Who raised the animal, fed the animal, prepared it for the offering? Well, that’s the kohen.
It’s an inverse relationship occurring here, if you think about it. For the Showbread, it is the kohanim who produce it, who eat it, yet the middle stage, its
No comments:
Post a Comment