Parashat Emor: For What Should I Compromise on Religious Observance?

(A d’var Torah delivered by Rabbi J.B. Sacks on May 6, 2023)

Around the corner and half way up the street was an small Orthodox synagogue, housed in a converted home. They were small and only met on Shabbat and holy days. Their president davened regularly at my synagogue’s daily minyan. They had a student rabbi.

The synagogue struggled during the winter months because the street on which it was located was a steep hill. Due to ice and snow, it was dangerous for the seniors to be walking. So I spoke with my lay leadership, and met with their president and offered that either permanently or, at least during the winter months, that the congregation meet on our premises. We would be honored and delighted if they had a permanent room, rent-free, in our building, and that they could use whatever prayer books and chumashim they were used to using.

We already had a kosher kitchen supervised by an Orthodox mashgiach, and most community functions were at our synagogue, so this would not be an issue. The president was very excited, but came back to tell me that the rabbi stated outright that it was forbidden to go into a Conservative synagogue, even to use the bathroom. This lack of receptivity was also true of some of the balebatim. They were confused why some of our community members wanted to have joint Shabbat kiddushim with Orthodox Jews.

Over the years, I have also heard the idea about joint projects that if Jews cooked food and ate it together, the “stricter” kashrut standards of Orthodox-observant Jews might conflict with the “more lenient” practices of Conservative-observant Jews. Such comments have always struck me because there seem to me better ways to mitigate any kashrut concern than to outright reject a communal meal with other Jews—Jews who, by the way, may not necessarily be less observant or “strict” than their Orthodox peers.

Such episodes raise a question: To what extent should we be flexible in our adherence to religious precepts, and to what extent can we remain steadfast in our commitment to certain principles, even if they do exclude others? With this dilemma in mind, I want to consider the opening verses of this week’s Torah reading, called Emor. The passage discussed cases where a priest may allow himself to receive tumat met (impurity from a corpse), something he is not usually permitted to do.

וַיֹּאמֶר ה׳ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה אֱמֹר אֶל־הַכֹּהֲנִים בְּנֵי אַהֲרֹן וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם לְנֶפֶשׁ לֹא־יִטַּמָּא בְּעַמָּיו׃

HaShem directed Moses: “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and tell them:

None shall defile himself for any [dead] person among his kin . . .

The Torah bars a priest from coming into close contact with a corpse, except, as the passage continues to delineate, under certain conditions, such as the death of a loved one. But when I read the opening verse, I was immediately reminded of a baraita, a rabbinic text from the first century CE. It offers a fresh perspective.

תָּא שְׁמַע דְּאָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בַּר צָדוֹק: מְדַלְּגִין הָיִינוּ עַל גַּבֵּי אֲרוֹנוֹת שֶׁל מֵתִים, לִקְרַאת מַלְכֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. וְלֹא לִקְרַאת מַלְכֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בִּלְבַד אָמְרוּ אֶלָּא אֲפִילּוּ לִקְרַאת מַלְכֵי אוּמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם,

שֶׁאִם יִזְכֶּה, יַבְחִין בֵּין מַלְכֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לְמַלְכֵי אוּמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם.

Come and hear what which Rabbi Elazar son of Zadok taught:

We would skip over coffins to greet the monarchs of Israel. And they did not say this only regarding the monarchs of Israel, but even gentile monarchs, that if one merits,

he will be able to distinguish between Jewish and gentile monarchs.^[1]

Now Rabbi Elazar son of Zadok is a priest living in the first century CE who is prohibited by the verse presented above from becoming impure by coming into contact with a corpse. This would presumably happen if he were jumping over coffins! The verse, however, does not mention a monarch as an exception to the rule. But how can it be that Rabbi Elazar is saying he became impure to greet a monarch—and not just any monarch, but even a gentile monarch?

It must be the principle of k’vod hab’riyot, human dignity. In fact, the baraita cited above is part of a broader Talmudic discussion on the question of when human dignity trumps law. That is, are there situations in which the dignity of a person supersedes whatever halakhic rules the situation requires? Rabbi Elazar son of Zadok answers in the positive: he, a kohen who must respect the strictures of Jewish purity law, may become impure to greet any monarch from any culture.

The two sources, Torah and baraita, present different rules. According to the Torah, a priest may not defile himself unless the corpse is that of his immediate family. Yet, according to the baraita, a priest may even become impure for a non-Jewish king. It isn’t that for the rabbis purity laws were less important; on the contrary, proper observance of purity was a fundamental concern for Jews in the ancient world.

I read this not as a shift away from purity but rather as an example of how the rabbis struggled to balance observance of it–and any law–with the value of k’vod hab’riyot. And since the rabbis were not allowed to and did not want to rule against the Torah, it must be that for the rabbis whose reading of Judaism we inherit, it could only be that human dignity was the undergirding and foundation of every law and that, therefore, what seemed like a hard and fast rule could not be hard and fast, at least not enough to usurp the greater principle of human dignity.

In approaching these texts, I cannot help but think of how the question of priests and defilement is emblematic of a larger, still-relevant question we modern Jews face: How do we navigate competing values that may require us to be lenient or make exceptions in certain situations?

For an answer to this question, it would do us well to look to Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, wherein he prescribes that one should seek a middle path, the derech beinonit, between two extremes:^[2]

שְׁתֵּי קְצָווֹת הָרְחוֹקוֹת זוֹ מִזּוֹ שֶׁבְּכָל דֵּעָה וְדֵעָה אֵינָן דֶּרֶךְ טוֹבָה וְאֵין רָאוּי לוֹ לָאָדָם לָלֶכֶת בָּהֶן…

וְיֵלֵךְ בְּדֶרֶךְ הַטּוֹבִים וְהִיא הַדֶּרֶךְ הַיְשָׁרָה. הַדֶּרֶךְ הַיְשָׁרָה הִיא מִדָּה בֵּינוֹנִית שֶׁבְּכָל דֵּעָה וְדֵעָה.

The two extremes opposite from one another for every trait are not a good path and are not fitting for a person to walk by their way…Rather, a person should walk in the path of the good (nonextremist) traits—and this is the path of integrity. The path of integrity is the middle measure in every opinion.

While Maimonides discusses how one should always act according to the middle path—for example, not being too quick to anger, but also not being numb to all feeling—his teaching presents a useful paradigm for many aspects of our lives, religious observance included. For example, on a scale of strict purity (represented by the Torah) to abandoning the concept of purity entirely, the baraita we studied might actually represent a derech beinonit, a middle path. It does not reject purity but expands on the narrow conditions of a literal reading of the written Torah.

We, too, should be able to balance holding fast to traditional observance—allowing it to inform our lives—while being able to accommodate practice, in certain situations, when values conflict. There should be a derech beinonit, for example, where one neither needs to isolate from sharing a meal with others, nor abandon kashrut entirely.

The Jew who refused to daven or eat with my B’nai Jacob community in Jersey City would have done well to heed this teaching. And let us strive to take this lesson into the future, crafting for ourselves a life full of d’rachim beinoniyot, middle paths, as an effective and meaningful compromise in the world in which we live, a path wherein our duty to Jewish rituals and practices never supersedes our duty to Judaism’s insistence on the dignity we must afford to each and everyone. Amen. Shabbat shalom.

^[1] BT B’rachot 19b.

^[2] Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 1:3-4.