Years ago, my sister and I were in Paris and, of course, being in Paris the most important thing we needed to see was the Mona Lisa. The day we chose to make our visit to the Louvre it was raining, and there was a lot of construction on the museum grounds. Rather than face the long line at the museum entrance, we ducked into what we thought was a smaller museum adjacent to the main one. We navigated upstairs and then opening an unmarked door, found ourselves face to face with the objection of our affection, the Mona Lisa herself. Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece hung in a small, darkened room, illuminated by his muse’s haunting face. We stood, mouths agape, staring at one of the most important pieces of art ever created, and it looked like she was staring right back at us.
There is something about the Hebrew name of this week’s portion, Emor, that has the same effect on me. Emor is in some ways the most common word in Torah, it’s Hebrew root Aleph-Mem-Resh meaning to say, occurs thousands of times in Torah. But it is also exceptional. By my count, Emor as a command only occurs two other times, both during the Ten Plagues. Here, as an isolated command, it stands out, like Mona Lisa’s eyes, it stares out at us from the abyss.
As Archie Levin perfectly captures in his Bar Mitzvah speech last Saturday night, words from the Torah like “defilement” can (and I’m paraphrasing) alienate us from the text. We feel the thousands of years of history that separate us from our ancestors in many of the rules of Leviticus, where people are severely punished for things we wouldn’t consider crimes today. And then, in an instant, we are transported back in an amazing moment of communion like my sister and I experienced that morning in Paris. We are never so far removed from the Torah that a few letters of our holy scroll can’t bring us home.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex