The 124 verses of Parashat Emor divide very naturally into six sections:
The first section (Leviticus 21:1-22:16) prescribes the laws pertaining to Kohanim (Priests).
The second section (22:17-25) forbids offering blemished animals as sacrifices, and describes which blemishes fall into this category.
The third section (22:26-33) gives general laws of how animals are to be treated before being sacrificed, then commands the Kohanim (and by extension all Jews) to sanctify the Name of G-d.
Thus far, these three sections have followed one another in an easily-understandable logical sequence, one subject flowing to another very naturally.
But then, the fourth section seems to break the flow. Chapter 23 commands the Festivals, “Hashem’s appointed seasons” (23:2): Shabbat (v. 3), Pesach and the Festival of Matzot (vs. 5-8), the Omer ceremony and the Counting of the Omer (vs. 9-16), Shavuot (vs. 16-21), Rosh Hashanah (vs. 23-25), Yom Kippur (vs. 26-32), and finally Succot and Sh’mini Atzeret (vs. 33-43).
Then the fifth section (24:1-9) returns to laws which apply specifically to the Kohanim: the Menorah and the olive oil with which the lamps of the Menorah were fuelled, and finally the Show-Bread (the לֶחֶם הַפָּנִים, the twelve loaves of bread which were permanently on the Table in the Sanctuary, later in the Holy Temple, replaced every Shabbat).
Then the sixth and final section (24:10-23) recounts the historical event of a blasphemer in the Israelite Camp.
The fourth section seems uncharacteristically out of place, interrupting the flow of laws which appertain specifically to the Kohanim. The festivals, after all, are incumbent upon every Jew, not just the Kohanim. So why are they inserted here?
I suggest that the Torah obliquely alludes here to another Festival that would one day be instituted well over a millennium after the Torah was given: Channukah. This explains why the Torah, after commanding all the Festivals in the year from Pesach to Succot and Sh’mini Atzeret, then continues with the Menorah. After Sh’mini Atzeret comes Channukah, celebrating the Festival of the Menorah which the Kohanim restored in the Second Temple.
And I further suggest that it is no idle coincidence that Parashat Emor almost invariably falls in the three-week period between Yom ha-Atzma’ut (Israel Independence Day) and Yom Herut Yerushalayim, the day that Israel liberated Jerusalem in the Six Day War in 1967.
(The 28th of Iyyar is often referred to as יוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם, Jerusalem Day. But this name is singularly unfortunate: the term יוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם occurs only once in the Tanach, in Psalms 137:7, where it refers to the terrible day that the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. יוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם is emphatically not a day to celebrate! יוֹם חֵרוּת יְרוּשָׁלִָם, the day of Jerusalem’s liberation from illegal foreign rule, and Israel’s deliverance from a war of attempted extermination and genocide which the Arabs had confidently promised, definitely is a day of celebration and Hallel.)
These are two Festivals which were added to our calendar only in the last couple of generations. So it is singularly apposite that they would be celebrated around the time of year that the Torah hints at the archetypal additional Festival of national liberation, Hanukkah.
The Haftarah for Parashat Emor is Ezekiel 44:15-31, towards the end of the Book of Ezekiel, describing the Third Temple:
“And the Levite-Kohanim, descendants of Zadok who kept the charge of My Sanctuary when the Children of Israel strayed away from Me – they will come near to Me to serve Me; they will stand before Me to offer to Me blood and fat, says Hashem G-d”.
And then the prophet continues by vividly describing the Temple Service in the rebuilt Third Temple.
Zadok first appears in 2 Samuel 8:17 as the Kohen Gadol who ministered in the Mishkan during the reign of King David. During the insurrection of Avshalom, Zadok and his fellow-Kohen Eviatar proved their unswerving loyalty to King David (2 Samuel 15); and years later, together with the prophet Nathan, Zadok anointed King David’s son Shlomo as King of Israel (1 Kings 1:32-40).
And from then onwards, throughout the First Temple period and in the early Second Temple period, all the Kohanim Gedolim were descendants of Zadok, including Ezra who was instrumental in leading the exiles from Babylon back to Israel and rebuilding the Holy Temple in Jerusalem (Ezra 7:1-6, 1 Chronicles 5:30-41).
It was only after the Maccabees of the Hasmonean Dynasty defeated the Seleucids, rededicated the Holy Temple, and restored the Temple service that there was a legitimate Kohen Gadol who was not descended from Zadok – Yonatan the son of Matityahu the Maccabee, who was installed as Kohen Gadol in 141 B.C.E., and all subsequent legitimate Kohanim Gedolim of the Second Temple era were of the Hasmonean Dynasty.
This, perhaps, sounded a warning: Those Kohanim of the Hasmonean Dynasty, brave and dedicated fighters for Israel’s freedom, men who gave their very lives for G-d and for Israel, were wildly popular as rulers, both temporal and spiritual. Yet within a few generations, their descendants degenerated into the very Hellenism which Matityahu and his sons had risked and often given their lives to resist, and eventually instituted a tyranny which oppressed the Jews in Judea as harshly as the Seleucid Empire had done.
Such was the result of a dynasty of Kohanim Gedolim from a line other than Zadok. So Ezekiel’s prophetic vision of the restoration of Zadok’s line restored in the Third Temple is especially powerful and inspiring.
It also suggests that the prophet Ezekiel had an inkling of the corruption that would plague the Kehunah (Priesthood) three centuries after his death. This prophecy must have been particularly comforting to the Jews of the late Second Temple period.
Rabbi Joseph Hertz (Chief Rabbi of Britain, 1913-1946), in his Commentary on the Chumash, introduces this Haftarah:
“The Haftarah...is a Vision of the New Jerusalem and the New Temple that are to arise when the Captivity is over. If, however, the new Temple is to be the embodiment in concrete form of Israel’s ideals of Holiness and Purity, those that shall minister in the House of G-d must not, as in the past, permit any violations of those ideals. Therefore, only descendants of the loyal family of Zadok shall be the priests of the future. In this Haftarah, Ezekiel undertakes to define their duties and ministrations; and thus connects with the Sedrah which regulates the life and work of the priests”.
Rabbi Hertz was indisputably a great man, a great Jew, a great leader, a great rabbi, a great visionary. But he could not have known, when he penned these words in 5692 (1932), that just sixteen years later this Haftarah, this “Vision of the New Jerusalem and the New Temple that are to arise when the Captivity is over”, would be read the day after Israel would become independent.
Neither could he have known that nineteen years after that, in 5727 (1967), a grand coalition of thirteen Arab and Muslim nations would attempt to exterminate Israel – and that Israel, outmanned and outgunned on four fronts, would roundly defeat those genocidal enemies in just six days, returning to Jerusalem four weeks after reading Parashat Emor.
The prophet Ezekiel, describing the third and final Holy Temple, looks forward to a time when the Kohanim will teach and adjudicate justice in the restored Jewish State:
“They will instruct My nation to distinguish between holy and mundane, they will teach them to distinguish between impure and pure; and when it comes to disputes, they will stand in judgement, and according to My judgements they will judge it...” (Ezekiel 44:23-24).
There is a peculiarity here in the text: the word לְמִשְׁפָּט (“in judgement”) is spelt defectively – לשפט instead of למשפט, the letter מ is missing. (Every printed Chumash and Tanach has either a footnote or a note inserted in the text to call attention to this.)
Why this peculiarity? Why does the prophet omit the letter מ in this specific prophecy?
– I suggest:
Some half-a-millennium before the prophet Ezekiel lived, King David had ruled Israel, fought temporal battles to strengthen the country physically and infused the nation with the spirit of sanctity to strengthen them spiritually.
The Tanach records the song of victory which King David composed “on the day that Hashem saved him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul” (2 Samuel 22:1). King David later incorporated this Song, which constitutes all of Chapter 22 of 2 Samuel, into the Book of Psalms (Psalm 18), with a few minor differences which he made with decades of hindsight and additional experience.
Ascribing his victories on the battlefields to G-d, King David lyricised:
“Hashem thundered from Heaven, the Most High gave forth His voice; He sent forth His arrows and scattered them; lightning, and He terrified them” (2 Samuel 22:14-15).
There is a peculiarity here in the text: the word וַיָּהֹם (“and He terrified them”) is spelt ויהמם instead of ויהם, with an extra letter מ. (Again, every printed Tanach has either a footnote or a note inserted in the text to call attention to this.) The parallel verse in Psalms 18 uses the word וַיְהֻמֵּם (“He drove them into a frenzy”, or “He confused them”).
The inference is that King David originally used the word וַיָּהֹם, as recorded in the Book of Samuel, and much later in life changed the word to וַיְהֻמֵּם, adding the letter מ, when he edited this Song and integrated it into the Book of Psalms.
But the Book of Samuel nevertheless alludes to the change by spelling the word וַיְהֻמֵּם with the extra מ in the written form (כְּתִיב), while retaining the spoken form (קְרִי) of וַיָּהֹם.
The result of this is an extra letter מ in the Tanach. And the prophet Ezekiel balances this by omitting the one letter מ from the word לְמִשְׁפָּט in his prophecy of the third, final, and perfect Holy Temple.
The seeming non-sequitur of the Festivals in Parashat Emor, which appeared to interrupt the laws of the Kohanim, actually alludes to Channukah, the Festival which the Kohanim would one day inaugurate.
The Haftarah for Emor gives us hope for the future time to come, the future which has already begun in the last two generations with the restoration of Jewish sovereign national independence in the Land of Israel.
And the prophet Ezekiel, even as he prophesies this glorious future (so far distant in his day, so close to us today!), reminds us of our past in Israel, of King David who founded the Jewish Royal Dynasty which will culminate with the mashiach, and of Zadok, the Kohen Gadol who remained unflinchingly loyal to King David and whose descendants are destined to serve in the rebuilt Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
This is indeed the most fitting riposte possible to Yom Ha'atzma’ut, and an equally fitting introduction to Yom Herut Yerushalayim.
Daniel Pinneris a veteran immigrant from England, a teacher by profession and a Torah scholar who has been active in causes promoting Eretz Israel and Torat Israel.