Parashat Emor opens with Leviticus Chapters 21 and 22, containing instructions to the Kohanim, concluding with the sacrifices.
Following this, Chapter 23 commands the Festivals - Shabbat, Pesach, the seven-week Omer period, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Sh’mini Atzeret.
And the third section, 24:1-9, returns to the Kohanim, with the mitzvot of the Menorah and the Showbread.
There are two peculiarities in this narrative. The first is that the mitzvot of the Festivals appear to be out of sequence, interrupting the mitzvot for the Kohanim. And the second is that G-d had already given the mitzvah of the Menorah back in Parashat Tetzaveh (Exodus 27:20-21), some ten months earlier, and then repeats it here.
So three questions arise here:
- Why did G-d interrupt the sequence of the mitzvot of the Kohanim with the mitzvot of the Festivals?
- Why did He repeat the mitzvah of the Menorah?
- And why did He repeat it specifically here?
Rashi (Leviticus 24:2) comments: “This is the section of the actual mitzvah of the Menorah. Parashat Tetzaveh only sets forth the sequence of building the Mishkan, thereby explaining the Menorah’s function; here the actual mitzvah is given, as though You will ultimately command Israel to do this".
The Ramban cites Rashi’s comment, but rejects it on the grounds that “the section [in Parashat Tetzaveh] does not adjoin the section of the Menorah ; and the Torah already said that ‘he lit the candles before Hashem as Hashem had commanded Moshe’ (Exodus 40:25) - thus both the mitzvah and its fulfilment have already been mentioned".
And the Ramban then proceeds to give his explanation: in Parashat Tetzaveh, G-d had told Moshe to command the Children of Israel to bring olive oil to illuminate the Menorah (Exodus 27:20), which they indeed did. “And even though it says there ‘an eternal statute throughout their generations’ (verse 21), this refers to the lighting of the lamps. And now, the oil which the princes had brought as their donation was depleted - so He commanded that the Children of Israel take pure beaten olive oil, like the original oil, from public funds".
The Ohr ha-Chayim (Rabbi Chayim ben Atar, Morocco and Israel, 1696-1743) cites both Rashi and the Ramban, and rejects both their explanations: “Rashi of blessed memory gave his explanation, but it is unsatisfactory; and the Ramban of blessed memory wrote that the oil was depleted, but there is no evidence for what he wrote".
And the Ohr ha-Chayim then proceeds to give two explanations:
“Maybe the Torah juxtaposes all the mitzvot which are connected with seven - Pesach is seven days, Sukkot is seven days, celebrating with the Four Species [1 lulav, 1 etrog, 3 myrtle-twigs, and 2 willow-twigs for a total of 7 components) lasts seven days. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur also have a certain aspect of ‘seven’ - they fall in the seventh month [Tishrei]. So the Torah inserts the mitzvah of the Menorah here because it has seven candles; the Table [containing the Show-bread] also has an aspect of ‘seven’ - the Show-bread is ‘placed in two stacks, six in each stack’ (Leviticus 24:6), which with the Table itself completes seven levels.
"And this Parashah also contains the mitzvah of the Omer which lasts seven weeks, and also the mitzvah of Shabbat [the seventh day]. So you find that this Parashah combines all mitzvot which are connected with seven, to indicate that they all have the same fundamental principle and message".
And he then suggests a second reason for the mitzvah of the Menorah being written here, immediately following the mitzvah of Sukkot:
He cites the Midrash (Torah Kohanim) and the Talmud (Menachot 86b): “Does He then need the Menorah’s light? After all, the Israelites walked only by His light all the forty years that they were in the desert! And the Tosafot (Shabbat 22b) explains that they did not walk by the light of the sun, but rather by the light of the Shekhinah… This is what Hashem teaches us by placing the mitzvah of the Menorah adjacent to the mitzvah of Sukkah - ‘because I made the Children of Israel dwell in sukkot when I took them out from the land of Egypt’ (Leviticus 23:43). This teaches that because of the Clouds of Glory, they did not have the light of the sun, and instead they walked by His Light; and this being the case, the mitzvah of the Menorah was solely for ‘the Curtain of the Testimony’ (Leviticus 24:3) - testimony far all who pass through the world".
Having cited four explanations (Rashi, Ramban, and two from the Ohr ha-Chayim), I now - hesitantly, with some trepidation - add my explanation for G-d’s repeating the mitzvah of the Menorah just here, interrupting the sequence of the mitzvot of the Kohanim:
The theme of Parashat Emor is the Kehunah - the Priesthood, the mitzvot which devolve upon the Kohanim. Chapter 23, containing the Festivals which are inserted in the midst of these mitzvot, seems to be a digression; but actually, the Torah is alluding to a Festival intimately connected with the Kohanim, which would one day come in the future.
Hanukkah is the festival which the Kohanim would one day bring into our calendar: it was the Kohanim - the Maccabees of Modi’in, the Hasmoneans - who were to fight for Judaism in the Land of Israel, and who were to restore sovereignty to the Jewish monarchy for more than 200 years.
And though that war was to happen well over a thousand years after G-d commanded us to keep His festivals, the Torah nevertheless contains an oblique reference to it. G-d inserted the command to keep the Festivals in the midst of the mitzvot of the Kohanim; the continuation was to be Hanukkah, which the Torah hints at by continuing with the mitzvah of the Menorah, lit by pure olive oil.
Indeed, the Ba’al ha-Turim comments in a somewhat similar direction: “The Torah places the mitzvah to take pure olive oil immediately after the mitzvah of Sukkot to indicate that we say complete Hallel on all eight days of Hanukkah just as we say complete Hallel on all eight days of Sukkot and Sh’mini Atzeret".
I note that because of how our calendar and the weekly Torah-reading are calibrated, we almost always read Parashat Emor in the 23-day period between Yom HaAtzma’ut (Israel Independence Day) and Yom Herut Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Liberation Day).
We can derive from this timing that just as the Kohanim added an additional Festival to the Jewish year more than a thousand years after G-d commanded us to keep His festivals, so too, in our generation of redemption, we have another two Festival days to add to the Jewish calendar at the time when we read Parashat Emor.
The Haftarah for Parashat Emor is abstracted from Ezekiel 44:15-31.
It is, in the words of Rabbi Dr Joseph Hertz (Chief Rabbi of the British Empire 1913-1946), “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".
Ezekiel was both a Kohen and a Prophet; his Prophetic ministry opened in Babylonian exile, the Land of Israel desolate under foreign occupation, the Temple Mount in ruins. He was a Prophet of exile and redemption, foreseeing both the return to Zion of his own day and the return to Zion of the final Redemption.
Jewish history of the Second Temple era showed, only too devastatingly, what happened when the Kohanim became corrupt.
The Hasmonean Dynasty, having defeated the Seleucid Empire and kicking them out of Israel, having re-establishing Jewish independence in the Land of Israel, had earned the uncritical adulation of an appreciative population.
The glory of the Maccabees was such that even during the war, while the conflict was yet raging, Yehudah the Maccabee, the son of Matityahu who had started the revolt, was accepted as temporal ruler of Israel as well as Kohen Gadol (High Priest).
This continued for a few generations; eventually Yehudah Aristobulus I, Matityahu’s great-grandson and the fifth Kohen Gadol of the dynasty (104-103 B.C.E.), declared himself King of Judea.
This was highly controversial, because the kingship - and certainly the hereditary kingship - is the exclusive prerogative of the Tribe of Judah. The Hasmoneans’ usurpation of the Jewish throne was, however, but one symptom of their growing corruption and estrangement from Torah.
Though the Rabbis of the generation protested against the growing Hasmonean corruption, the enthusiasm of the masses for this dynasty which had liberated the nation from Seleucid occupation was irresistible.
Thus began a confrontation between the combined kingship-priesthood and the Sanhedrin (the Rabbinic authorities), a conflict which was never really resolved for as long as the Hasmonean dynasty lasted.
Under the reign of King Yehudah Aristobulus I, Hasmonean forces conquered and annexed the Galilee - boosting the popularity of the monarchy even more. The masses were sufficiently enamoured of the King and his victories to overlook the fact that he imprisoned his youngest brother Alexander Yannai (Jannæus), whom he considered sufficiently popular to threaten his own position.
Aristobulus ruled for just one year: he died in hideous pain of an unexplained disease, just days after his brother Antigonus was murdered by Aristobulus’ bodyguards, after his wife Shlom-Tziyyon (Salome Alexander) had convinced Aristobulus that Antigonus was plotting against him.
With Aristobulus dead, Queen Shlom-Tziyyon released Alexander Yannai, who then became the second king of the Hasmonean dynasty, reigning from 103-76 B.C.E. He married his dead brother’s widow, Queen Shlom-Tziyyon, and with her had two sons, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus.
Aristobulus, the younger brother, became Kohen Gadol in 66 B.C.E., holding the post for four years.
During his reign, Hasmonean forces under King Alexander Yannai conquered the northern coastal plain (Acre and the surrounding area), southern Judea, the Gaza region, and large parts of Trans-Jordan.
But the national pride which he engendered with his military conquests wasn’t unlimited, and he eventually went too far in his opposition to the Rabbinic establishment. On Sukkot (most likely 98 B.C.E., though some sources indicate a year later), Alexander Yannai officiated as Kohen Gadol in the Holy Temple.
There was a dispute between the Rabbinic authorities, the Perushim (Pharisees), and the breakaway Tzedukim (Sadducees), regarding the ceremony of נִסּוּך הַמַּיִם (water libation), and King Alexander Yannai demonstratively followed the Tzeduki interpretation. This sparked a massive protest in the Holy Temple, in which his soldiers massacred some 6,000 people.
This was the beginning of the Judean civil war, which lasted some six years and in which some 50,000 Jews were killed.
Eventually, however, the populace were confronted with a terrible choice: defeating Alexander Yannai with the help of the Seleucid Empire, and therefore returning to Seleucid occupation, or accepting a cease-fire and accepting Alexander Yannai as their king.
A Jewish king, however corrupt, seemed the lesser of the two evils, so the civil war finished with the rebels laying down their arms. And Alexander Yannai took gruesome revenge on the rebel leaders, murdering them in public in ways too horrific to describe.
When King Alexander Yannai died in 76 B.C.E., his widow Shlom-Tziyyon became Queen of Judea. During her reign she made every effort to restore Judea to its former glory: she banished the Sadducees from Jerusalem, reinstated the Sanhedrin’s authority, and brought Judea greater peace and prosperity than at any other time during the Second Jewish Commonwealth.
It was a time when all the blessings which G-d had promised as a reward for keeping His mitzvot (Leviticus 26:3-13 and Deuteronomy 28:1-14) were showered upon Israel.
But when she died in 67 B.C.E., those halcyon days ceased. Her two sons, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, proved themselves worthy of their father Alexander Yannai. Each of them claimed the throne of Judea for himself, leading to another bloody Jewish civil war, the two brothers and their respective followers fighting for the crown.
To break the stalemate, Hyrcanus II eventually forged a military alliance with the Roman Empire. The civil war ended in utter ignominy in 63 B.C.E., when Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) marched into Jerusalem in support of Hyrcanus.
Josephus records that in that battle, 12,000 Jews were killed.
Hyrcanus II subsequently became Kohen Gadol and King of Judæa (the Latinised spelling). In fact, he was a vassal king, totally under Roman control.
23 years later, in 40 B.C.E., Matityahu Antigonus the Hasmonean, a son of Aristobulus II, in collaboration with the Parthian Empire, mounted a revolt against his uncle King Hyrcanus II and his Roman masters. He defeated Hyrcanus, and chopped off both his ears. This inflicted a blemish upon him which, in accordance with the laws of the Kehunah in Parashat Emor and Bechorot Chapter 6, disqualified him from being Kohen Gadol.
Matityahu Antigonus exiled his uncle, the deposed Kohen Gadol and king, to Babylon. Thus Matityahu Antigonus became Kohen Gadol and King of Judæa. He was a vassal king, under almost complete control of the Parthians - but he could nevertheless claim to be a legitimate Jewish king of the Hasmonean dynasty.
And after reigning for just three years, he was defeated and killed by the Romans in 37 B.C.E..
Thus ended, in utter ignominious disgrace, the glory that had once been the Maccabees’.
Such was the result of a corrupt Kehunah in Judæa. The Second Jewish Commonwealth was in irreversible decline, and was snuffed out by the Romans a few generations later.
But Ezekiel’s prophetic vision of the third and final Holy Temple, waiting to be built in Jerusalem, still sustained the nation, through corruption of the Kohanim, civil war, Roman occupation, and exile.
It is a prophecy especially relevant at this time of the year, between Yom ha-Atzma’ut and Yom Herut Yerushalayim.
And no less relevant is his prophecy that the Kohanim who will minister there will be of the incorruptible descendants of Zadok.
The final redemption will yet come. The final Holy Temple will yet be rebuilt. Israel will once again be sovereign and independent in its Land. And all corruption will yet be swept away.