This week's parasha is Emor. It covers a great deal of ground. When I started studying it this week I was struck by the idea of how much of Judaism is encapsulated in this one parasha. In this one parasha we learn some of the rules regarding the kohanim needing to maintain ritual purity and we're given commandments surrounding Passover, the counting of the omer, Shavuot, Sukkot, and Yom Kippur. Keeping Shabbat is also mentioned. It seemed that if there was only one parasha you could have from the Torah, you could do a lot worse than to pick Emor.
One detail that I'd like to pull out, though, is one that might seem less relevant to today's world. Kohanim are commanded to avoid exposure to the ritual impurity which emanates from the deceased. Exceptions are made for first degree relatives. The kohen gadol however does not even get these exceptions, he was not allowed to even attend the funeral of a parent.
Rashi, the prolific medieval French commentator, notes that there is a case where even kohen gadol is obligated personally to attend to the burial of an individual. This is the case of the "met-mitzvah", an abandoned dead body (see B.T. Nazir 48a). Every Jew, including the kohen gadol, who encounters a met-mitzvah is obligated to ensure that the met-mitzvah has a proper burial.
Rabbi Eli Mansour of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn expands on this by noting that even on Yom Kippur when the kohen gadol is going to atone for the communal sins of the Jewish people, if he encountered a met-mitzvah he would have been obligated to personally perform a proper and dignified burial. This would necessarily disqualify him from performing the Yom Kippur rites which would then be carried out by another kohen who had been prepared for such a contingency.
Tractate Nazir also notes that in the case of a nazir and a kohen encountering a met-mitzvah, the kohen would be obligated to bury the met-mitzvah and not the nazir. If a nazir becomes ritually impure he has to restart his period of nazirute from the beginning and bring an appropriate sacrifice. The kohen merely needs to wait a week and then immerse in mikvah to return to a state of ritual purity (see B.T Nazir 47).
So how is this relevant to us?
I think that it demonstrates the critical nature of acts of lovingkindness (gimilut chesed) in Judaism. Here we have a scenario of the kohen gadol on the holiest day of the year - the Sabbath of Sabbaths as it is called in this week's parasha - and he is obligated to attend to an anonymous person who clearly cannot repay his kindness.
I would hope that for all of us our Torah would be a Torah of lovingkindness in this spirit.
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