Ruth, who was a Moabite, is often described as a model convert, on account of her declaration to her mother-in-law, Naomi, “where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God” (1:16). Indeed, Ruth is referenced as one of the first “converts” to Judaism, after Abraham and Sarah (well, before their “conversion,” Abram and Sarai). It is for this reason that we in the Library of JTS feature Ruth prominently in our current exhibition, “Your People Shall Be My People: Conversion to Judaism through the Centuries,” even naming the exhibition after Ruth’s declaration to Naomi. We chose to create an exhibition about conversion to Judaism at this time because in the modern age, many people have made that choice. In an age of fluid identities, when conscious choice becomes crucial, more people than ever (and there were such converts in the past, even despite laws that forbade such transitions) have chosen to affiliate with the Jewish path. But what do Ruth and what she represents have to do with Shavuot?

Shavuot—biblically a holiday marking the first harvest—came to be associated with the revelation of the law at Mt. Sinai. Indeed, it is described in our prayers as “the time of the giving of our Torah.” At Sinai, the people of Israel stood at the foot of the mountain, ready to accept the Law given to Moses as instruction for Israel for all generations. What kind of transition did the people undergo at Sinai? In what ways were the people different after that revelation than they were before?

In the view of the Talmudic rabbis, the people of Israel converted at Sinai. Since, for the rabbis, to be a Jew is to be a person of the Torah, before the revelation the children of Israel were not “Jews” (the term is anachronistic here). They only became “Jews” when, at Sinai, they did what converts to Judaism must do: they immersed (the Talmud imagines this), the men were circumcised (the Torah reports this explicitly), and they accepted the “yoke of the commandments,” that is, the Torah. Indeed, as the Talmud, in tractate Yebamot, makes clear (and there is a fine 16^th century volume showing this in the Library exhibition), the children of Israel serve, for the rabbis, as the models for later conversions. The rituals a convert must undertake are precisely those executed by the people at Sinai.

Now, it is true that Jewish tradition also identified others as models for conversion. The model offered by Abraham (and, we would say, Sarah) is well known, and as we can see in the names of converts written on ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts) in the exhibition, all converts are ultimately the sons or daughters of Abraham. And, of course, Ruth was also seen as a model for conversion. But the association of Ruth and Shavuot subtly makes another point: that there is no conversion without standing at Sinai. Because Shavuot is about the revelation at Sinai, it is also, inescapably, about conversion. It is this of which the reading of Ruth also reminds us.

There is a well-known rabbinic teaching claiming that all Jews, of all generations, stood at Sinai. Hence, we are all converts. The term the rabbis adopted for “convert” was the biblical word “ger”—“resident alien” or “stranger.” The Torah commands that we not oppress the ger, because we too were gerim in the land of Egypt. Whether converts or strangers, we have been both, and thanks to what we have learned from our experiences, we are obligated to welcome and protect the strangers and newcomers among us, for we are they. On this Shavuot, when we all stand again at Sinai, let us rededicate ourselves to this value, for ours is a world where it is often neglected.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Parashah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

“The Land” is a central character in Leviticus, receiving 23 mentions in the final two chapters, and 70 altogether in the second half of this central book of Torah. We think often of Leviticus as centered on the Sanctuary, and that it is, but the Land itself is a living character, offering blessings and curses to the people of Israel. If the people live faithfully, then the Land will receive blessed rains, produce its bounty, and provide security and satiety. But if the people act as if their title to the Land is absolute, if they fail to allow the Land to rest on the sabbatical year and recognize God’s ultimate title, then they will be forced into exile.

As Jacob Milgrom notes, the previous priestly account of pollution of the Land—the flood narrative of —requires ablution, the washing away of sin with water. (Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27, 2336)That solution is unavailable now for two reasons. First, God promised never to flood the earth again. Second, the sin that occupies Leviticus is not really one of pollution but of over-extraction of natural resources. The people have ignored God’s command to observe the sabbatical year; the only resolution is for the people to be pushed off the land so that it can rest and recover. Hence, the dreaded punishment of exile.

Toward the end of the devastating reproach section of our portion, the Torah predicts a future reconciliation when the exiles will humble their hearts, and their sin will be atoned. “Then will I remember My covenant with Jacob, also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the Land” (). This verse has several unusual features. It reverses the order of the patriarchs; it records Jacob’s name “full” with an extra letter (יעקוב, rather the Bible’s usual יעקב); and it leaves out “remember” for the middle man, Isaac.

Each element is interesting, but let us focus on the finale of the verse, where the Land itself becomes something like a fourth patriarch. God announces, “I will remember the Land,” making it not only the destination of return but also the very foundation of the covenant. As Midrash Sifra observes, “the Covenant is linked to the Land” (Behukkotai 2:8). Thinking back to , we recall that the covenant that God establishes with Abraham is all about the Land: “Then I will give to you and your descendants after you the land where you have dwelt, the Land of Canaan as an eternal possession, and I will be your God”(). The Land is not only a place to live, but an intermediary through which to encounter God.

Elsewhere in the Bible, the Land of Israel stands as a symbol of the virtue or lack of virtue of Israel. In a time of physical exile, Jeremiah imagines the Land itself lamenting its abandonment and asking why. Let the wise come and explain, “Why is the Land in ruins, laid waste like a wilderness, with none passing through it?” (). A land that is abandoned, in ruins, is evocative of the absent human life that once flourished there. Isaiah depicts the Land pining for its people and rejoicing upon their return ().

The Rabbis imagine the Land of Israel to be something like a tough nanny. On the one hand, she is a disciplinarian, noticing the failure of the people to observe her commandments such as the neglected sabbatical, and calling these failures to God’s attention. On the other hand, she is their caregiver. In Midrash Vayikra Rabbah, Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish says that it is like a king who has three sons and a nurse for them. If he wants to know about his sons, he inquires about the nurse. So too does God care about the children—that is, Israel—but inquires only about the Land (Behukkotai 36).

This Midrash views the Land as an instrument of reward and punishment, but perhaps the truth is deeper still. The Land is more like a teacher or a parent, socializing its students to express gratitude, self-control, and respect for others. Like an anxious child who grabs more food than they really need, the people of Israel are inclined to ignore the Sabbatical. This undermines awareness of divine title and cedes self-control, so that fear guides their way, all the way into exile.

German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas argued that pre-modern ethics was limited to a range of proximate concern—it was always assumed that earth would rebound from any damage that we could cause. Therefore, responsibility was only for direct damage, not for the cumulative harm caused over the course of generations. (The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, 5) That indeed seems to be the understanding in Leviticus: After a few years of exile, the neglected sabbaticals will be made up, and the people will be welcome to return. Our fear is that this is no longer true. Our destructive powers have grown too great, and the land may not recover from the harm that we cause.

Enjoyment of the land requires us to tread lightly on it. A walk in the park, a hike in the hills, a dip in the ocean—these simple pleasures restore our relationship to the land, reminding us that we are not its owners, but rather its temporary inhabitants. More than this is required—real reductions in carbon emissions and the willingness to let the land rest. As with the ancient neglect of sabbaticals, our contemporary abuse of our home is having direct and dangerous consequences. Reading this portion alerts us to that danger and motivates us to make the changes required to live in health and joy on all the good land that God has given.

This commentary was published originally in 2019.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Like much of Leviticus, Parashat Emor opens with yet more of these rules. But now the Torah needs to acknowledge that even when everything is in the right place, there is still death. What’s a priest to do when tragedy strikes? “Speak [Emor] to the priests, the sons of Aaron,” God tells Moses, “and say to them: None shall defile himself for any [dead] person among his kin, except for the relatives that are closest to him” (Lev. 21:1). In order to stay pure, priests are limited in terms of when they can come near a dead body; even though they may mourn the death of another, the Torah says that they can only be near the corpse of a close relative. After a few terse verses about mourning practices, the Torah enumerates further rules that are meant to keep the priests and High Priest pure, with the upshot being that a priest is “holy to their God” (21:7).

As anyone following along in Leviticus until now knows—the priests are special. And in a ritual system in which impurity abounds and priests must remain on call to serve God, it is unsurprising to see the Torah set extra strictures to keep them pure. But what do we make of such passages today? While many of the practices listed at the opening of this week’s parashah are still observed by Jews who maintain priestly lineage, they can feel remote to the rest of us—rules for a religious elite in a Temple-era world that no longer exists.

R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801–1854), the founder of the Izhbitza-Radzyn line of Hasidic rabbis, read this passage in a way that allows it to speak not only to the priests, but to anyone. In his book the, “the Izbicer” reads this passage allegorically. First, the word “priest” can be understood—based on —not merely as a descendant of Aaron, but as anyone “who seeks to serve God,” an Oved Hashem.

Having made this first move, the Izbicer then reads the passage at the start of this week’s parashah as speaking not just about the specifics of corpse impurities, but about the challenges that face a religious person when they encounter death or other tragedies. “A person like this,” the Izbicer says of the Oved Hashem, “can become angry with God’s actions.” By contrast, someone who “thinks the world operates by chance” cannot be truly angry with God, “because they can say,” when dealing with a tragedy, that “it’s just happenstance.”

The Mei ha-Shiloach explains that this capacity for anger—for frustration with the way things are—is not a failure of faith but is actually an expression of faith. This is a striking inversion of how religious anger is often perceived. We tend to think of protest as a sign of weakened faith. The Izbicer suggests the opposite: that the person who cannot be angry with God has simply stopped believing that God is responsible for anything.

The frustration of the Oved Hashem comes from a place of care. To challenge the order of things is to believe not only that they can be different but that they should be, because ultimately there is an overarching ethics according to which the world should operate, that even God should be held to. Only someone who takes God seriously, who believes the world is ordered with intention and purpose, can be genuinely outraged when that order seems to fail. Indifference is the luxury of those who expect nothing.

As an educator teaching in a world full of ever more injustices, my greatest fear is not that my students will be upset with the order of things, but that they will stop caring at all. True faith carries with it the burden of expectation, and with expectation comes the possibility of disappointment. The Izbicer reminds us that we should hold on to that disappointment. Our disappointment—our own and that of our students—should inspire us to do good: to remain invested enough in the world to be troubled by it, and to fight and strive for something better.

Leviticus imagines a perfectly ordered world—one in which everything is in its right place. The Izbicer would say that the person of faith has internalized that vision. They know what the world should look like, and so when it doesn’t, they cannot simply shrug. To be frustrated with the world as it is, is to believe in the world as it ought to be.

The chapter begins with a striking heading: “God said to Moses: Speak to the entire assembly of the Israelites and say to them: ‘Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.’” The text lends this chapter special weight when it instructs Moses to gather the entire people to hear it, something that does not often occur in Leviticus, which is mostly directed at the priests. Indeed, many of the instructions laid down in  would, if observed, produce a society of very high standards: Respect your parents; leave part of your harvest for the poor and the stranger; do not steal, embezzle, or lie; don’t oppress your fellow man; don’t delay payment to your employees; don’t curse the deaf or trip the blind; don’t pervert justice; don’t go around bearing tales; don’t nurse a grievance, take revenge, or hold a grudge; respect your elders and protect the stranger; don’t cheat in business; and, in the middle of the chapter, the ringing and nearly impossible challenge to love your neighbor as yourself.

But the chapter doesn’t begin “Be moral, for I the Lord your God am moral” or “Be righteous, for I the Lord your God am righteous.” It begins “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Indeed, everything that surrounds  is about holiness. Our double parashah begins by instructing Aaron not to enter the most holy precinct of the Tabernacle whenever he chooses but only once a year, under particular conditions and pursuant to particular rites, subject to a penalty of death; it seems that the holy is not only an ideal state to be strived for but a force to be treated with caution. The laws of prohibited sexual relations are tied to holiness, for they are preceded and followed by the admonition: “Make yourselves holy and be holy, for I am the Lord your God” () and “Be holy for me, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Holiness seems to involve both a moral and a ritual state: it is to be pursued, in some cases; and to be avoided—or at least, treated cautiously—in others.

The dangers inherent in holiness are mentioned often in the Torah. The warning to Aaron about not entering the holy site builds on the shocking account of the death of his two sons () that resulted from their unauthorized entry into the holy place to make an unauthorized offering of incense (). The Torah does not say that God struck them down; it says that fire emerged from God’s presence—i.e., from the sanctuary itself; they were killed by a force that seemed to be triggered automatically, like an electric shock. And to drive the lesson home, God explains their death by stressing its connection with His holiness:

Through those nearest me will I be shown to be holy,
And before the people as a whole, I will be shown to be glorious. ()

Thus, the Torah commands us to be holy, but it also warns us to beware of the holy.

Our tradition has resolved the tension between the command and the warning by pointing to another meaning of the word kedoshim, the word normally translated “holy.” In many passages in the Bible, words that mean “holy” imply separating or distinguishing. Relying on this usage, tradition explains “You shall be holy” (kedoshim tihyu) as meaning “You shall be separate” (perushim tihyu) (e.g. Sifra Kedoshim 1:1). This usage can be observed in the laws of the Sabbath: when we are commanded to make the Sabbath holy, the meaning is that we are to separate the Sabbath day from weekdays through special observances.

By analogy, when we are told “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God am holy,” the meaning would be that we are commanded to separate ourselves from bad practices, such as the forbidden relations listed twice in our double parashah. The injunction could imply separating ourselves from other nations, in accordance with the heading of Chapter 19: “Do not do the kinds of things that are done in the Land of Egypt where you formerly dwelt, and do not do the kinds of things that are done in the land of Canaan to which I am bringing you.” The injunctions to be holy would imply that, as God is separate and different from the world and everything that is in it, we are expected to be different from the other nations in holding ourselves to a higher standard.

But there is another line of rabbinic interpretation. To be separate, some ancient rabbis explained, means that to be holy, we should separate ourselves, i.e., abstain, even from things that are permitted to us. The law permits us to drink wine, but that does not mean that we have license for drunkenness; the law permits us to have sexual intercourse with our spouses, but should practice it in moderation; the law does not explicitly forbid foul language, but we should avoid it out of our own sense of holiness. (e.g., Ramban) The Pharisees of antiquity were a sect of Jews who adopted stricter rules of ritual purity and obligatory gifts to the priests and Levites than those observed by most Jews. Tradition explains the name of the sect as deriving from parush, “separate,” the very word that the Rabbis used to explain kadosh, “holy.”

Pushed a little further, this idea of holiness could devolve into asceticism. The satisfaction of going the extra mile in serving God, particularly in the form of self-denial, is appealing to a certain religious sensibility and is attested in the history of Jewish religious practice. For spending thirteen years in a cave studying the Torah, the second-century rabbi Simeon bar Yoḥai has come to be considered a saint; his tomb in the Galilee is revered to this day. There were pietists in antiquity who observed a second day of Yom Kippur, resulting in a forty-eight-hour fast. Medieval European Jewish pietists imposed upon themselves extreme mortifications that were similar to those of the monks of medieval Christendom. Kabbalists since the twelfth century have undertaken extreme fasting and periods of isolation from human contact. A person who undertook such restrictions was known in Yiddish as a ��ó�������, a “separated one.” Most rabbis historically, while showing respect for persons who went beyond the law’s minimal demands, have preached moderation. But the ascetic trend in Judaism, though not mainstream, has been continuous.

Not everyone agreed that asceticism was a good thing. The author of Ecclesiastes advocates moderation even in matters of religion, saying, “Do not be overly righteous; why should you make yourself desolate?” Most of us moderns probably incline more to Ecclesiastes’s view than to the views of the ascetics. For it is not only themselves that the too-holy make miserable by choosing to miss out on so many of life’s healthy and permissible pleasures. We have all observed the tendency of the too-holy to take pride in their piety and to look down on the rest of us, even on those who strive to be merely holy. There is even an English word for the smug too-holy: sanctimonious, derived from the Latin word for holy, sanctus. They are a social type from which the rest of us are happy to be separated! Perhaps it was these extremists to whom Hillel addressed his admonition, “Do not separate [tifrosh] yourself from the community” ().

But the holiness that is enjoined on us cannot simply be an avoidance. God’s holiness radiates outward, so can the holiness that He expects of us be merely a turning away? God’s holiness is a positive; can ours be merely a negative? We are commanded not merely to avoid something but to do something. Our chapter’s injunctions to love one another and to love the stranger must be a start in the direction of holiness. But the danger that radiates from the holy suggests that something more than mere obedience, more than even fastidious obedience, more even than love is implied in the command to be holy.

God’s holiness is surely not merely a set of restrictions and requirements but the power that created and sustains the universe and that has the capacity to bring it crashing down. We cannot achieve that kind of power, of course—and woe betide the one who thinks he can! But insofar as it is compatible with our powers as human beings and the capacity of social institutions to tolerate it, we are to emulate this force by living actively, engaging positively and intensively in whatever we do, however we live, whatever choices we make.

This commentary was originally published in 2018.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling, a rash, or a discoloration, and it develops into a scaly affection on the skin of his body, it shall be reported to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons, the priests.

The idea that others would examine and report on intimate details of our bodies—that such things would be of communal concern, and subject us to institutional regulation—may seem archaic. But as transgender people know, when it comes to gender, this kind of surveillance is alive and well.

Every trans person has experienced gender surveillance—the ongoing scrutiny of bodies, clothing, voices, and gestures to determine if we are male or female. Gender surveillance happens in stores, on the street, in the work place; it is conducted by strangers and friends, bosses and employees, police and people who are homeless, doctors and accountants. Wherever we go, whomever we encounter, others, consciously or unconsciously, are looking at us to determine whether we are male or female—which is why the therapist who helped me through gender transition instructed me to always carry a letter, addressed “To whom it may concern,” in which she assured whoever was reading it that I was not presenting myself as a woman in order to defraud or otherwise harm others.

I am not only an object of gender surveillance; I participate in the communal monitoring of gender. When I see someone, I immediately try to determine if they are male or female, because so many of my habits of understanding and relating to others are premised on determining who they are in terms of binary gender. I have lived my entire life engaging in gender surveillance, subjecting everyone—myself included—to that binary-enforcing gaze.

The spate of “bathroom bill” legislation in North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere—laws designed to force trans people to use the restrooms that correspond to the sex on our birth certificates—has drawn national attention to gender surveillance. “Bathroom bills” require people whose bodies visibly vary from the norm to undergo intensive, intrusive examination and, if our differences are officially found to be defiling, to be expelled from communal spaces and publicly stigmatized.

 commands similar responses to bodies whose differences are officially deemed “leprous”:

As for the person with a leprous affection, his clothes shall be rent, his head shall be left bare, and he shall cover over his upper lip; and he shall call out, “Impure! Impure!” He shall be impure as long as the disease is on him. Being impure, he shall dwell apart; his dwelling shall be outside the camp ().

In , the Torah expands the range of bodies that are to be expelled because they are considered defiling:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Instruct the Israelites to remove from camp anyone with an eruption or a discharge… Remove male and female alike; put them outside the camp so they do not defile the camp of those in whose midst I dwell. The Israelites did so, putting them outside the camp (vv. 1-4).

The image of organized searches for those whose bodies may “defile” their society may seem like an outgrown relic of Iron Age notions of ritual purity. But as Jews found out during the Holocaust, and, as Latino communities in the U.S. targeted for immigration “sweeps” can attest to today, human beings have never left such practices behind.

To my knowledge, trans people have never been subjected to this sort of formal “removal” process. Until recently, most of us have lived in hiding or “below the radar”: too few and too scattered to inspire formal searches and “removals.” But many trans people know what it’s like to be seen as defiling our families, homes, workplaces, and communities, and forcibly removed as a consequence—expelled, sometimes violently, because the “eruptions” of our transgender identities are seen as a threat to communal health, harmony, religious life, or social order.

The removals of defiling bodies commanded by the Torah are in many ways less harsh than the removals many transgender people endure. The Torah’s commandments target temporary physical conditions that may affect anyone, rather than singling out a specific minority for discrimination. Unlike today’s gender-based removals, the Torah’s laws don’t stigmatize those who are removed from the camp, or suggest that they are guilty of moral failing, sin, or crime. (While leprosy was later interpreted and stigmatized as divine punishment, “eruptions and discharges” are common events.) And while the Torah allows those who have been removed to rejoin the community after completing rituals of purification, such as those detailed in , many transgender people are exiled for years, decades—sometimes for the rest of our lives.

The Torah is often cited as the basis for religious communities to exclude, exile, and stigmatize transgender people—and even to deny us urgent medical care—but the Torah never commands, approves, or encourages such things. Even when Moses declares that those who cross-dress are “abhorrent” to God, he does not claim that God demands that they be “removed from camp.” Though there have always been people who do not fit into the categories of male and female, the Torah says nothing about us. It does not portray us as a threat or an abomination; it doesn’t declare us unclean or unfit to participate in communal worship or activities; it doesn’t demonize us, curse us, punish us, relegate us to the margins or the shadows, order gender surveillance to guard against our entry into the community or the Tabernacle, or organize searches to locate and expel us.

The Torah’s silence opened the door for the rabbis of the Talmud to adapt halakhah to enable intersex Jews to participate in Jewish communal life, and, more recently and locally, for Yeshiva University to tolerate my presence as an openly transgender professor. But because the Torah does not acknowledge that there are human beings who are not simply male or female, it shrouds us in silence and incomprehensibility.

The Torah’s detailing of defiling physical differences ensured that these differences could be recognized, spoken of, and understood by communities as part of being human. In order to fully include transgender people, Jewish communities have to follow the Torah’s example—to speak frankly about transgender identities, to recognize and pragmatically address our differences, and to face up to, and change, the communal policies, practices, and habits that, intentionally or not, lead so many of us to be removed, or to remove ourselves, from the camp.

When this d’var Torah was first published in 2017, so-called bathroom bills—laws criminalizing trans people’s use of public restrooms that fit the gender with which we identify—were relatively new and, to me, surprisingly unpopular. Now, nine years later, this kind of anti-trans legislation has metastasized. Thousands of trans people and their families have become internal refugees, moving from state to state in search of health care, equality, and safety; others, including me, have either fled or are preparing to flee the country. All of us are waiting to find out if we will be subject to the invasive processes described in Leviticus 13 and Numbers 5: inspecting our bodies, officially designating us as “unclean,” and forcibly removing us, as lepers and other “unclean” Israelites were, from American society. 

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Moses’s response is to state that he now understands something God had said in the past:

Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD meant by saying: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, And gain glory before all the people.” And Aaron was silent.()

What is Moses trying to convey to his brother in this moment of sudden tragic loss? Does he mean this to be comforting? Or is he simply musing to himself in the shock of the moment, much as Robert Oppenheimer did on July 16, 1945, in the aftermath of the Trinity nuclear test at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” (paraphrasing Bhagavad Gita 11:32). Is it not a moment so pregnant with power and potential, triumph and tragedy, that only such words will do?

But the mystery here is greater than at first glance. Even accepting Moses’s reverie as a natural human response, we are still left with the question: What was God’s original statement? There is no verse in the Torah that directly corresponds to Moses’s statement. So what did God say? And why had Moses been confused by it? How did the death of Aaron’s sons clarify it for him? The answer to these questions is the subject of a dispute in the  where two verses are proposed as candidates for Moses’s conundrum. By looking at the Talmud’s two suggestions as to what God’s confusing statement was, we can gain insight into Moses and Aaron, understanding their reactions to this moment better. 

The first possibility the Talmud presents is that Moses is referring to God’s commandment in :

The LORD said to Moses, “Go down, warn the people not to break through to the LORD to gaze, lest many of them perish. The priests also, who come near the LORD, must stay pure, lest the LORD break out against them.”

Here God warns Moses that the people should not ascend Mt. Sinai during God’s revelation upon the mountain. The power and presence of Divine glory is so great, and the human form so weak, that the bodies of those who approach will be overwhelmed and destroyed. It does not seem that there is any moral quality to this prohibition, but simply anxiety over uncontrollable danger. God seems unable to hold back the inherent radiating power that Divine presence evokes. Like getting too close to the sun, or perhaps to a source of ionizing radiation, those who get too close to God’s immediate presence will inevitably perish because of the tremendous force of the radiating Glory.

This is very much akin to the story of Uzza ben Abinadab recounted in  and :. Uzza and his brother were charged with driving the cart carrying the ark when David first tried to bring it up to Jerusalem. On the way, the animals driving the cart stumbled, leading the ark to slip, and Uzza reached out, catching the ark, and dying instantly on the spot. David was afraid to bring the ark any further and delayed bringing it into Jerusalem for three months. Uzza committed no moral transgression, only an instinctual error, and died from direct exposure to God’s power. If we accept this understanding, Moses means to tell Aaron something like: “Working this close to so much power is dangerous, and those closest (i.e., most physically proximate) to God will be the most exposed to the danger.” In other words, God’s power cuts both ways. It can grant great benefits, but it can overwhelm us and destroy us as well if we fail to take care.

The second possibility the Talmud presents is :

. . . a regular burnt offering throughout the generations, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting before the LORD. For there I will meet with you, and there I will speak with you, and there I will meet with the Israelites, and it shall be sanctified by My Presence (kevodi).

Here God alludes to the Divine glory (kevodi) as the “power source” of the desert sanctuary, namely God’s presence. What does Moses find mysterious or confusing about this? Well, even in the desert, God is represented by the kohanim; they make up at least a portion of God’s glory.  Can humans truly sanctify the Divine, when the Divine is already entirely holy? Here, the Talmud suggests that we read the word kevodi (lit. “My-glory”) as mekhubadai (“those who glorify me”). In other words, God’s presence is one and the same as the human beings who attempt to approach God. Those who reach out to God can come to represent God so completely that they are equivalent to God’s own presence.

With this interpretation, the Talmud links the act of Nadab and Abihu in bringing strange fire with more typical acts of martyrdom. The Talmud seems to be claiming that the two sons of Aaron chose to serve by dying for God in order to dedicate the sanctuary with their lives. This act of self-sacrifice would show the power contained in the sanctuary and make it a source of awe among the people. While this may be troubling to us, the Talmud’s interpretation attempts to fully demonstrate the strength of Moses’s words to Aaron: “Your sons did no wrong. They died doing a good thing, sanctifying the Divine name among the people.”

The raw, visceral potency of this understanding is undeniable, and I find its call a primal one. Though I know there will be many who find this second interpretation deeply disturbing, its demand that connection with God is worth giving up one’s life raises the stakes in religious life. When we fail to see that this power, majesty, and glory is one of the things that consistently attracts people to religion, we put ourselves in a very dangerous position. At some level, the tremendous mystery which awakens within us fear and trembling can be properly taken as the Divine voice calling out to us. On the other hand (and this is the thing that disturbs us so deeply), what we think to be a great mystery can simply be a moment of self-delusion, leading us into acts of nihilistic self-destruction.  One of our most central tasks as religious people is to sort out magical thinking and wish-fulfilling fantasy from God’s true demands, demands that lead to authentic holy deeds and actual moral imperatives.

I think this last thought is more aligned with the Talmud’s first interpretation, that all power, especially religious power, can be overwhelming and dangerous, and it needs to be contained in order to be safely employed for the betterment of the world. This is what happened at Mount Sinai when God told the people they should not ascend the mountain lest they die. Can we understand the purpose of the desert sanctuary similarly? Must we not keep Divine power contained in the midst of the people? If we are able to do so, becoming a community both containing and embodying holiness, we can approach God without fear. My blessing for us all is that we have access to God’s power, but safely and beneficially, not as a mighty storm, but as a gentle rain.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

There are numerous points of entry, including the haftarah for this week, which points to the interrelationship between Passover itself and Shabbat Hagadol. Without making a case for precedents and influences, let us note that this haftarah (Malachi 3:4–24) concludes with an explicit reference to Elijah (vv. 23–24): “Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome, fearful day of the LORD. He shall reconcile parents with children and children with their parents…” Now, I think that reconciling parents and children is a wonderful task, but that is a subject we shall leave for another day. In rabbinic interpretation, one of Elijah’s responsibilities was held to be in reconciling halachic disputes that occurred in antiquity and concerning which no resolution was ever recorded. It is one such unresolved dispute that provides us with a wonderful point of entry for Elijah into our Passover experience and his mysterious cup of wine

Some modern scholars have taken a kind of anthropological approach to note Elijah’s presence in our liturgies at particular “liminal moments.”[i]  Taken from the Latin limen, or “threshold,” the term was developed by 19th and early 20th century anthropologists, such as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, to refer to rites of passage or moments of transition that were felt to be dangerous. Jewish liturgies created for such moments thus invoked Elijah as a kind of “heavenly protector” to help the participant transition from the “before” to the “after.” A brit milah is one such type of moment (potential danger to the newborn son); Motzei Shabbat is another one (one Jewish belief holds that God takes away at the end of Shabbat, the “second soul” with which God has endowed us at the onset of Shabbat, and the fear is that God will accidentally take away our primary soul, as well).

In this context we must recognize that Passover was often an especially dangerous time for Jews. It takes place during the same season as the one in which Christians mark the crucifixion and was therefore also a time at which—until quite recently— that Christian tradition charged ancient Jews. Christians would take out the responsibility for this upon contemporary Jews living in their midst. Pogroms would often break out during Passover/Christian Holy Week. And so, during the seder, when Jews would go see if Christians were in the vicinity, they invoked Elijah as a protector at that time, as well. Some liturgies incorporate the singing of Eliyahu ha-Navi at this time; others incorporate the tradition of reciting verses such as שְׁפֹךְ חֲמָתְךָ אֶל הַגּוֹיִם אֲשֶׁר לֹא יְדָעוּךָ וְעַל מַמְלָכוֹת אֲשֶׁר בְּשִׁמְךָ לֹא קָרָאוּ, “Pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know You, upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name” (Psalm 79:6), which is thus to be understood as what might be recited “when the coast was clear.”

Returning to idea of Elijah as a mediator, we need to look at a central passage concerning God’s promises to the Israelite nation while it was still suffering under Egyptian bondage:

Say, therefore, to the Israelite people: I am the LORD. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I, the LORD, am your God who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians (Exodus 6:6-7).

In various midrashim (e.g., Talmud Yerushalmi Pesahim 10:1), the sages consider this passage to be the passage of the arba leshonot ge’ulah, “four expressions of redemption,” because it was felt that by means of the four verbs contained in this passage, God had promised redemption Israel four times. Now, you may recall that the Mishnah (Pesahim 10:1) ruled that a person should drink no fewer than four cups of wine during the seder (וְלֹא יִפְחֲתוּ לוֹ מֵאַרְבַּע כּוֹסוֹת שֶׁל יַיִן). Moreover, according to some authorities, this requirement was based on the arba leshonot ge’ulah passage from the Book of Exodus. However, other Sages pointed to the verse that immediately follows this passage (Exodus 6:8) and which contains an additional “expression of redemption,” והבאתי: “I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession, I the LORD.” According to the logic of these sages, even though God has not yet brought the entire Jewish people into the Land, none should drink fewer than FIVE cups of wine at the seder to commemorate what were, in effect, not four but five expressions of redemption!

Now, if one thinks about a dispute such as this one, with one rabbinic position holding that one should drink no fewer than four cups, and the other position holding that one should drink no fewer than five cups, one can see that, despite the dispute, both sides agree that four cups should be drunk. And that becomes the halacha: we drink four cups of wine—and pour the fifth, but do not drink. And that fifth cup becomes the “Cup of Elijah,” not because Elijah comes to each celebrating Jewish home and drinks some wine from “his” cup, but because of the role the figure of Elijah plays, according to rabbinic lore, when two groups of opposing rabbis cannot agree on what the halacha is, but know they must establish a rule to follow. And that role is established by a midrash on the verse from Malachi that we read as part of the haftorah for Shabbat Hagadol, and that I cited earlier: “Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome, fearful day of the LORD.  He shall reconcile parents with children and children with their parents…” (Mal. 3:23–24). In this sense, the reconciliation that Elijah is to bring about is not between literal family members, but members of the broader rabbinic family. Moreover, even the Aramaic word that is found in the Talmud to mark such irreconcilable disputes ( תיקו literally, “let it—the dispute—stand”) was taken to be an acronym for Malachi’s promise of a deliverance that would be heralded by the Prophet Elijah: תשבי יתרץ קושיות ובעיות tishbi yitaretz qushiyot u-va’ayot, “Elijah will resolve difficulties and problems.”

And now that we have traced the route through which Elijah visits our seder, I will close this essay not with additional analysis, but with a prayer: May we soon come to live in a world that merits Elijah’s arrival, a world that is marked not by strife but by amity. And may we welcome Elijah into our seder both with honest and ritualized memory of terrible experiences the Jewish people have endured, but also with the hope that one day—soon, we hope!—we may experience peace and reconciliation.

[i] See Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text: a Holistic Approach to Liturgy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 20–45 (for the role of Elijah, see pp. 24–27; on liminality, see pp. 42–43).

The publication and distribution of the JTS Parashah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

There are several distinct covenants with God in the Tanakh, including with Noah and all humanity; with Abraham and his descendants; with the Jewish people through the giving of the Torah; with Aaron and his priestly descendants; and with David and his royal House.

And in our parashah, the (somewhat lesser-known!) covenant of salt:

וְכָל־קָרְבַּ֣ן מִנְחָתְךָ֮ בַּמֶּ֣לַח תִּמְלָח֒ וְלֹ֣א תַשְׁבִּ֗ית מֶ֚לַח בְּרִ֣ית אֱ-לֹהֶ֔יךָ מֵעַ֖ל מִנְחָתֶ֑ךָ עַ֥ל כָּל־קָרְבָּנְךָ֖ תַּקְרִ֥יב מֶֽלַח׃

You shall season your every offering of meal with salt; you shall not omit from your meal offering the salt of your covenant with God; with all your offerings you must offer salt. (Lev. 2:13)

The law here is clear: the grain offering and all other (i.e. animal) sacrifices have to be made with salt. The use of the word covenant (berit) is puzzling and an exploration of this phrase can teach us about the nature of covenants with God and beyond.

A similar phrase (berit melakh, rather than melakh berit) appears two other times in the Bible:

All the sacred gifts that the Israelites set aside for God I give to you, to your sons, and to the daughters that are with you, as a due for all time. It shall be an everlasting covenant of salt before God for you and for your offspring as well. (Num. 18:19)

Surely you know that the God of Israel gave David kingship over Israel forever—to him and his sons—by a covenant of salt. (2 Chron. 13:5)

Unlike in our parashah, in these contexts the subject matter isn’t about salt at all—so what is this “covenant of salt” in Numbers and Chronicles?

Ramban suggests on our verse in Leviticus that the phrase refers to the requirement for salt in sacrifices as a covenant itself, and that the other verses are compared to it to emphasize their long endurance:

“because there is a sacrificial covenant, the Torah also uses this covenant as a model for other covenants, as both the priestly covenant (Numbers 18:19) and the Davidic covenant (2 Chronicles 13:5) are called “covenant of salt” because they are upheld just as the sacrificial covenant of salt.” (Sefaria Community translation by Zev Prahl)

The notion of an enduring covenant—one that continues through the generations in particular—is important in both Numbers (where the verse specifically discusses Aaron’s descendants) and in Chronicles (where this is part of a demand by David’s great-grandson, Abijah, that a challenger submit to his authority). But it’s not immediately clear why this “covenant” of salt on sacrifices is so quintessentially enduring.

I suspect that as covenants broadly have a link to salt, the word “covenant” was added in Leviticus because the emphatic requirement regarding salt brought this link to the author’s mind. So, what is the connection between salt and covenants that endure? One quite intuitive suggestion is that it is due to salt’s preservative qualities. The Midrash on the passage from Numbers states:

“The covenant was made with Aaron with something that is not just healthy [i.e. resistant to decay], but maintains the health of other things.” (Sifrei Bemidbar, Korah, pis. 118, ed. Horovitz)

Similarly, on 2 Chron 13:5, the Metzudat David commentary of David Altschuler explains the phrase “covenant of salt”:

“The establishment of the enduring covenant [with David’s house] is like salt, in that it endures and does not rot.”

Salt is in fact mentioned in reference to covenants in several ancient Near Eastern sources beyond the Bible, and this may well be because “its preservative qualities made it the ideal symbol of the perdurability of a covenant.” (Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, 191)

Salt also played a less figurative role in some ancient covenants as it was a key ingredient in meals that were eaten on the establishment of a pact:

What is fundamental is that “the communion partaking of salt is a sign of friendship and a symbol of communality.” [from Wilhelm Rudolph’s  Handbuch zum Alten Testament volume on Ezra and Nehemia] The same was true for the Greeks and Romans. . . .

Binding mutual commitments result from the hospitality of table fellowship. … The “covenant of salt” transfers to the divine covenant the notion of hospitality associated with table fellowship, with its subsequent commitment to loyalty and solicitude; Israel is to keep its covenantal obligations, although God, too, is to provide for the election and rights of the covenantal partner  . . . . (Hermann Eising, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, s.v. salt)

Sitting down and eating a proper meal together (salt seems to make the meal “proper” in some of the ancient world) forms a bond. And it’s worth noting that the priestly families literally shared sacrificial meals with God! Biblical scholars often compare the covenant between God and Israel to political arrangements between leaders of greater and lesser powers. That kind of geopolitical framing can obscure the personal, even intimate nature of these covenants. (Indeed, political leaders today still have state banquets as acts of foreign relations.)

A kabbalistic connection between salt and covenant can also be found in Rabbenu Bahya (on Lev. 2:13), who conceptualizes salt as the product of sea water and the heat of the sun. Therefore,

“In the essence of salt is the power of water and the power of fire, which signify two of the [Divine] attributes on which the world is established: the attribute of Compassion (midat rahamim) and the attribute of Justice (midat hadin), and for this reason . . . it is called “the salt of your covenant with God” . . . . And just like [the Rabbis] said [in Midrash Bereshit Rabbah], God saw that it [humanity] could not endure with Justice [alone], so God combined it with the attribute of Compassion. Relatedly, salt preserves and destroys, it preserves meat for a long time and gives flavor to food, and it also destroys, as vegetation cannot grow in a place that is very salty.”

This commentary serves to highlight two important features of covenants: that they are very powerful forces, and that they must be held in balance to harness their forces for benefit and not for harm. The illustration given by Bahya is instructive: that God had to compromise on God’s initial plan to allow a place for humans in the world. The notion that both parties have to compromise in order to have a successful relationship is familiar from human relationships, but radical when ascribed to divine ones!

Covenant is a form of committed relationship—and the facets of the covenants revealed by the efforts of commentators traditional and modern to explain this curious reference in our parashah can be instructive to us as we think about the relationships in our own lives (including our relationships with God). How will we make them endure? Will they have impact beyond our own lifetimes? What intimate activities seal and reseal our commitments—especially during a time when physical proximity is limited? How can we keep them in balance and thereby harness their power instead of being consumed by it?

The Ben Ish Hai notes that there was a custom amongst the Jews of Baghdad to put salt on the dish that they used to gather pieces of bread whilst searching for hametz before Pesah. One of the reasons he suggests for this tradition is that it might be an omen for fulfilling this mitzvah for many years to come as the Torah refers to salt as an “eternal covenant.” (Halakhot, Year 1, Tzav, 6)

As we prepare for our upcoming sedarim, when we hope to sit down for a ceremonial meal together with some of those with whom we are in relationship, and as we continue to celebrate the ongoing relationship that God established with our ancestors, may we remember (perhaps as we taste the salt water) to reconsider, reseal, and strengthen all the covenants in our lives.

This commentary was originally published in 2020.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).