Our parasha today details the requirements for cohanim, priests, to be fit to officiate in the sacrificial cult and to partake of the sacred offerings. Just like the animals that were offered had to be perfect, so too, the priest himself had to be unblemished. He wasn’t permitted to serve if he had any kind of physical defect, if he came into contact with the dead, or if he married a divorced woman or a harlot.
You might find it troubling that the cohanim had to be “perfect.” Doesn’t it contradict other teachings in the Torah such as the notion that all people are created in the image of God or last week’s parasha that commands compassion and respect for the deaf and blind? But here we’re instructed that anyone with a disability is disqualified, that anyone with a blemish, a scar, a broken bone is unfit. How do you make sense of this? Why can’t the cohanim touch real life experiences like death, divorce, disability?
Maimonides explains in the Guide for the Perplexed (3:45): “the multitude does not estimate man by his true form but by the perfection of his bodily limbs and the beauty of his garments.” The sanctuary and the Temple were to be revered and respected, and the masses would only find acceptable beautiful, handsome, perfect people with nice clothes. So if the priest wasn’t perfect, the people might think that the Temple and God might not be perfect, either.
We might find this outrageous, but is it really so different than today? We expect our leaders, our politicians, our candidates to be perfect. We look for their flaws, we analyze their every word, their clothes, their relationships, and if, God forbid, their blemish is too great, then they, like the priests, are disqualified from service.
But who is perfect? Who hasn’t touched death or divorce? Who doesn’t have a defect of some sort? It’s a wonder that any priests were able to serve! And they didn’t even have Botox and Rogaine back then!
Over the years, Judaism has evolved, and our thinking about “perfection” has evolved as well. With the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the sacrificial cult gave way to rabbinic Judaism. And the rabbis valued leaders for their imperfection! The rabbis say in the Talmud: “One should not appoint anyone as leader of a community, unless he carries a basket of bugs around his neck.” What does that mean? Contact with impure creatures made a person impure. Bugs: It’s the same word in our parasha for what renders a priest impure. The rabbis wanted leaders who were open and honest about their impurities and imperfections, who wore their flaws around their necks. That’s quite different than expecting the priests to be perfect.
The rabbis also tell a story about the Messiah:
One rabbi, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, is meditating, and he has a mystical experience in which he encounters the prophet Elijah. He asks Elijah: How will we know who the Messiah is? Elijah’s answer: he will be sitting at the gates of the city, among the poor and the sick, untying and tying the bandages of his own wounds.*
Humans are not perfect, the world is not perfect, and so the Messiah can only be someone who himself is wounded, blemished, in touch with the brokenness of the world. And Unlike the priest, who must marry a virgin, the messiah is a descendant of King David, whose lineage is created by one sex scandal after another (I won’t go into detail. You’ll have to read the juicy parts on your own).
The rabbis’ point is: perfection is not important or real, for that matter. What is important is being honest about our human flaws and blemishes, so that we can become not perfect, but whole. The priest, it seems, had to create a façade that the world is perfect, but the Messiah must personally know imperfection so that he can bring healing and redemption to a broken world.
What does this mean in our lives? This past Thursday night, we had the first Public Action of the Marin Organizing Committee, of which Kol Shofar has been a part since its inception. Many of you were among the over 600 people in attendance. Some of you were among those who spoke out about issues of concern to our community: seniors, teens, mental health services, emergency shelter, the hazards of the Redwood Landfill, immigration, affordable housing. It was an amazing evening and powerful expression of civic involvement and communities coming together to organize for change. Rabbi Stacy Friedman spoke about how we like to think that Marin is perfect: the perfect scenery, our perfect homes, our perfect cars, our perfect children who get in to perfect schools. But there is a reality that is far from perfect, and only when we are honest about that, can we begin to make the desperately needed changes.
This past week was also Yom Haatzmaut, Israel’s Independence day. Our celebration of Israel as the Jewish state, long yearned for, miraculously created, has become more complex over the 60 years of Israel’s existence. Some have given up on the Zionist dream because of the disappointment that Israel isn’t as perfect as we had hoped it would be. Like Maimonides said about the priests, only what’s perfect and unblemished is acceptable to the masses. But if we expect Israel, like anything else, to be perfect, then our only choices are (a) to put up a façade of Israel based on romantic feel-good images or (b) give up on Israel for failing to be perfect in 60 years.
The rabbis imagined the imperfect Messiah, the wounded and bandaged Messiah, because of the hope that redemption can come out of brokenness, not out of perfection. Israel has its blemishes and challenges, along with its beauty and miraculousness, and by facing the complexities, we can do the real work that leads to messianic redemption.
Jewish thought has evolved as we humans have evolved. There was a time when perhaps we expected the cohanim to be perfect because that allowed us to believe that the world must be perfect, too. But we learned that the world is not perfect and neither are we, neither is Marin County, and neither is Israel. And God forbid one would read this parasha and conclude that our flaws render us unfit for divine service. Actually, it is the opposite: it’s acknowledging our imperfections that allows us to do divine service, that is, the work of healing and redemption.
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* I want to thank Estelle Frankel for pointing me to this Talmudic text from Sanhedrin 98a in her book Sacred Therapy, p. 166.
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