Leviticus 12:1–15:33
This week's commentary was written by Dr. Alan Cooper, Elaine Ravich Professor of Jewish Studies and provost, JTS
This week's double dose of purity laws is unlikely to top anyone's list of favorite Torah portions. While the laws may be discomfiting and obscure, however, they also are fundamental to an understanding of biblical theology and anthropology, and they convey a message that transcends their particular details.
The priestly author of Leviticus marks the collection of laws in chapters 11–15 as a digression from the book's narrative flow. Next week's Torah portion begins with the words, "The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron" (16:1), picking up a thread that was dropped following the report of the young priests' demise in chapter 10. The intervening laws concerning dietary restrictions (chap. 11), childbirth (chap. 12), skin eruptions and related afflictions (chaps. 13–14), and bodily emissions (chap. 15) seem to stand outside the story time. In addition to their concern with purity and impurity, what those laws have in common is that they address the essential characteristic of human existence, the fact that we are embodied.
In traditional Jewish thought, embodiment and mortality are the principal factors that distinguish us from God. Unlike God, we must take in sustenance (chap. 11) and reproduce (chap. 12) in order to survive, and we inevitably experience physical corruption (chaps. 14–15) and death. Those are ingredients of our humanity, natural concomitants of our embodiment. We strive to constrain and control them and, once every year on Yom Kippur, we attempt to suppress them altogether in a ritual of disembodiment (Lev. 16:29–34).
Concerning God, in contrast, as the popular synagogue hymn Yigdal declares:
אין לו דמות הגוף ואינו גוף, לא נערך אליו קדושתו
God has no bodily form and is incorporeal; God's holiness is incomparable beyond measure.
Belief in an incorporeal God is the third of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles. In his "Laws of Repentance" (3.7), Maimonides condemns as a heretic anyone who conceives of God as having bodily form. He also devotes the first chapter of his Guide of the Perplexed to refuting the view that the references to the "image" and "likeness" of God in Genesis 1 denote God's physical body. (Ancient Near Eastern evidence, particularly a ninth-century Aramaic royal inscription from Tel Fekheriye, may argue to the contrary, but that is beside the point.)
Maimonides' insistence on God's incorporeality evokes an obvious question: if we rule out the possibility that God has any physical form, what does it mean for us to be "in the image of God" (Gen. 1:27)? Many commentators have proposed that the "image" connotes some nonmaterial divine quality or attribute that is essential to humanity, perhaps one that distinguishes us from other living creatures. For Maimonides, the distinguishing feature is the intellect, but that is only one of several possibilities.
Continue reading.
This week's commentary was written by Dr. Alan Cooper, Elaine Ravich Professor of Jewish Studies and provost, JTS
This week's double dose of purity laws is unlikely to top anyone's list of favorite Torah portions. While the laws may be discomfiting and obscure, however, they also are fundamental to an understanding of biblical theology and anthropology, and they convey a message that transcends their particular details.
The priestly author of Leviticus marks the collection of laws in chapters 11–15 as a digression from the book's narrative flow. Next week's Torah portion begins with the words, "The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron" (16:1), picking up a thread that was dropped following the report of the young priests' demise in chapter 10. The intervening laws concerning dietary restrictions (chap. 11), childbirth (chap. 12), skin eruptions and related afflictions (chaps. 13–14), and bodily emissions (chap. 15) seem to stand outside the story time. In addition to their concern with purity and impurity, what those laws have in common is that they address the essential characteristic of human existence, the fact that we are embodied.
In traditional Jewish thought, embodiment and mortality are the principal factors that distinguish us from God. Unlike God, we must take in sustenance (chap. 11) and reproduce (chap. 12) in order to survive, and we inevitably experience physical corruption (chaps. 14–15) and death. Those are ingredients of our humanity, natural concomitants of our embodiment. We strive to constrain and control them and, once every year on Yom Kippur, we attempt to suppress them altogether in a ritual of disembodiment (Lev. 16:29–34).
Concerning God, in contrast, as the popular synagogue hymn Yigdal declares:
אין לו דמות הגוף ואינו גוף, לא נערך אליו קדושתו
God has no bodily form and is incorporeal; God's holiness is incomparable beyond measure.
Belief in an incorporeal God is the third of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles. In his "Laws of Repentance" (3.7), Maimonides condemns as a heretic anyone who conceives of God as having bodily form. He also devotes the first chapter of his Guide of the Perplexed to refuting the view that the references to the "image" and "likeness" of God in Genesis 1 denote God's physical body. (Ancient Near Eastern evidence, particularly a ninth-century Aramaic royal inscription from Tel Fekheriye, may argue to the contrary, but that is beside the point.)
Maimonides' insistence on God's incorporeality evokes an obvious question: if we rule out the possibility that God has any physical form, what does it mean for us to be "in the image of God" (Gen. 1:27)? Many commentators have proposed that the "image" connotes some nonmaterial divine quality or attribute that is essential to humanity, perhaps one that distinguishes us from other living creatures. For Maimonides, the distinguishing feature is the intellect, but that is only one of several possibilities.
Continue reading.
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