At our Passover seder, we take turns reading the paragraphs of Maggid. Each participant around the table reads a paragraph, in whichever language they wish, from whichever edition of the Hagadah they select from our collection or bring with them. There is always a fraught moment when we get to the four children. Nobody wants to read the “wicked child” because, obviously, if you read the “wicked child’ paragraph…you are the wicked child. Or so it seems to many at our home over the years.
But, in truth, within families and within our places of work and within our communities we do get labeled. Maybe not as “the wicked child” but certainly as “the troublemaker” or “the quiet one” or the “hard worker” or the “thoughtful one.’ (Isn’t it interesting that smart man and wise guy mean very different things?)
Our Torah portion should make us think of labels too. Years ago my teacher Rabbi Dov Linzer noted that in places where the Torah speaks about processes and events and circumstances, rabbinic literature speaks about proper nouns and identities. This shift is fairly comprehensive, it occurs for a very good reason, and it has consequences which are not entirely positive.
Let me try to explain from the end of the story and work backwards. Rabbinic literature is populated by people with a distinct halakhic status and unique sets of rules and regulations that govern what they can eat and where they can go and to whom they can be married: a kohen gadol, the high priest, may not marry a widow, a kohen hedyot, a “regular” kohen is allowed to marry a widow and he can also eat terumah. A nazir may not enter a cemetery. An eilonit, a woman with a certain endocrine disorder, is exempt from the mitzvah of yibum. And, based on this week’s parashah and next week’s parashah, we have the metzorah and the nidah and the zav, among others. Each with their own status, each with associated prohibitions, and each with unique ways of regaining their purity.
The Oral Torah is occupied with presenting detailed guidance for every facet of life. And, like every legal system, it develops its own internal language that can be deployed to define and give parameters for all of life’s complexity. In this regard, Halakhah as it emerges from the Oral Torah is no different from any legal system in its dependence on clear definitions of circumstances and of people so that mitzvot can be fulfilled and prohibitions avoided.
But the Torah itself, the written Torah, is not a self-sufficient code for how to live. Instead of code-like straight letter law, the written Torah tells stories and describes circumstances. The written Torah alone can never be a stand-alone source for what to do and so the written Torah does not have to be as precise or comprehensive in delineating a status or defining terms. In the written Torah, even common words can have multiple meanings. For example the word “Shabbat” in the Torah means “Shabbat” except for the phrase, וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמׇּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת in Parashat Emor, describing the mitzvah of Sefirat HaOmer in which case, our rabbis taught us, the word “Shabbat,” in its context, means “Pesach.”
In place of using a status, the Torah describes a process. And so in our parasha we read about אִשָּׁה כִּי תַזְרִיע וְיָלְדָה זָכָר the woman who has given birth to a male baby and we read about אָדָם כִּי־יִהְיֶה בְעוֹר־בְּשָׂרוֹ שְׂאֵת אוֹ־סַפַּחַת אוֹ בַהֶרֶת a man who has on his body a rash or swelling or discoloration. Rabbinic literature just speaks of a “yoledet” or a “metzorah.” In next week’s parashah we do read about the “metzorah” but in place of the zav, zavah, and nidah with whom we are familiar from rabbinc literature, we read instead וְאִשָּׁה כִּי־תִהְיֶה זָבָה דָּם a woman from whom blood is flowing – and similar language for all the other people described in the parashah. The Torah describes a natural phenomenon and does not name a status.
This is uncannily familiar and contemporary. We are often taught to avoid labels that can flatten someone’s identity or stigmatize them and instead describe what has happened to them. And so, to take one example from this past week’s newspapers, we are told to avoid referring to “homeless people” but instead refer to “people experiencing homelessness.” And so on for various attributes or circumstances or disabilities that can become labels which could stigmatize. The Oral Torah needs labels in order to codify law in a rigorous way; the written Torah avoids them.
I thought of labels this week in an entirely different context because for many of us, the identity that defines us most significantly is our national identity. Almost every human being alive today lives in a nation state and 200 years ago nobody did. We lived in empires or city-states or kingdoms or as members of indigenous tribes. The division of humanity into nations is so ubiquitous that we can take it for granted but, with just a little bit of introspection we should realize that every human being has many allegiances and identities that overlap and sometimes reinforce one another and sometimes pull against each other.
The wave of terrorist vilence in Israel this week can be understood using simple labels of national identity. Once again, eleven innocent Israelis have been murdered by Palestinian terror in three deadly attacks in the spate of a week. But digging just a bit deeper we see that two of the victims were Ukrainian and not Israeli (how tragic that they sought safety in Israel and were killed in cold blood). One of the victims was a member of Israel’s Druze minority. One of the victims, Seargent Amir Khouri, a police officer who was fatally shot as he subdued the gunman who attacked Bene Berak was himself a Palestinain Christian from Northern Israel who had described himself, in his own words, as a “proud Palestinian,” and this week was refered to as a “gibor” a great hero who died “al kiddush Hashem” by the busloads of Orthodox Jews from Bene Berak who traveled to the Galil to honor him at his funeral. Just before Shabbat I read that the street where he was shot will be named after Amir Khouri. If you’ve been to Bene Berak you know that all of the streets named after people are named after rabbis. It will now be rabbis and Amir Khoury. The doctor on call at the hospital in Tel Aviv where Seargent Khouri died, the man who had the grim responsibility of reporting his death to the press, is himself an Arab citizen of Israel, as are a disproportionate number of doctors and nurses (professions that seem to attract minorities all over the world).
This complicated mess of identities is the result of the great triumph of modern Israel and its relative success building an open and diverse society where refugees and immigrants want to move and where people of diverse religious and ethnic and national identities want to serve others as physicians and s police. We honor the dead by noting all of the components of their identities.
We honor one another by celebrating and never forgetting one another’s individuality. Law has to assign labels and determine the status of every person and every situation. But not all human interactions should be primarily legal interactions.
At the seder we remember identities that are ancient but that need reinforcement. Hayav adam lirot et atzmo – each individual must see himself or herself as though he or she personally has left Egypt. My father was a wandering Aramean refugee who settled in Egypt and was enslaved there. Had God not taken our ancestor from Egypt we ourselves and our children and our children’s children would still be subjugated to Pharaoh in Egypt.
Afilu Kulanu Hakhamim, Kulanu Nevonim, Kulanu Yodi’im et HaTorah – even if all of us were wise and scholarly and knew the Torah, we would still be obligated to tell the story. We might not be so wise, but at the seder, just about everyone there already knows the story. And so we take on the identity of a wise person who knows the Torah who is nonetheless fulfilling the mitzvah of asking questions and answering them to reinforce our identity as Jews who have been redeemed by God’s outstretched arm.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 