Understanding Blasphemy, Knowing the Partial Truth of Another, D’var Torah 2019/5779 for Parshat Emor. Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herrmann
On June 12, 1945 in New York City, the Agudat HaRabbanim — the Union of Orthodox Rabbis in the U.S. and Canada — formally excommunicated Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism who founded the synagogue where I serve as rabbi. The rabbis publicly burned copies of his prayer book, because the prayer book contained changes to the liturgy that took out a personal Messiah, chosenness, along with a few other traditional principles. Admittedly, the prayer book was “racy” for its time. Unlike today where creativity abounds and almost anything can go into (or out of) a prayer book, Kaplan’s siddur was the first of its kind, radically challenging Jewish norms while maintaining traditional forms.
While opposition was inevitable, it is quite an image: pious men with beards over a flame burning his prayer book. It is especially shocking because those books contained the four letter name of God that is traditionally only buried; never thrown away. Kaplan was put in “herem,” charged with the crime: Liturgical Blasphemy.
This week’s torah portion continues the theme of holiness found in this section of Leviticus and spans a number of diverse themes. From the laws of the priests to the communal celebration of the core holiday cycle to the Ner Tamid, continual light. The torah portion ends, as is read in the triennial cycle of torah reading, with a strange and upsetting incident of the “blasphemer.”
The torah describes a child of mixed descent who blasphemes God and is to be stoned to death. The particular case lends itself to a greater principle and warning against blasphemy. It successfully intends to have the reader shaking in their boots a bit, considering their future words and actions.
As a modern reader, everything about the blasphemy passage in the torah feels profoundly troubling.
First: why single out the accused person is of mixed origin? What does sharing that information serve?
Second: there are no clear parameters set. We don’t have a direct quote from this man — to help guide us in understanding what we can and cannot say, what exactly is out of bounds. Are there certain words that are off limits? Or it is just a general act of cursing God? If the punishment is so extreme and the crime is so vague, how will we know if someone has had a hard day, is going through a spiritual crisis or is really placing God and the community in a space of existential threat such that we need to wipe them out so it doesn’t spread? It seems like the torah is setting up a crime that leaves too much power in the hands of potentially angry masses and creates very slippery slope.
Third, the violent and particularly brutal way of enforcing a rule against blasphemy feels like something that may be appropriate for Game of Thrones — but not necessarily our sacred text.
How are we to make sense of this passage about the blasphemer?
Jewish tradition teaches us that the torah is the beginning, not the end of the conversation, in our tradition. We understand the torah in light of the words on the page — and the ways in which those who came before us understood the text and adapted the text to their particular times and circumstances.
When we look at the way the early rabbis deal with their inheritance of blasphemy laws from our torah portion, we see that we were not the first group of people to be uncomfortable with the harsh treatment of a person who perhaps steps out of line and curses God.
Don’t get me wrong: the rabbis still upheld blasphemy as a major sin, saying it the rule to refrain from it applied to all people, not just Jews (see the Noahide laws). At the same time, they also sought to limit how we might enforce this prohibition.
In the mishneh, the earliest code of law and the basis for the Talmud, the rabbis say that the punishment of stoning a person for blasphemy only applies when they speak aloud the four letter name of the Divine, the Tetragrammaton.
In Jewish tradition, we are never to pronounce the Divine Name, made up of the Hebrew letters Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey. Instead, we replace the name for God with euphemisms, like “Adonai” — my lord or “HaShem.” Imagine that we have a secret code for being a member of the club — but we are not allowed to say the name of the secret code aloud — because if we do, we are out of the club!
The rabbis were likely uncomfortable with the slippery slope problem I mentioned earlier, and therefore sought to limit the scope of this difficult law. It is my understanding that they sought to ensure that people did not take the law into their own hands as they sought to build a more sustainable justice system.
It also seems to me that their decision to limit the application of physical punishment to a person who says the forbidden four letter name of God, that they were also making a profound statement (or at least we can interpret from them) about who truly is a blasphemer — and ultimately about holiness.
Let’s think for a minute: Who might be a person who would say God’s holy name out loud? Who might be the kind of person to breach this communal taboo?
It seems to me that it would be the kind of person who lacks humility, who sees themselves as special and more holy, above the crowd. This is a person who believes they have a direct line to God and that others do not. This is the kind of person who claims to know God and God’s wishes in a way that others to do not.
By limiting the punishment to a person who says the unsayable name of God, I believe that the rabbis were making a statement about what kind of speech and “spiritual attitude” is outside of the bounds of sacred community.
Reading the mishneh in this way, we arrive at a radically different understanding of what blasphemy is than our torah authors and thus what is considered “outside the bounds” within a community.
In this read, blasphemy is not simply questioning God or cursing what we might consider sacred.
Blasphemy is when a person speaks from a sense of holy superiority, surety in the face of the unknown, the Mystery. Blasphemy is when another person’s claim to religion and spirituality diminishes others’ claim to understanding and interpretation. Blasphemy occurs when a person claims exclusive knowledge of the Divine and even more so, oppresses or excludes on the basis of that superiority.
People like this surely lived in the age of the early rabbis, who were vying for authority and control in a new world of rabbinic Judaism. And we know there are people today who use their faith to claim that they themselves know what God wants and they themselves know that their interpretation of religion is the only correct one.
They are the people who claim to know that God wished and willed our current President to be elected. They are the people who blame tsunamis on homosexuality. And within the Jewish community, they are the ones who blame the most catastrophic events of Jewish history on the emergence and practice of Liberal Judaism.
There are those who won’t bake cakes for gay and lesbian couples because of their religious beliefs. Or those who employ women at their stores but refuse to allow medical coverage for things they themselves do not personally agree with. Or progressive religious people who tell Muslim women not to wear a hijab, explaining that it not “feminist,” when only a Muslim woman can know whether or not wearing a hijab speaks to their feminist or other sensibilities.
Returning to the original example of 1945 in NYC with the books that were the precursor to the ones we so freely hold in our hands this mornings — the real blasphemy in that situation is the fact that a group of rabbis claimed that another rabbi, whose works and ideas had influenced thoughts, was so far out of bounds that you would ex-communicate him and burn prayer books that possessed that most sacred name of the Divine — the name that cannot be uttered!
Now that we have arrived at a different notion of blasphemy, we must ask: What is the antidote to this kind of blasphemy, how do we address it in order to our make our shared spaces “holy spaces”?
I would argue it is through cultivating the value of “spiritual humility.” Spiritual humility acknowledging that especially in the world of the sacred, of Mystery and faith, that there is as much as we do not know as we do.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of CLAL speaks about this as being committed to seeing the “partial truth” in another’s spiritual claim. This requires us to actively seek out the “truth” even in what we might not agree with and to seek holiness in all places. He so beautifully says, “You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right.”
I am not saying there are no “lines” — there may be places and practices where we agree that a religious practice is being utilized to harm others and does not have this measure of “truth.” At the same time, this concept of spiritual humility teaches us a way of being in the world that we very much need at this moment, when people claim to know the truth with a capital “T.” It teaches us to investigate, learn about and be open to understanding the beliefs of others. And to embrace that doubt and “not knowing” is part of faith.
Leviticus, especially in this section, is about holiness. Not just holiness of the individual rather about upholding the holiness of the community. To have a sacred community — and I would argue a civil and open society — we do need to wipe out the kind of blasphemy that is in the form of “knowing” and “being sure” of what is right, what is the will of God. And we need to replace it with a humility that allows us to be open to the interpretations and experiences of other people. A humility that gives us the confidence in our personal beliefs without imposing them on others. This is how we make for sacred community.
Shabbat Shalom!
