Emor: Space, Time, and the Kohen’s Encounter with Mortality

By Ben Rothstein

There seem to be several disparate sections of this parasha:

‎21:1-15‎​​ Restrictions on kohanim’s mourning practices

‎21:16-24‎​ Restrictions on kohanim with mumim (blemishes)‎

‎22:1-16‎​​ Restrictions on eating kohanim’s food

‎22:17-33‎ ​Further laws of qorbanot

‎23‎​​ Moʿadim

‎24:1-12‎​​ Requirements in the mishkan

‎24:13-23‎​ The meqallel

I’m not going to attempt here to link all of them together, but I will investigate what links the opening section, addressing the mourning practises of the kohanim (many of which are official codifications of Moshe’s instructions to Aharon following the deaths of Nadav and Avihu), with the main bulk of the parasha, the moʿadim.

In order to address this issue, we must find a precise definition of the term moʿed. Were I to ask the average person on the street, they would likely stare at me blankly because the average person on the street doesn’t speak English and certainly has no idea what a moʿed is. However, were I to ask a fellow Jew, who takes an interest in the Torah, said Jew would probably say that moʿed means a festival. One would be forgiven for such a mistake, given our parasha’s consistent use of the term to introduce the festivals. However, this does not explain the use of the term in the phrase ohel moʿed; it isn’t a festival tent like at Glastonbury, and so the definition of moʿed must be reconsidered. The ohel moʿed is frequently translated ‘Tent of Meeting’ and that’s a bit better, but in what sense are the festivals ‘meetings’?

To get a better view of the semantic field of the term moʿed, we can look the meaning of the cognate word in other Semitic languages. In Ugaritic, mʿd is an assembly; the Arabic mauʿid derives from waʿada, which means to promise, as does Old South Arabian mʿd. With this in mind, we can propose a definition of moʿed along the following lines: an agreed arrangement (between two or more individuals) to meet. This captures the idea of both an assembly (called together at an agreed time) and a promise (an agreement between parties, with a future date set for the upholding of the agreement). Reading that back into the Biblical Hebrew, we can understand what the term moʿed means for us. The ohel moʿed is an agreed place where God speaks to Moshe. The moʿadim are the agreed times in the year when Bené Yisrael meet with God. The English word ‘appointment’ captures both of these aspects nicely—an appointment can be made with regard to both place and time. By using the same word, moʿed, to designate both spatial coordinates and temporal coordinates, the Torah is treating spacetime as one entity.

Next, let us understand a little more about these ‘appointments in time’ with God. Interestingly, the section of the moʿadim begins with a description of Shabbat (Leviticus 23:3); thus all the moʿadim are framed under the paradigm of Shabbat. Shabbat is a day that is blessed and sanctified by God (Genesis 2:3), whereas the moʿadim are the opposite. Just as the ohel moʿed is a space carved out by humans for God’s presence (reciprocal to the space carved out by God for humans’ presence, AKA creation), so too the moʿadim are times carved out by humans for God’s presence to be near. The moʿadim are blessed and sanctified by humans, not God. The epitome of this idea is found in the Talmud, in the derasha presented by Ribbi ʿAqiba to Ribbi Yehoshuʿa: ‘“These are the moʿadim of YHWH, proclamations of the sanctuary, which you shall call” – whether [called] in their [correct] time or not at their [correct] time, I have only these moʿadim (Rosh HaShana 25a).’

The moʿadim encourage use to examine ourselves from a human, existential perspective. Taking Shabbat again as the paradigm, melakha is forbidden on both Shabbat and the moʿadim and so these days are days of restricted activity. The prohibition on ‘doing’ allows us to shift focus from ‘doing’ to ‘being’ (not to sound cliché, but we are human ‘beings’ not human ‘doings’). Each moʿed does this in a different way; for example, Pesaḥ prompts us to look at our autonomy (the better translation of ḥerut, rather than freedom), and our different expressions of it, especially through the prism of time by reclaiming the eating of bread that did not have time to rise. Sukkot forces us out of the permanent houses we have built for ourselves and into outdoor huts, bringing us back to our human nature (human < humus, adam < adama), and tells us to take some plants and simply wave them about because we are so happy in our human transience.

But what lies in wait for us, at the end of this human trajectory through time? The final appointment, the meeting that assesses our totality as human beings, the ultimate moʿed of death. I’m not just being poetic—the pasuq in Iyov’s parable, just before the interruption of Elihu reads:

כִּֽי־יָ֭דַעְתִּי מָ֣וֶת תְּשִׁיבֵ֑נִי    וּבֵ֖ית מוֹעֵ֣ד לְכָל־חָֽי׃​

For I know You’ll return me to death, the meetinghouse [beit moʿed] of all living things. (Job 30:23)

At the end of our lives, we leave the fabric of spacetime and our consciousness is called to its final reckoning. Now of course, this trajectory was set in place by the primal human, Adam HaRishon, by taking actions that made humanity mortal; therefore, to an extent, time itself is a consequence of Adam HaRishon’s error, and his being cast out of the Garden of Eden. By extension, beforehand, ‘time’ existed in a spatial sense, where the human could walk back and forth through time as it did through space (if that sounds confusing, then for a fuller exposition read Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids, where an event occurs that allows people to ‘walk around’ through time). Thus, is it any wonder that once Adam HaRishon is kicked out of the Garden, and the entropic clock of time begins, ticking away with all the ominous force of the second law of thermodynamics, that Adam seeks to return to the place that is moʿed?

‘He expelled [Adam] and brought him outside the Garden of Eden to Mount Moriah, for the gate of the Garden of Eden is next to Mount Moriah. From there He took him, and to there He returned him… as it is said, “to work the land whence he had been taken”.’ (Pirqei DeRibbi Eliʿezer 20).

The future site of the Temple, the permanent ohel moʿed, is a familiar place for Adam HaRishon, and in his returning to it, it reminds post-exilic Adam of his former relationship to time, now preserved only in his relationship to space. In fact, the ohel moʿed provides a refuge even from death itself. A kohen, and in certain cases a non-kohen who flees from a king, or from an exceptional ruling of the court, to the altar in the Temple, is thereby saved (Mishne Tora, Hilkhot Roṣeyyaḥ 5:12-14). This ohel moʿed harks back to the Edenic immortality, in contrast to Iyov’s beit moʿed lekhol ḥay.

And so what better context in which to situate the laws of mourning pertaining to the functionaries of the ohel moʿed itself than here? Immediately after the laws of the spatial moʿed, immediately before the laws of the temporal moʿadim. When death does come to call, how must those who form part of the very essence of the ohel moʿed itself relate to it? Since, in this place, expressions of death are antithetical, the kohen gadol, representative in the extreme of the ohel moʿed, may not observe even the smallest aspect of mourning, and in fact may not even leave the ohel moʿed! He is an integral part of its functioning, and death has no