Rabbi Dr Walter Rothschild
Beit Warszawa, 6th. March 2020 (Shabbat Zachor) – What does it mean to be a Priest? I am so glad that I am not one! As a Rabbi – a totally different concept of religious communal leadership – I am free to think for myself, to study and interpret texts according to my own best abilities and best conscience; I need to wear something that could be described as ”reasonably smart” to honour the occasions on which I officiate and to honour the congregation before which I stand, but there is no fancy prescribed uniform. To gain this status I have, it is true, to spend several years studying with approved teachers – that is to say, teachers approved by other teachers, teachers who are themselves respected by their contemporaries for their knowledge, their wisdom and their integrity, and it would be expected of me that I, in turn, should justify their trust in me by following their example and by setting an equivalent example for my own students, my own congregants, so that I become just one link in a chain of tradition. If I have deserved it, a hundred years or so after I have died people may still perhaps quote from one of my books or refer to one of my teachings – Who knows? I won’t be there to claim the credit. There are of course, as in all walks of life, potential dangers, potential temptations, there are others who compete with me, perhaps unfairly, following a different form of training, expressing different and even contrary views and interpretations, jockeying for positions, and in consequence rabbis do spend a lot of their time and energy arguing with or arguing against other rabbis, defending their points of view, defending their positions. But we are free to do so.
Contrast this with the Cohen, the Priest! In this week’s sidra ‘Tetzaveh‘ we read amongst other things how the Cohanim were born into their position, whether they wanted it or not; If your father was Aharon, then you and your three brothers were priests. You had no option. You would have to wear the most elaborate uniforms, gowns, turbans, breastplates, tunics, so-called ‘holy garments’ involving a lot of careful embroidery and the affixing of jewels and semi-precious stones, of gold and purple and scarlet, of twisted linen, which one could not keep clean because the job involved working as a slaughterman in what was a holy abattoir, slaughtering lambs and rams, goats and doves, scattering blood and ash all over the place. Naturally one had to wash and bathe regularly, one had to keep the incense burning against the stink and the flies. One had to wear chains and cords. There would be one High Priest and then a hierarchy of junior priests and, below them, the Levites whose task it was to do a lot of the manual labour (especially when it came to dismantling, carrying and re-erecting the entire tent complex at a new spot in the desert….. later on, when a fixed Temple had been established, someone had to keep it swept clean, someone had to check the maintenance needs and supervise the work, someone had to gather wood for the fires and remove the ashes and bones….. Someone had to collect the funds.) What was frightfully important was that you were NOT permitted to think for yourself, to take any short cuts, to deviate in any way from the ritual as laid down in the holy texts. God expected the same menu day in, day out, with extra portions on certain days, and essentially you were like the cook preparing the meals down on Earth to send up to Heaven when the time was right.
Shemot Chapter 28 comprises a long list of what had to be worn on specific occasions and by the specific High Priest and the other priests; Chapter 29 occupies itself with the formal ordination or dedication or ‘consecration’ of the Priests – there was little formal training, it seems, they had to learn ‘on the job’ and at least two of them made a fatal error while doing this.
Later we will learn the restrictions that the Cohanim will face, both when it comes to the choice of woman they may marry (it goes without saying, incidentally, that the Priests were all male!), how to punish their daughters if they go ‘off the rails’ (NOT a pleasant piece of Torah), how they must keep themselves ‘pure’ for their holy service, to the extent of keeping away from the dead except their very close own relatives; We will learn which bits of which sacrifices they may keep for themselves and their families to eat, their share which effectively forms their income. (A hint here – Life will be difficult if you don’t like roast lamb or braised mutton fat.) Even later in the Mishnah (Tractate Yoma, for example) we will read how the priests had to be kept fit for their work, kept awake the night before Yom Kippur to avoid any messy problems, taught how best to slaughter the sacrificial offerings, and more. They will have the duty of raising sons to take over their duties in due course. So much is laid down for them to observe and obey, affecting so many parts even of their private lives. And if you are not born into that family – you have no chance of joining.
The problem is in essence a very simple, fundamental one: The Priests are PEOPLE, they are human beings, not angels; their task is to act as intermediaries between ‘normal people’ and God, should the ‘normal people’ wish to bring a sacrifice or be commanded to do so, but they themselves share all the failings and weaknesses of all human beings; they can be subject to temptation, they can misuse their position (especially when it comes to neurotic, depressive women coming alone – as the sons of Eli did when the sanctuary was still in Shiloh) – they can be lazy, forgetful, tired, frustrated, they can be in a bad mood….. they can have worries regarding their marriages or their children, just like everyone else….. There is an attempt to make them into a sort of special caste, a special species, somehow superior to other human beings, but the reality is that they are not. In consequence they have to bring regularly their own sin offerings, their own acknowledgement that they are fallible, not perfect; they have to acknowledge that they are not worthy to perform their work – and then they have to do it anyway.
As we know, the early Church took over many of these concepts – many but not all; it is, for example, hard to create a hereditary dynasty when one is also compelled to be celibate! Nevertheless, the hierarchy, the extravagant costumes, the fixed rituals and fixed liturgies, the degree to which a priest is ‘cut off from normal life’ whilst at the same time it remains obvious that he (again, it is always a ‘he’ in the Catholic Church) is human and subject to weakness, sickness and mortality – so that one needs Homes for aged priests who have no family to care for them – we see many such parallels with the Cohanim of olden times. Every now and then a scandal emerges in which it turns out that a priest behaved more like a normal person than he is allowed to; every now and then a scandal emerges in which it turns out that another scandal was not allowed to emerge but was hidden or suppressed for as long as possible. But nobody is really surprised.
Well, for two thousand years or so Judaism has managed to continue without a Priesthood, without an altar or Temple or animal sacrifices. There are indeed still those who claim to be descended from the Aaronic line, the ‘Cohen‘ caste and there are even DNA research projects which seek to explore to what extent anyone’s longer-term ancestry can be demonstrated. There are people called Cohen and Cohn and Kochan and Katz (‘Cohen Tzedek‘), there are those who feel they are still forbidden to marry a divorcée or a widow, still forbidden to enter a cemetery at a funeral, still feel they are called upon to stand up at a service and, covered by their tallit and without their shoes, recite the ‘Priestly Benediction’, the Birkat Cohanim. Some still feel entitled to be called up first to an Aliyah for the Torah reading. For myself – I am happy to be who I am.
I was once visiting in a synagogue where the Gabbay came to me before the Torah service and asked ”Are you a Cohen?” ”Being a Rothschild is enough for me,” I replied…… I should have said, ”Being a Rabbi is already more than enough.” It is. Truly.
Shabbat Shalom. Rabbi Walter Rothschild.
P.S. Today is also ‘Shabbat Zachor‘ the Sabbath on which we remind ourselves – through an additional reading from Deuteronomy 29 – that whatever we do and wherever we go, there will always be ‘Amalekites’; this term referred originally to a specific tribe in the Sinai desert that attacked the Israelites just as they had crossed through the Sea but has come to mean everyone who, for whatever or for no reason, just hates Jews. Unfortunately such people never seem to go away, no attempt to cure this irrational hatred has worked until now – so we need to remember that……
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