Shabbat shalom…
THE book of Leviticus or Vayikra, the middle book of the torah relays laws primarily, and very few stories… and none of them is a particularly happy story…
Once upon a time, while we were wandering in the wilderness, between Egypt and Israel, a man, an unnamed man, the son of an Israelite mother and Egyptian father, gets into a fight with an Israelite man, and as a result, the man curses God’s holy name in front of a whole lot of people. Everyone is shocked, they don’t know what to do, so they drag the man to Moses, who tells them to keep him confined while he consults God. God’s decree is death. And everyone who heard the curse is called upon to participate.
It’s a pretty gruesome story.
And it raises all sorts of questions. Through the centuries, our best minds have looked at this story, and tried to fill in the holes.
For example,
While we don’t know the men’s names, we learn the man’s Jewish mother’s name was Sh’lomit, the daughter of Dibri, from the tribe of Dan. Why do we get this detail and what does it mean?
Who was the man’s Egyptian father and should we care?
What were the two men fighting about?
How did the man curse God?
And of course, what is so bad about cursing God that you would deserve the death sentence and why would everyone who heard it have to participate?
Right before we read this little story, we learn about the showbread, the 12 loaves of challah baked for the sanctuary. Keep that little detail in mind…
What do we learn from the mom’s name? According to Rashi, the great medieval French commentator, her name which means Shalom, the daughter of “I speak”, was an incessant talker, who constantly greeted people with the word, Shalom, and kept going. And clearly, her father was also a talker. And the tribe of Dan was known for being an argumentative group…
What do we learn from the fact that his father was an Egyptian? According to one midrash, his father was the Egyptian taskmaster that Moses had killed before he escaped to Midian, long before he returned to lead us to freedom. Imagine the kind of grudge this might have caused in the son. Another midrash, told by Rashbam, Rashi’s grandson, teaches us that the Eygptian had left when we left and converted to Judaism. But he did not have a tribe. So two opposing ideas. Which one works for you?
The not having a tribe was a big deal, because those were the beginnings of our neighborhoods. We camped according to our tribe, but only according to our father’s tribes. We followed a patrilineal line then, and so this man had no place to be. Imagine what that must have felt like… Always the odd man out, the only one, the other, the one who probably got teased, picked on, maybe bullied. In those days, who your daddy was mattered mightily.
What were the two men fighting about? The rabbis have a number of answers. Including the showbread, the 12 beautiful loaves of challah. One said the unnamed man was upset that the challah were all made on one day, to be used throughout the week: he thought it was a sin that God’s bread should get stale, while another noted that one of the many miracles of life in the wilderness was that the bread did NOT go stale…
But I think, especially since the Torah didn’t tell us about the fight, it could have been about anything: what they were wearing, who said what to whom, who got to play with what toy when, or who got to go first in some game, or who got to decide what to eat that night. Or who controls the remote? Or who cleans up after dinner? Or how you fold the laundry? Do you ever have fights like that? Later on, you think they don’t really matter that much, but boy, did you get worked up over it! In the scheme of things — not so important, but at the moment – it seemed vital to your very being…
So they fought. Over the sanctity of the bread, or over the miracles or over something really unimportant.
I imagine the son of Shlomit to be someone who was always harrassed, never fit in, never felt accepted. And one day, this day, something just snapped. He thought life was horrible, all of existence conspired to make him miserable.
Now the curse… The rabbis discuss this — in the 10 commandments we are told not to take God’s name in vain. So we’re not supposed to say what everyone nowadays seems to say, or even write as an abbreviation – OMG – oh my… gosh… but God has a lot of names in the Torah – some of them are Elohim, El Shaddai, Av Harachamim… And then there’s the one we pronounce Adonai, from the letters yud hay vav hay. It’s called a fancy name, the tetragrammaton – which is Greek for 4 letter word. It’s a word that is a form of the word “to be” – which means he will be, he will become, he is, he has been. All of existence is wrapped up in that word and that name. We don’t even know how to pronounce it anymore – that’s part of why we say Adonai, which means literally, my lord or my master… It was thought to be very dangerous to say this. Also, one’s name, especially God’s name, was thought to be about your essence: and God’s name, God’s – about being and becoming, is about existence itself…
So imagine that the unnamed man cursed this holy name that holds all of existence in it. It’s even worse than telling your mom you hate her, especially right before mother’s day. It’s even worse than gossiping: it’s like saying you want the whole world to be destroyed…
So imagine you are Moses in charge of this whole large group of people who already complain a lot. Here is this guy – whose father you may or may not have killed, who hasn’t found a place in your community, this holy community you are working so hard to form, and build… and now this guy threatens existence itself… and everyone’s heard him! You don’t want everyone to think this is a way to behave… so everyone has to deal with it…
I’m going to say that death is a pretty harsh punishment. Period. but I can see the importance of us all recognizing how important our words are. How words probably made this man feel hopeless and small and angry. And how words bring worlds into creation and how they can bring worlds into disaster… How words can bully, words can hurt, words can heal.
So always think before we speak… so that we choose our words wisely and well, and strengthen our community rather than harm it.