Leviticus A Holy Occasion There Will Be

Parashat Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23)

In the summer of 1852, Frederick Douglass, already a celebrated orator at age 35, was invited to give the keynote address at the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society’s Independence Day celebration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. Douglass, who began his life in slavery before escaping from a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, was the nation’s foremost abolitionist. He used the occasion of the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to confront America’s failure to live up to the vision articulated in its founding document: “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us,” he said near the beginning of his address. “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” Later, Douglass quoted the first chapter of Isaiah to excoriate the empty piety of America’s religious life: “When ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! When ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15).

This summer America will celebrate its 250th 4th of July, so Douglass’s speech was already on my mind when I read Parashat Emor this week. The parsha includes God’s instructions for when and how the Israelites should observe Shabbat and celebrate the major festivals and holy days of the Jewish year: Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur. “Mark, the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be a sacred occasion for you: you shall practice self-denial, and you shall bring an offering by fire to GOD” (Leviticus 23:27).

Holidays — including both Jewish and American — have many functions. They create a reason for loved ones to gather in community and mark our passage through time. They orient a community around its shared narrative. Through ritual and tradition, they translate that narrative into values and themes that define and reinforce the community’s self-conception. Thus, holidays can also surface the dissonance between a community’s values, which exist in the abstract, and its reality, which is born out in the lived experience of its members.

Centuries before Frederick Douglass was invited to speak to the abolitionists of Rochester, New York, our ancient rabbis incorporated Isaiah 57:14-58:14 into the Yom Kippur morning Haftarah liturgy. In this passage, the biblical prophet excoriates the ancient Israelites for the empty piety of their Yom Kippur observance: “Is such the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when God is favorable? No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke” ( 58:5-6). Rituals of Yom Kippur observance intended to draw the Israelites closer to the divine had been emptied of their meaning, for what could they gesture toward if God’s larger moral imperatives about how to treat workers and care for the suffering went unheeded?

Frederick Douglas, whose oratory helped power a movement for human liberation, followed in this tradition. More than quoting directly, he echoed and updated Isaiah’s message that July in Corinthian Hall: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity…your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”

Jewish holidays also function in part to emphasize this dissonance between ideal and actual. We build porous roofs over our sukkot, spill our crumbs into the river, set an extra plate and open the front door. In the moments of our greatest joy, we shatter glass. These rituals of rupture and disintegration allow us to confront the gulf between our noble aspirations and compromised reality. On other days our impulse might be to pretend the distance is short, but denying the vastness of this gulf does not bring us closer to our aspirations and instead only diminishes them. By their ritual design and very existence, our holidays force us to confront this contradiction.

111 years after Frederick Douglass’s remarks to the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, the writer James Baldwin published an open letter to his nephew reflecting on the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: “You know, and I know,” he wrote, “that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.” There is a gap between this world and the one we are capable of building and sharing and deserving together. And still, America will celebrate its 250th Independence Day in July, and about two months later, on the 1st of Tishrei, it will be 5787. There are many ways of marking time. The occasions we mark together each year, the religious observances and civic holidays, give our communities shape and meaning. They remind us that we are together on this journey, and that we have a long way to go.

Adam Zemel is senior story teller for the marketing department of Hebrew College. He holds an MFA in Fiction from UCRiverside, and his nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, Hey Alma, and elsewhere. This drash is adapted from his work as a contributing writer to the American Scripture Project.

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