Ajarei Mot 5776 - English

By Rabbi Daniel A. Kripper

Beth Israel - Aruba.

This Parashah presents very interesting and complex images.  

From the simplest standpoint, we can distinguish a common denominator in the text.  The Parashah highlights the topic of blood, both in ritual affairs as in family affairs and lineage. 

The ritual refers to the order of the sacrifices in the Temple, like we see it vividly described in the liturgy of Yom Kippur. 

When Aaron, the Cohen Gadol, enters the Sanctuary on the most important time of the year, he is not allowed to wear the essential ornamental clothing.  He is to wear simple clothes, like a penitent interceding for the entire people.  

From this we gather that all the transgressors, and consequently all the atonement sacrifices, have as an aim to mediate between the perfection ideal presented by the Torah and the reality of human nature. 

In the next sentence, the notion that blood is a forbidden substance is introduced, and that it must not be consumed because it is the essence of Life.  This is expressed in the ritual of preparing kosher meat by eliminating the blood before it is cooked. 

In another chapter, but no doubt linked to the one before, we find the banning of incestuous relationships.  A variety of blood relationships are excluded and forbidden.  

In Leviticus 18:2-4, the Children of Israel are instructed not to imitate the sexual practices of Egypt, from whence they came, or from the land of Canaan, to where they were going.  

The holiness of family must be preserved at all costs, and new kinships must be found outside of social group of origin; the rule will be exogamy instead of endogamy.  

Beyond the genetic reasons from modern science, we see here an opposite tendency to the Pharaonic family that sought to guard the purity of the lineage.  They married only within the family.  This Parashah leans towards the outside and to social leveling, as opposed to Egyptian nobility and their determination to maintain their titles and ancestry.

The ideal in the Torah of Moses is to preserve and protect the moral integrity and the ethic guidelines of the rising Hebrew nation. 

Blood is life and life should be sanctified.  Egypt represents not only physical slavery but also moral and human degradation.  

Time and again we are instructed to avoid the abusive and immoral practices of Egypt to be able to become “light for all the nations.”

Rabbi Daniel Kripper

Beth Israel Aruba