Disability and the Celts - Emor - Mythic Torah

Nuada Silver-Hand

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Emor, the 8th reading of the book of Leviticus, that includes further instructions for the Priests as well as the major festivals of the Jewish year.

As a religious Jew, and particularly as a future rabbi, I come to the Torah looking for wisdom and guidance. I expect the Torah to speak to me with a voice of holiness and divinity, a voice that calls me to be better than I am.

But there are sections of the Bible, and the Torah in particular, where this set of assumptions is hard to maintain, where it is very difficult for me to see the perfect voice of holiness that I look for.

Emor contains one of those sections.

After beginning with instructions about the Priests avoiding dead bodies, God gives Moses instructions about priests with physical disabilities:

From the Deep - Leviathan in Jewish Tradition - Genesis 1

Arthur Rackam, 'Leviathan'

21] And God created the great taninim, and every living creature that creepeth, wherewith the waters swarmed, after its kind, and every winged fowl after its kind; and God saw that it was good. 

כא  וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֶת-הַתַּנִּינִם הַגְּדֹלִים; וְאֵת כָּל-נֶפֶשׁ הַחַיָּה הָרֹמֶשֶׂת אֲשֶׁר שָׁרְצוּ הַמַּיִם לְמִינֵהֶם, וְאֵת כָּל-עוֹף כָּנָף לְמִינֵהוּ, וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים, כִּי-טוֹב.  


Welcome to the first blogpost of "From the Deep" a series of short thoughts and reflections on Leviathan in Jewish tradition, starting from the Bible and then spreading forward (and even backward) in history.

We begin, as all things do, with Genesis 1, in which God creates the world through speech over the course of 7 days.