Laying Hands on the Head of the Blasphemer: A Cautionary Tale of Immigrant Injustice

Parashat Emor 5777 / 13 May 2017

Shabbat Shalom. I want to thank our bat mitzvah this morning, Ella Ward for a wonderful d’var Torah that prepared us for the Torah reading, bringing our attention to the verse from Leviticus, Chapter 24 calling for an equal standard of justice for the Israelite and the stranger alike. Ella, your words were thoughtful and inspiring, and an apt opening to our Sanctuary Shabbat.

מִשְׁפַּ֤ט אֶחָד֙ יִהְיֶ֣ה לָכֶ֔ם כַּגֵּ֥ר כָּאֶזְרָ֖ח יִהְיֶ֑ה כִּ֛י אֲנִ֥י ה’ אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

“You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike,

for I the Lord am your God.” (Leviticus 24:22)

This verse is directly preceded by five verses that call for retributive justice for serious violations of civil law, crimes that include murder and causing a person or an animal major injuries. In this localized context, our verse seems to be a technical point of clarification- the preceding laws shall apply to anyone, regardless of the status of the victim or perpetrator’s citizenship.

To understand the deeper import of this verse, we’ll take a broader look at its context.

First, though, I want to look at the words geir and ezrach, which are generally translated as ‘citizen’ and ‘stranger’ respectively. Some bibles translates geir as ‘sojourner,’ which is a more literal translation that captures the aspect of the geir not having always having lived in this place. Both stranger and sojourner focus exclusively on the geir’s current status, and essentially erase her past circumstance. A third translation of geir suggested by bible professor Frank Spina.^[1] According to Spina, based on Near Eastern evidence, geir is a person who has left her place of origin because of social or political upheaval. This category certainly includes refugees and asylum seekers, but it also include many immigrants. As for the word ezrach, translating it as ‘citizen’ is problematic, since it has for us political implications absent from the Torah. A better fit might be ‘native born.’

Expanding our view to the verses before and after those we’ve been exploring, we see that these verses are stuck in the middle of the narrative of a man who blasphemes and was stoned to death for it. In verse ten we read that  “The son of an Israelite woman went out, and he was the son of the Egyptian man among Israel.” (Leviticus 24:10)

 

The man gets into a fierce argument with fellow Israelites and in the heat of the moment he blasphemes the name of God.  Those who witnessed the scene bring him before Moses to be judged. God’s verdict is that all who were there shall “lay their hands on his head” and the entire nation shall stone him to death.  (24:11-12)

This story is difficult in many ways, including the fact that blasphemy would carry a death sentence (which is a discussion for another time.) Why did this man instigate a fight, and why does the Torah need to tell us that he was the son of a Jewish woman and an Egyptian man? The paucity of information in the presentation of this story leaves us searching for answers. Into the void steps the midrash (Leviticus Rabbah 32:3) which presents a version of the events leading up to the fateful fight. This ben ishah Yisraelit, this man whose mother is an Israelite from the tribe of Dan, attempts to pitch his tent in the tribe’s quarters, the midrash says. The men of the tribe of Dan will have no part of it. They reject him, saying that, since tribal affiliation is determined through the father, he has no place amongst the tribe of Dan. From the verse’s formulation, this ben ishah Yisraelit clearly identifies as an Israelite like his mother, and he is living among the Israelites. Still, his fellow kinsmen are unwilling to accept him. According to the midrash,  The ben ishah Yisraelit takes his case to Moshe, seeking out empathy from another Jew who himself grew up as an outsider in Egypt. However, Moshe rules in favor of the tribesmen of Dan. In his anger the ben ishah Yisraelit, reacts by blaspheming God’s name.

It was grave sin. It was. And yet, can you imagine what his experience was in this moment? How dejected, how exposed, alone and desperate he must have been? He had tied his fate to his God and his people and both had effectively turned him out. Respectfully, I find it hard to blame him for having a crisis of faith and responding as he did. Though I understand the severity of his crime, given the circumstances I find his death sentence deeply upsetting.  I am not excusing his crime–after all, the ben ishah Yisraelit violated the prohibition of desecrating God’s name, a law stated explicitly just a few verses earlier. But I am upset by the community’s shunning of someone not entirely like them.  And so is the Torah, it seems.

The blasphemer’s punishment is unusual. “Let all those who heard place their hands upon his head,” says God, “and let the entire congregation stone him.” My colleague Rabbah Sara Hurwitz picks up on the  gesture of laying of hands, the smicha, and sees in it a parallel to other acts of smicha. On Yom Kippur, for example, the High Priest places his hands on the scapegoat, transferring Israel’s iniquities onto its head, before it is sent to perish in the desert (Vayikra 16:21-22).  “The people who witnessed the blasphemer, most likely the very people who banished him from their midst, were obligated to atone for their lack of compassion by means of smicha,” Rabbah Hurwitz writes. “The ben isha yisraelit died for his transgression, but he also became the scapegoat, sent to his death because of the sins of his neighbors.”^[2]

At this point, the story takes an unexpected turn. God tells Moses what the punishment will be (Lev. 23:13-14), and then God continues. Moses is to deliver a message to the people of Israel. He is to remind the people of the severity of causing death or bodily harm to another (15-21). It is in this context that our verse appears, demanding that we must treat the other with respect and compassion and the full protection of the law, whether we consider the other to be “one of us” or an outsider.

In this context, our verse serves as rebuke for the Israelites and Moses alike, especially given that the chapters to come focus sharply on our responsibility to those most in need and exposed, defenseless and vulnerable. Based on the midrash I see this as a cautionary story illustrating the steep price of failure to meet the great moral challenge presented only a few chapters back.

In chapter 19, verse 18, we read of the obligation to love one’s reah, one’s neighbor, or kin, or fellow members of the covenant as oneself, ve’ahavtah. More so than for many other verses of the Torah, rabbis have for millennia worked themselves into a tizzy trying to understand the nature of this commandment. For more on this, you can read Rabbi Freidman’s words from last week. For now, though let us say simply that the verse obligates radical responsibility to one’s fellow.

And yet only a dozen or so verses later the Torah comes and tells us that that obligation of ahavah, of radical care and responsibility, is now extended to include those who are not part of the kin-group but live among you. Whatever you owe to those around you who are insiders, you also owe to those who are outsiders.

Using Spina’s translation of geir, verses 33 and 34 read:

These two mitzvot remind us, as my teacher Rabbi Shai Held points out, that “ethnic lines matter but they are not the last word in ethics.” Of course we are going to love those close to us differently than others, but our moral responsibility extends well beyond our inner circles or even the lines of citizenship. This is “one of the greatest moral challenges of the Torah, and it is nothing less than a moral revolution.”^[3] 

Over and over again the Torah brings us the formative experience of our people: we were strangers in the land of Egypt. To this experience there are two possible responses: The Torah could have said, “For hundreds of years, no one did anything to help you, therefore to heck with them, you don’t owe anybody anything.” The other option is to say, “you were strangers, therefore you must spend your life cultivating solidarity with and empathy for those who no one lifts a finger for.” As Rav Shai puts it, we all have both voices in us, but the Torah commands us to cultivate one impulse rather than its partner in crime. It demands of me to take my own suffering and use it to generate a sense of responsibility to respond to the suffering of others.

The Israelites who rejected the ben ishah Yisraelit failed to understand this bedrock principle of the Torah, and they are condemned for it.

This moral stance that the Torah demands of us is not always natural for us, it’s not always easy. When the Torah was received, this principle was revolutionary, and it still is today.

In the Ancient Near East, kings were held responsible for the fate of widows and orphans. Only in the Bible is the category expanded from our vulnerable to the vulnerable outsider- the geir. Furthermore, the responsibility shifts from the king to each one of us. It is a radical move, and is central to our theology.

Today, this Sanctuary Shabbat, we will have a chance to explore what it looks like to live this theology today? Later today, after kiddush, we’ll hear from folks working together in an interfaith coalition for immigrant justice- Reverend Adan A. Mairena, pastor of West Kensington Ministry, a diverse Presbyterian church; Blanca Pacheco, a community organizer and Assistant Director of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, an interfaith, multicultural immigrant justice movement organizing communities to end injustices against immigrants, regardless of status, and Egina Manachova, a founding member of Kol Tzedek Synagogue’s New Sanctuary Movement committee. We will also hear for Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney about what Philadelphia’s status as a sanctuary city means, and why he is willing to fight to keep us a sanctuary city. At this time, it is my honor to invite to our bimah the Executive Director of New Sanctuary Movement Philadelphia, Peter Pedemonti to share with us how his own faith motivates his work.

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