Oasis Songs: Musings from Rav D
Friday, May 16, 2025 / 18 Iyar 5785
Summary: Do ordinary people seek holiness, or does that require a special personality? Is holiness reserved for a special class of people, or do we ensure that everyone has access to it? Holiness may not be the sort of social good we normally think about when we consider other needs such as access to food, shelter, or health care, yet reflecting on it reveals how well society addresses the needs of the marginalized.
Reading Time: Six minutes
Parashat Emor 2025
It was 1998, and I was working for Rabbi Alan Lew in San Francisco shortly before beginning rabbinical school. Congregation Beth Sholom, where he served, was an urban synagogue. This meant that an unusual coterie of individuals would knock on the doors seeking a meal, a conversation, or sometimes something more.
One day, two young men in their twenties appeared while Alan was visiting incarcerated Jews. One of the men was more disheveled in appearance; he exuded a sense of unease, maybe even shame. The other approached me, wanting to know if they could spend time in the chapel. “My friend,” he confided, “needs to make a promise before the Torah.”
In today’s more security-conscious world, a synagogue guard might not have allowed them entrance, but this was a different era—one in which the idea of the synagogue as sacred refuge outweighed security concerns. Even so, the office staff asked me to make the judgment call. I looked at them both, paused, and then led them to the small chapel where the daily minyan was held. I stayed at a distance as the unkempt man unburdened his heart in front of the aron kodesh, the holy ark.
Who knows exactly why they came? It seemed clear that the young man had stumbled—perhaps drugs or sex had ensnared him. Maybe he had burned a relationship to the ground, hurting someone he loved. Two things became clear to me that day. The first was that this single foray in front of the Torah was unlikely to resolve the man’s life challenges. Change rarely happens in an instant. The second insight was more visceral: more than anything, he craved contact with the holy. He needed to feel that a higher dimension of life was still accessible to him, even in his lowly state.
Few of us are immune from moments like this. I once had a conversation with an older congregant who had lived a mostly carefree life for seventy years until the chronic pain of illness forced him to seek God through a series of poignant questions. We all need to reach toward something beyond us.
I never learned what became of that young man in the chapel—whether he found a better path or slipped back into the same patterns. But for fifteen minutes on a cold San Francisco morning, he touched the holy. He was given a chance.
So often, we don’t give people that chance.
Parashat Emor presents us with an unsettling truth: priests with physical blemishes are barred from serving in the Temple. Modern readers, steeped in ideals of equality and inclusion, recoil from the notion that physical condition could disqualify someone from spiritual service. Shouldn’t holiness transcend the body? Shouldn’t spiritual worth be determined by the soul, not by visible traits?
But beneath our discomfort lies a deeper and more enduring tension: how do we honor the sacredness of every human being while still aspiring toward the highest levels of spiritual excellence? In our drive to make holiness more inclusive, do we risk erasing the space for the kind of greatness that is necessarily rare—and, by extension, necessarily exclusionary?
Jewish tradition, and the Torah itself, offer two primary models of holiness: one as dynamic process, and the other as a fixed state.
The first model, rooted in the ritual categories of tahor (pure) and tamei(impure), reflects holiness as a fluid, reversible condition. Touching a corpse, giving birth, or experiencing illness renders someone temporarily impure; during the week or so of this impurity, they are prohibited from entering the holy precincts. One need only wait, immerse in a mikvah, or undergo ritual, however, and the doors to sacred participation reopen. This model is deeply compassionate; it sees human vulnerability as normal and creates pathways of return.
The second model, however, is unyielding. The priesthood is a hereditary sacred status, one that no amount of personal piety or moral greatness can attain if one has not been born into it. Even among priests, those with physical blemishes, such as blindness, lameness, or similar disfigurements are permanently barred from performing sacrificial service. This vision of holiness is structural, embedded in roles. Not everyone belongs to every role.
Together, these models offer a profound theological anthropology: holiness is both accessible and fragile. Everyone may draw near, but not everyone may enter. And while everyone is called to strive, only some are appointed to serve in specific holy ways.
This leads us into parallel territory with Christian theology, which also wrestles with human limitation and divine holiness. In much of Christianity, especially post-Augustinian thought, human beings are seen as ontologically fallen: incapable of saving themselves without God’s grace. Judaism resists this notion. It sees human beings not as depraved, but as vulnerable by design. We are not fallen—we are fragile. Our path to holiness is not blocked, but hard-won through covenant, effort, teshuvah, and ritual renewal.
This understanding is deepened by the work of Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, a scholar and theologian who lives with cerebral palsy. Belser critiques religious models that tie holiness to perfection, whether physical or spiritual. She insists that the divine image is not reserved for the unblemished or the strong. In Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole, she explains that much of her disability isn’t in her physical condition, but in how the structures of society limit and exclude her.
Her work affirms that holiness is not about overcoming weakness; rather, it is about carrying it with dignity and recognizing its sacred presence within ourselves and others. (https://www.juliawattsbelser.com/book-excerpt) This vital correction—this insistence that holiness is not reserved for the able-bodied or the self-controlled—must not erase the call to aspiration.
Judaism has always balanced compassion with challenge, inclusion with inspiration. Not everyone is Moses. Not everyone enters the Holy of Holies. The tradition leaves space for the tzaddikim, the prophets, the sages, the spiritual athletes who climb to spiritual heights that most of us only glimpse. Their excellence is not elitism—it is a beacon.
The analogy to sports is instructive. We rightly celebrate inclusive spaces like the Special Olympics, which affirm the dignity of every participant. But we also celebrate the Olympics themselves: a realm of rigor, refinement, and rare achievement. Both have their place. Dignity is non-negotiable. But excellence is still real and necessary.
In religious life, this tension lives as well. If we flatten all distinctions in the name of inclusion, we risk forgetting the power of greatness. We lose our reverence for the spiritually luminous, and we deny ourselves the inspiration to strive toward it.
A mature theology of holiness must hold both truths:
- That every human being, however wounded or wandering, is beloved and belongs.
- Also, that some human beings, through a combination of grace, devotion, and sacrifice, rise, with their ascent being a gift to the community.
Holiness without compassion becomes cruel, shutting out those who carry the marks of life’s wounds. Holiness without aspiration becomes shallow, severed from the soul’s longing for transcendence.
Parashat Emor confronts us with the cost of purity models tied to physical perfection. It also refuses, however, to let go of the idea that there are spiritual heights worth climbing. Judaism, at its best, calls us to cherish both the broken and the radiant, the struggling and the soaring. The sacred journey demands both: a home for every soul, and a horizon toward which every soul can yearn.
The real test of our theology is not in what we proclaim, but in whom we let in. That young man who came into the chapel disheveled and trembling wasn’t the kind of person we usually imagine when we talk about holiness. In fact, in many religious communities today, he wouldn’t have made it past the front door. His presence would have felt disruptive, even threatening.
Yet, for a brief moment, he was drawn to the ark like a Kohen to the altar or a moth to the flame. He approached it not as someone entitled, but as someone desperate to reconnect with the sacred. And in that moment, he may have stood closer to God than many who sit comfortably in pews week after week.
Our inclusive rhetoric often falters precisely when tested by the truly marginal. Moreover, our reverence for spiritual greatness often becomes shallow when we forget how much it costs. If we create communities that are safe, polished, and equal, but no longer capable of recognizing either radical holiness or the raw ache for it, then we will have lost something essential.
In the end, holiness cannot be tamed. It lives in the structured rituals of the priests and in the trembling prayer of the penitent. It shines in the excellence of the tzaddik and flickers in the fragile yearning of the broken. Our task is not to erase difference, but to make space for all of it: to remember that sometimes the most sacred moments come when we least expect them, and come from those we least expect.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rav D
Shabbat Table Talk
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