Why Can’t a Lame Priest Serve in the Temple?

This week’s Torah reading, concerned mainly with regulations governing the Temple service, forbids any member of the priestly caste with a physical deformity (e.g., lameness, blindness, or a lazy eye) from performing the sacrificial rites, although he is nonetheless eligible to a share in tithes. Reflecting on the sharp discordance between this law and modern sensibilities, William Herlands writes:

It’s hard to imagine that the same God who is venerated by the Psalmist as “the father of orphans, the champion of widows” would reject the ritual service of [a disfigured priest]. Indeed, Moses is referred to as having “uncircumcised lips,” which the midrash . . . explains is a physical disability that made it difficult for him to speak. Yet Moses served God with unparalleled intimacy, and the Talmud states that God initially desired that he be the first High Priest.

Perhaps we can approach this tension by examining a parallel law with respect to animal sacrifice. In Leviticus 22 the Torah forbids sacrifices of disabled or disfigured animals [referred to with the same Hebrew term used to describe disqualified priests]. . . . The Torah fears that people will view sacrifice as a means of ridding themselves of a burdensome beast. Left to market forces alone, people would bring sacrifices from old cows that cannot produce milk or injured goats that cannot be sold at market.

Similarly the Torah is concerned that without a clear place in society, people may relegate the disabled to the Temple. The disfigured were an unsettling enigma to ancient (and even modern) eyes. We can imagine the desire to remove them from the community and hide them away in the sanctuary, assuaging our lingering guilt with the thought that their tasks are sanctified. . . .

Instead, the Torah requires us to embrace the disabled into society.

Read more at Bronfman Torah

More about: Leviticus, Priesthood, Religion & Holidays, Temple, Torah

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF