Emor
Leviticus 21:1–24:23

By Jen Smith

There’s a peculiar rhythm to this week’s Torah portion, Emor.

It opens with the laws governing the Kohanim (priests), including laws for who they can marry, what to do after becoming ritually impure, and how to maintain a heightened standard of holiness. It is a detailed and exhaustive (almost exhausting!) list of objectives to accomplish in an already brutally rigorous job.

And then, suddenly and without warning, the Torah pivots, and we are no longer talking about who or what is holy – we’re taking about when holiness happens.

אלה מועדי ה׳…These are the appointed times of God… (Lev. 23:2)

The calendar unfolds before us: Shabbat, Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot. And poof! Just like that, sacred time enters stage East. And honestly, this narrative shift feels oddly relatable.

None of us are Priests, and neither do many of us live lives of consistently elevated sanctity. Most of us are regular people trying to remember where we put our keys, or what to pick up the kids, all while trying to remember who we are.

Emor seems to acknowledge this. And thus, we learn that holiness is not only reserved for a spiritual elite; it is built into the architecture of time itself.

There’s a subtle but radical idea here: Judaism does not expect us to be holy all the time. Instead, it asks us to step into a state of holiness at specific moments.

Shabbat arrives every week because time itself has been sanctified, not because we’ve earned it.  And the festivals of Jewish life return year after year, not because we are deemed spiritually ready, but because the calendar insists that we show up anyway.

The Torah reminds us that we don’t have to feel holy, we just need to keep our appointment.  (Which, frankly, feels very comforting, because if holiness depended on our moods, we’d all be in trouble.)

Mystics take this a step further.

In the language of the Zohar, sacred time isn’t just commemorative, it is also reactive. The same spiritual energy that once flowed into the world during a particular moment in history becomes available again each year when that moment returns. In those terms, Passover is not just a memory of liberation; it is liberation itself reopening. Shavuot is not simply the anniversary of some ancient revelation; it is revelation, reoffered. Time, in this model, is not a straight line moving forward. It is a spiral.

As human beings, we circle back each year, though never to the exact same place. We return older, wiser, and maybe a little more tired, but we also return more capable of receiving what we couldn’t receive before.

So why begin with the priests at all? Because Emor is making a quiet but powerful move.

It starts with a model of concentrated holiness, contained, guarded, and fragile, and then it expands outward. From the Temple, to the calendar. From the few, to the many. From space, through time. Holiness becomes portable. We don’t need to be in a sacred place. We need only to be in sacred time.

And then, just when we’re getting comfortable, Emor ends with a jarring story:

A man blasphemes the Divine Name, and the response is swift and severe. At first, it feels out of place. But maybe it’s not.

Because if time can be sanctified, then language can be desecrated. If words can create sacred reality, they can also fracture it. And in a world where holiness is no longer confined to a Temple, speech becomes one of the primary tools through which we build, or break, the sacred. The rabbis of mystic Judaism would caution us against thinking of words as just sounds. They would remind us that our words are vessels for divine energy.  What we say matters. Deeply.

There’s something almost funny about the Torah’s expectations here. It tells us to Be Holy. Also, do not speak destructively, keep track of a lunar calendar, and to count 49 days with intention. It’s a lot.

Which is why Emor offers us a workaround: We don’t have to master holiness. Each sacred moment is a gate through which divine light flows again into the world. The question is not whether the light exists, it is whether we are willing to step into it. And maybe the deepest wisdom in Emor is that we needn’t change ourselves to encounter the sacred. We need only to show up to meet the sacred at the right time.

Shabbat Shalom!