Emor | Caste

וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה אֱמֹר אֶל־הַכֹּהֲנִים בְּנֵי אַהֲרֹן וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם לְנֶפֶשׁ לֹא־יִטַּמָּא בְּעַמָּיו׃ 

Eternally Present said to Moses: Say to the priests, the sons of Aaron, say to them: For a (dead) person among his people, one is not to make oneself tamei...

Leviticus 21:1 (Tr. Everett Fox)

 וְעַל כָּל־נַפְשֹׁת מֵת לֹא יָבֹא לְאָבִיו וּלְאִמּוֹ לֹא יִטַּמָּא׃ 

[The priest] shall not go in where there is any dead body; he shall not make himself tamei himself even for his father or mother.

Leviticus 21:11

In Leviticus, Tamei, dualistically translated  as “impure,” or “unclean,” is a response or reaction to strong physical-spiritual experiences such as contact with death, menstruation, childbirth, and male ejaculations. The priest is vulnerable to additional categories of tamei, related to the duties of the priestly caste. Tamei separates us from kedoshim, holiness, the connection for which Eternal Presence brought us out of slavery.

The tamei-causing experiences are physical events so strong they shake up the world as we have so far experienced it. They bring potential for new identification and new life, such as becoming a mother, father, woman, man, orphan, widow, widower. At the same time, if we become completely consumed in new potential and identification, we lose connection to our source and what we have touched before.

At times in my life when a new identification has arisen — mother, grandmother, orphan — I needed tamei- time to integrate the experience and grow strong in my new role. Torah creates this integration space and time by declaring the person not "ritual ready," not ready to participate in personal and collective rituals and acts that are crucial for the survival of the community.

And I regularly need retreat and reflection time so I don't become totally consumed in the roles, so I don't lose myself in the expectations and limits of the roles. Tamei-time is a time-out space, an opportunity to experience and process transitions and strong physical events within the fabric of society. In Torah, the whole purpose of the society being constructed is so we will know the One Source and keep Oneness at the center. If we don't have time, space and capacity to process and integrate new experiences into our lives, we become over-identified with the new state, or we are so full and distracted that we don't take it in at all, and miss growth and enjoyment.

Either way, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we miss our appointment with life. We become attached to an identification that separates us from the essence of who we are.  When we humans are lost in strong physical and emotional experiences, we create narratives and adopt strategies based exclusively on immediate survival. We forget our deeper spiritual knowing and aspirations.

This is how ancestral trauma gets registered in us and how we perpetuate it. Something physical or emotional overwhelms us. It lodges in the physical body and gets frozen, with no space or time or accompaniment to process it.

The Caste System

In dualistic readings and interpretations of Torah, these states are considered negative states, often used to justify patriarchal control of women and racist domination of other peoples. Tragically, interpretations of the laws of "purity and impurity," tamei, in the Torah, have been used by the Nazis and US slave owners and segregationists, and even some religious Jews to justify hatred, submission and murder.

In Germany, the Nazis banned Jewish residents from stepping onto the beaches at the Jew' own summer houses, as at Wannsee, a resort suburb of Berlin, and at public pools in the Reich. "They believed the entire pool would be polluted by immersion in it of a Jewish body," Jean Paul Sartre once observed.

...in the early 1950s, when Cincinnati agreed under pressure to allow black swimmers into some of its public pools, whites through nails and broken glass into the water to keep them out. In the 1960s, a black civil rights activist tried to integrate a public pool by swimming a lap and then emerging to towel off. "The response was to drain the pool entirely," wrote the legal historian Mark S Weiner, "and refill it with fresh water."

— Isabel Wilkerson, Caste

Words are Windows or Words are Walls

Our challenge today is to use Torah to dismantle patriarchal, xenophobic, and racist systems of domination. Just this month, the state of Georgia in the US passed a law prohibiting distribution of water to people waiting on line in the hot Georgia sun. Waiting on line for what? To vote. Where is the outcry from the preachers and teachers who look to Torah for guidance? It surely was in response to this sort of racist cruelty that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, when he marched with the African American community in Selma, Alabama, “I felt as if my feet were praying.”

These are the historic origins, the pillars upholding a belief system, the piers beneath the surface of a caste hierarchy. As these tenets took root in the firmament, it did not matter so much whether the assumptions were true, as most were not. It mattered little that they were misperceptions or distortions of convenience, as long as people accepted them and gained a sense of order and means of justification for the cruelty to which they had grown accustomed, any qualities that they took to be the laws of nature.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste

How do we get to the "piers beneath the surface of a caste hierarchy" that exists today to protect the domination of one group over another? Clearly thorough systemic change and transformation of the thinking that supports domination are both needed.

With Nonviolent Communication and Buddhism, we listen to hear words as windows that open us to our own and others' hearts. The Buddhist world view abandons any duality that might lead to devaluing one life over another. We inter-are: my freedom is ties up in your freedom. My safety in your safety. My dignity in your dignity.

Neither Defiled nor immaculate,

Neither increasing nor decreasing

These concepts exist only in our mind.

The reality of interbeing is unsurpassed.

Plum Village, France

Nonviolent Communication includes taking responsibility to transform our own thinking from patterns that separate us from other's humanity. We shift to thoughts and communication that connect. Marshall Rosenberg often said, words are windows or words are walls. We practice with everyday communication to help us recognize how violence manifests in our own thinking. This is not to underestimate how violence and discrimination are embedded in and reinforced to serve the systems of power and domination. Rather, it is to empower us to be more effective in creating the change we want to see.

Words Are Windows (or They’re Walls) 

I feel so sentenced by your words,
I feel so judged and sent away,
Before I go I’ve got to know,
Is that what you mean to say?
Before I rise to my defense,
Before I speak in hurt or fear,
Before I build that wall of words,
Tell me, did I really hear?
Words are windows, or they’re walls,
They sentence us, or set us free.
When I speak and when I hear,
Let the love light shine through me.

There are things I need to say,
Things that mean so much to me,
If my words don’t make me clear,
Will you help me to be free?
If I seemed to put you down,
If you felt I didn’t care,
Try to listen through my words,
To the feelings that we share.

—Ruth Bebermeyer (frequently sung by Marshall Rosenberg)