This week’s Torah commentary, written by Rabbi Jonah Rank, Rosh Yeshivah of Hebrew Seminary, has been sponsored anonymously.
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The joke usually goes something like this:
A congregant, sitting in the office of his rabbi, bangs his fist on the table and demands, “Make me a kohen!”
“I’m sorry,” replies the rabbi. “I can’t do that.” After all, the request is absurd. Doesn’t he know that being a kohen just passes genetically from father to son?
The congregant repeats his request but raises his voice just a little more this time. The rabbi doesn’t budge. This pattern repeats several times—with the congregant increasing his volume each time. After a few hopeless minutes have passed, the rabbi notices the congregant pull out his checkbook and, with pen to paper, announces, “This check for $50,000 will pay for some much-needed repairs around this building and will convince you to make me a kohen.”
The rabbi, detesting any form of bribery or dishonesty, calculates that a donation of this sort could be used to a significant cause and declares, “By the power invested in me as the rabbi of this congregation, I hereby pronounce you a kohen.”
At last, the congregant sitting across from the rabbi, breathes a sigh of relief, ekes out a “thank you,” pulls his chair back, stands up, and slowly makes his way to the exit.
But just before the congregant crosses into the doorway, the rabbi calls for the congregant’s attention. “Before you go,” the rabbi asks nervously. “Can you please explain to me why becoming a kohen is so important to you?”
The congregant exhales and suddenly looks vulnerable—pensive, and even a bit sentimental. “Rabbi, I’m not sure if you’d understand,” he responds. “My father was a kohen, and so was his father, and so was his father.”
The contemporary Jewish community reserves very few unique privileges for kohanim (the descendants of Israelite “priests,” including the first High Priest, Aaron) or other Levites (descendants of the Israelite tribe of Levi). Certain traditional (and many traditional-leaning) Jewish communities designate a few special roles in the prayer service for kohanim (most commonly, offering the congregation blessings based on Numbers 6:24–26; and being called up to recite a blessing preceding and following a service’s first Torah reading). These communities assign a similar (but lesser-ranked) array of service honors for the remaining Levites (namely, washing the hands and feet of the kohanim before the kohanim bless the congregation; and being called up to recite a blessing preceding and following a service’s second Torah reading). Though these honors may seem small in the grander scheme of Jewish life, knowledge of one’s own (or one’s neighbor’s) Levitical or priestly lineage greased the wheels of the engine of Jewish prayer for centuries. In 1913, the Reform Jewish philosopher Rabbi Dr. Kaufmann Kohler (born in 1843 Germany, died in the United States in 1926) painted this picture (in an article where he argued that calling up to the Torah a youth upon becoming a bar mitzvah—or anyone else—was a backward practice):
To be sure, it was a grand and glorious privilege of each individual member of the Congregation to be called up—like the priest, the Aaronide and the Levite, the original teachers of the Israelitish community—to read aloud from the Book of the Law and thus be made the participant of the great spiritual heritage of the people of God. Let me say… that the seven men called up each Sabbath to read from the Law were, in my opinion, originally none other than the seven principal men of each town… who being familiar with the whole Law and otherwise the true representatives of the community sat on the platform of the Synagogue, having at least one Aaronide and one Levite endowed with the rights of priority in their midst. (See CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly, vol. 23, pp. 170ff.)
Suffice it to say, the modern appeal of egalitarianism tended to eliminate or to diminish recognition of priestly or Levitical lineage in liberal (and many liberal-leaning) Jewish communities. After all, in 1885, the American Reform Movement in what has since become called the “Pittsburgh Platform” (named after the place where the series of principles earned denominational approval) equated the entirety of “the Jewish people… as the priest of the one God.” If the entire enterprise of the Jewish people constitutes the entirety of Jewish priesthood, being a descendant of Aaron or any of his fellow Levites would be only a matter of genetic, but not spiritual, dispute.
Nonetheless, the narrative of our people recounts time and again the burden of the Levites. Whereas all other Israelite tribes were assigned portions of the Land of Israel to inhabit, the Levites received no such inheritance from God (other than God, or at least service to God, standing in as some kind of inheritance). (See Deuteronomy 10:9 and 18:1–8.) Presumably to counteract the dreadful thought of unhoused Levites, the Book of Numbers records God’s command that each Israelite tribe donate portions of their own land for the Levites and that the Levites be allowed to live in cities of refuge designed for those who committed manslaughter (chapter 35). With such precarious living conditions, the divine message put into Moses’ mouth in Deuteronomy 12:19 seems perfectly apt:
הִשָּׁ֣מֶר לְךָ֔ פֶּֽן־תַּעֲזֹ֖ב אֶת־הַלֵּוִ֑י כׇּל־יָמֶ֖יךָ עַל־אַדְמָתֶֽךָ׃
Be yourself forewarned lest you abandon the Levite during all of your days upon your land.
To appreciate the full power—and pitfalls—of this allegedly eternal plea has demanded that Jewish readers interpret and then reinterpret these words time and again. In the first half of the 1st millennium C.E., a rabbinic book called Sifrey Devarim uplifted from this verse the Torah’s urging our concern for the Levite “כׇּל־יָמֶ֖יךָ” (kol yamekha, “all of your days”). The author of this ancient collection understood that this law would remain operative “אפילו שמיטים ואפילו יובלות” (“even [during] sabbatical years and even [during] jubilee years”) (74:8). In other words, supporting the Levites would remain a social responsibility even in whole years when Jews might otherwise relax certain other debts and monetary dues. (Compare Leviticus, chapter 25.) The very civilization that birthed the Levites as an institution imagined that the hardships of the Levite were designed to last eternally.
According to the biblical scholar Rabbi Dr. Jeffrey H. Tigay (1941–present), the era when Deuteronomy’s words were first written on parchment coincided with an era when—as per II Kings 23—Jewish priests and other Levites were either asked to serve alongside other Levites in Jerusalem (if any jobs were still available) or, worse, slaughtered. Grounded in a “scroll of the Torah” (סֵ֧פֶר הַתּוֹרָ֛ה, sefer hattorah) that the priest Chilkiyyah claimed to have found (in II Kings 22:8), many of the reforms that King Josiah instituted (as recalled in II Kings 22:1–23:28), resemble laws appearing in no book of the Torah other than Deuteronomy. (Compare, for an example of Rabbi Tigay’s understanding, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy on Deuteronomy 17:6–8, pp. 171–172.) Most pertinently, Deuteronomy introduces a stipulation that there would only be only one place to offer sacrifices (such as in 12:1–8). Levites with neither homes nor jobs seemed bound to enter an inescapable cycle of poverty.
In the year 70 C.E., however, everything that the Jews knew about economics would change. Upon the Romans’ destruction of the Jews’ second Temple in Jerusalem, the Jews would disperse across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Like all Jews with tethered connections to the Temple, the Levites had to reinvent themselves, not necessarily as a group, but blending in just a bit more with the remnant of the Jews who had to make due as minorities with limited rights. Diasporic Jews no longer related so easily to Deuteronomy 12:19’s warning that we be concerned for the plight of the Levites. In medieval France, the rabbinic commentator Rashi (c. 1028–1105) noted the force of the words “עַל־אַדְמָתֶֽךָ” (al admatekha, “upon your land”) and taught, “בגולה אינך מזהר עליו יותר מעניי ישראל” (“in exile, you are not forewarned [to watch] over that [Levite any] more than [the rest of] the poor of Israel”). Nearly a millennium later, the pioneering Israeli religious Zionist educator Rabbi Asher Wassertheil (1921–2008) attested in his book Birkat Asher:
מעולם לא ראיתי שמישהו ישים לב ללוי יותר מלישראל בכל הנוגע למתן צדקה. ולכאורה צריך לומר על זה ״האידנא״ כשמקורות הפרנסה שווים לכל.
I have never seen anybody devote more attention to a Levite more than to someone [born of any other tribe of] Israel when giving tzedakah (צדקה, “righteous charity” [to those in need]). In light of this, one needs to say [that the Torah should have used the word] “now” [in reference to the law warning us to be careful not to abandon the Levite]; [this law cannot apply] when [access to] sources of income are equal for all.
It is true that, as categories, neither the descendants of Aaron nor the larger tribe of Levites today feels the burden of unemployment on account of the shut down of illicit altars or the hardships of homelessness in light of having never received a portion of the Land of Israel. (Individual Levites certainly feel other kinds of hardships nowadays—but not for the reasons mentioned above.) Rather, we know that the humble origins of the kohen and the Levite alike define for us a mitzvah that was once imagined to be interminable—because the suffering of this holy family seemed interminable.
Jews today should understand that the command that we not abandon the Levite now unfolds for us to reveal two deeper messages. First, we—like Rashi, Rabbi Wassertheil, and dozens of rabbis in between them—should feel compelled to consider what is now an effectively nonexistent plight of the Levite, so that we may then immediately shift our attention towards others who are in far deeper need. Second, Jewish ritual life invites both the kohen and the Levite to participate in unique rituals that, when enacted, should remind us of the historic reality of Levites of the past—that their ancestors’ dedication to their faith Divine drove them far apart from reliable incomes or housing. Sacralizing time and space for those who dedicate themselves so wholly to such holy and noble matters intertwines our experience of the sacred with our conception of the ethical.
A Levite is inherently no holier than any other Jew, but the Levite does carry a collective history to which we can point and from which we can draw inspiration. Neither the happenstance of genetics alone nor the specificity of the patriarchal line through which men pass Levitical status onto boys (and just boys) should impress us. Instead, we should direct our hearts to this interweaving of coincidence, history, and our moral conscience. Through this fabric made of Jewish materials—through witnessing (or even being) anyone who identifies as a kohen or Levite participating in Jewish life—we recall that Judaism constitutes both a sacred gift to God and a plea for the betterment of humanity.
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