This week’s Torah commentary, adapted from a commentary written in 5785 by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored anonymously.
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There is a joke that is commonly told of a man who demands that his rabbi turn him into a kohen (a descendant of Aaron and his family of ‘priests’ in the ancient Israelite temple in Jerusalem). The rabbi expresses his discomfort with declaring him a kohen; the rabbi knows that this sort of title only comes about genetically and patrilineally only—passed on from father to son. Finally the rabbi asks the man to explain why he wants this so badly, and the man yells at the rabbi his response. “My father was a kohen, and so was his father, and so was his father!”
Jews today reserve very few privileges for kohanim (the plural of kohen) and leviyyim (members of the Levite tribe from which the kohanim came). Certain traditional or traditional-leaning communities designate special roles in the prayer services for kohanim—most commonly, offering the congregation blessings based on Numbers 6:24–26; and being called up to recite a blessing before and after a service’s first Torah reading. These communities assign similar honors for leviyyim: 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.
Are these honors so precious? Writing in New York in 1913, the German-born Reform Jewish philosopher Rabbi Dr. Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926) once argued that calling up to the Torah a youth upon becoming a bar mitzvah—or anyone for that matter—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… 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 diminish recognition of these lineages in liberal Jewish communities.
Still, 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 only inheritance the Levites received from God was service to God, or in other words, employment without housing benefits. (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.
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 during years when Jews might otherwise relax certain other debts or even ownership of property. (Compare Leviticus, chapter 25.) The very civilization that birthed the Levites imagined that the Levites’ hardships would last eternally.
According to the biblical scholar Rabbi Dr. Jeffrey H. Tigay (1941–present), the era when Deuteronomy’s words were first put to 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. (See Deuteronomy 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. When the Romans destroyed the Jews’ second Temple in Jerusalem, the Jews would disperse across Africa, Asia, and Europe. 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 warning us to worry about 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.
Neither kohanim nor leviyyim today feel the burden of unemployment on account of the shutdown of illicit altars or not being assigned land some 3,000 years ago. (Individual kohanim and leviyyim 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, in the present day, 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 nobody else) 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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