Emor: Why Does Creativity Need Boundaries? | Into The Verse Podcast

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Into The Verse | Season 1 | Episode 6

Emor: Why Does Creativity Need Boundaries?

Parshat Emor includes a familiar passage known as the parshat hamo’adim – the section of the Torah that describes all of the Biblical holidays. But there are two major interruptions in this passage, two things that just don't seem to belong.

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In This Episode

Why are they invading the holiday section of this parsha? As it turns out, these two “interruptions” may be the key to understanding what Jewish holidays are really all about. 

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Transcript

Imu Shalev: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha … diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

Hi, I’m Imu Shalev. This week’s Torah portion is Emor (except in Israel, where it’s Behar). Right in the middle of Parshat Emor, there’s a passage that lists all the mo’adim – God’s “appointed times” in our calendar – starting with Shabbat and going on to Pesach and all the other holidays. It’s a lovely little section of text that happens to be the Torah reading for Sukkot and Pesach, as well as my bar mitzvah parsha – I was a “bo bayom'' on Sukkot. Because we read it so often throughout the year, it may feel very familiar. But, as usual here at Into the Verse, Rabbi Fohrman is going to ask a few questions about this holiday section of the Torah. And he’ll focus on that which is not familiar, those strange parts of the holiday section that seem to stick out like sore thumbs… what’s that doing in the holiday section? And as usual, those things that stick out will be key to helping us understand what Jewish holidays actually are, and what sense of spirituality or meaning they’re meant to foster in us. Here’s Rabbi Fohrman.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Hi everyone, this is Rabbi David Fohrman, and welcome to Aleph Beta. So I want to talk to you today about the Korban HaOmer – the Omer offering. Now, the Omer offering shows up smack dab in the middle of what's known as parshat hamo'adim – the section of text within this week's parsha that lists the various holidays. Right in the middle of that, we're told about this offering called the Omer that's supposed to come from barley, and until that offering is brought, you aren't supposed to eat from the new harvest of that year (in Hebrew, that's known as chadash). So what that means is that whatever grain is being harvested in the early part of the spring from the new year, you're not allowed to actually eat any of that grain until the Omer offering has been brought.

Interruptions in the Parshat HaMo’adim

Now, the question is: What exactly is this doing in the parshat hamo'adim? Technically speaking, it doesn't really seem to be a holiday. It seems to be invading the parshat hamo'adim. For that matter, there's another non-holiday event in the parshat hamo'adim, and it's the laws of leket and pe'ah. Now, these are the laws that dictate that you shouldn't reap all the wheat from the corners of your field; you should leave those for the poor, and if there's some gleanings that are left on the ground as you begin to harvest the wheat, so you should leave those for the poor also. So these are very nice laws, but they're not really attached to any particular moment of the calendar either, and they're not holidays, so what's Omer doing here, and what's the laws of leket and pe'ah doing here?

A Dispute About the Omer Offering

For good measure, let me just throw in another question here about a technicality having to do with the Omer, which is: When exactly is the Omer offering brought? It says that it's supposed to be brought מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת – which literally means “the day after the Sabbath.” So the question, of course, is: The day after which Sabbath? I mean, there's a lot of Sabbaths during the year. So this has led to the famous dispute between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees look at this and they say: Well, the last holiday we talked about right before the Omer was Passover, and then we hear that the day after the Sabbath you're supposed to bring this Omer offering. So they think it means that whenever Passover begins, you look at the Sabbath that happens after that, and then the Sunday after that Sabbath, that's when you bring the Omer offering. That would be “the day after the Sabbath,” in the words of the text. So that seems to make perfectly reasonable sense. 

But that's not what the Pharisees say. According to the Pharisees, the word Sabbath, as used in the text here, is actually a reference to the first day of Passover. So “the day after the Sabbath” means the day after the first day of Passover. And that actually seems a little strange, because if the Bible wanted us to celebrate this on the first day after Passover… just say celebrate on the first day after Passover! Don't get all ambiguous on us and refer to the first day of Passover as Sabbath! What if the first day of Passover falls out on a Wednesday?

So how do we understand the Pharisees' position here? How do we understand what the laws of Omer are doing here? How do we understand what the laws of leket and pe'ah are doing here? I think that the key to answering all of these questions is actually locked up in an understanding of the Pharisees' position about calling the first day of Passover “Sabbath.” There's a reason you would call the first day of Passover “Sabbath”... because it really is Sabbath. 

Why Is Passover Called a Sabbath?

If you look at parshat hamo'adim, you will find two numbers recurring over and over again in the dates, in the times… and those numbers are ones and sevens. It almost seems like you're in this parallel universe where the only numbers there are… are ones and sevens. You can look at the holidays and you'll see what I mean. Passover is in the first month. How long does it last for? For seven days. Which days are holy? The first day is holy, the seventh day is holy. Then you're supposed to count seven times seven days, and then there's another holiday on the day after seven times seven days. And this just keeps on going.

As an explanation of this phenomenon, I suggested a theory that in effect, all of the mo'adim are actually manifestations of the idea of Sabbath within the cycle of the year. The Sabbath itself is a holiday that recurs weekly, but perhaps there are other Sabbath events that occur during the year, and we call these the mo'adim – the holidays.

The very first of these is actually Passover. Sabbath involves a kind of rest from the creative process, and Passover also involves a kind of rest from the creative process. What kind of creative process? The process by which man creatively dominates the world of plants. To see it, let's talk about how you make bread. 

Our Dominion Over Plants

It begins with the planting of wheat, and wheat, as a grain, is lush and ripe and vibrant – but then you harvest the grain, which is really just a euphemism for cutting it down and killing it. But grain dies slowly because it's a plant. It needs to be deprived of water over time. You leave it out in the fields to die a slow death, and it gets to be brittle and crumbly. Then you take the wheat and you strip it away and all you want is the seeds, the seeds which the wheat could use to reproduce itself… but you take those seeds and you smash them, destroying the wheat's last chance to be able to perpetuate itself, and you have flour.

Then when you're good and done, because this process was a process of deprivation of water from the wheat, what do you do? Just when it's too late to actually help the wheat grow and recuperate anymore, you add water to the flour. In so doing you bring it back to life, because the flour and water – that mixture together, the dough – actually becomes alive through the naturally occurring yeast that is on the side of the husks of wheat. Yeast is an organism, and when it comes into the bread, it lives. It has CO2 that's exhaled by the yeast that causes the bread to rise. So just when the flour is dead, you bring it back to life again, only to kill it once more when you put the dough in the oven. 

As the baking bread gets warmer and warmer, the yeast becomes more and more active, rising even more, until the temperature is too hot, killing the yeast. The yeast explodes into the bread. And you take the bread out of the oven, and now it becomes the staff of life for human beings. It keeps us alive now. 

But we have dominated the plants, exerted our creative control over them in making this bread. And acting like God, creating and dominating the world, molding it to suit our needs… always needs a time to stop, to pull back. The great teaching of Sabbath is that creativity cannot go on forever. It must be halted. Otherwise it is a juggernaut that runs away with itself. God, the great Creator in the sky… He rested, He stopped, and we stop too. We take a break from a process of bread-making on Passover. It's our day of rest with reference to the world of vegetation. 

The Two Sabbaths

So there is a certain logic to the Pharisees' position that the first day of Passover is called Sabbath. It really is a Sabbath event. But here's a nagging question you might have when pondering this all. You might say to yourself: Well, that's a very fine theory about Passover being Sabbath-like because we're taking a break from this way that we dominate the plant world. But if you think about it, there's actually two cycles of life and death that we bring into the plant world in the process of bread-making, and we're really only taking a break from one of them! You see, you can divide them up into the life and death cycle of planting the wheat, then harvesting it and killing it… and then the second life and death cycle is when you add water to the wheat and bring it back to life and then throw it into the oven and kill it again. Now, I get that on Passover we take a break from the second one, but it's not really a Sabbath from the whole thing. What about the first part of the cycle? Is there ever a break from that? Where is the Sabbath event for that part of the domination of plant life involved in bread-making?

There is a Sabbath-like event for that part of the process, and it actually coincides with the Sabbath-like event for the other part of the process. What do you do on the day after this great Sabbath we've been talking about – this Passover event? You bring the Omer offering. But what does the Omer offering do? It allows you to eat from the new crop of grain. The grain that you planted, brought life to, and then you killed through harvesting… you can't touch that. You're in Sabbath mode with respect to that, all the way until the day after the first day of Passover, which means the first day of Passover is the one moment where you're actually resting from both parts of the bread-making cycle. You're not eating from the new wheat yet, because you haven't brought the Omer, and you're not eating chametz. And that, I believe, is what the laws of the Omer are doing in these holidays.

Why Creativity Needs Boundaries

You see, the holidays – they're about Sabbath-like events. Paired with the Sabbath-like event of Passover is the Sabbath-like event of refraining from eating the new crop of wheat until the Omer is brought to allow you to have it. The Omer is about the larger Sabbath theme that these holidays are about, so of course it belongs here. Then you ask: Why, a few verses later, do we have the laws of leket and pe'ah? They might not be holidays, but what are they about? They're about resting from domination of the world of vegetation too. It's a different kind of rest. 

Man is given dominion over the world, and part of that includes dominion over plant life and vegetation. That power has fueled the rise of human civilization. So our ability to dominate the world of plants is crucial to us. It's our creative prowess unleashed upon the world of vegetation. But that ability to cultivate and mold the world must have some boundaries. Some of those boundaries are designed to help you understand that there's people other than you that need to get fed.

God says: It's not enough for you to rest with reference to Me. This isn't just about Me; you've got to rest with reference to your fellow man too. There's poor people out there, strangers who don't have land. Don't just content yourself on Passover with your abolition of chametz and think that you're done with resting from your domination of plants. Don't just bring your Omer offering, congratulate yourself on being able to eat the new crops. That same imperative to rest requires you to relinquish domination of your field of wheat and allow the poor and the stranger to reap nature's bounty as well.

Imu: So I hope you enjoyed that piece as much as I did. What I love about this piece is that it totally changed my way of understanding Jewish holidays. My old conception of Jewish holidays is that they’re meant to commemorate some special occasion – Israel’s coming out of Egypt, the giving of the Torah. It’s sort of a memory of that day. But the idea that all of our holidays are somehow rooted in Shabbos – that somehow the cessation from creative activity is at the root of all our holidays, and each of our holidays is a Sabbath – has totally transformed my relationship to the holidays themselves and a lot of my own spirituality. 

I think it’s a really primal and powerful idea that one of the things that makes us human is our creativity, our technological prowess, our building of businesses, our building of families. We are, by nature, incredibly creative beings, and it feels really meaningful to engage creatively. And sometimes our creativity run amok is problematic. Too much creativity, or too much power over the plant world, too much power over the world of technology, too much power over others, leads us to forget the Creator, God, and can somehow throw us out of balance with our brothers and sisters, make us think that if I’m wealthier or if I’m a better creator than my peers, I’m somehow better than them… or somehow out of balance with creation itself, out of balance with the land, with animals, with the natural world that sustains us, that feeds us. 

Shabbat restores that balance. It reminds us of the Creator above us, of the independent integrity of our fellow creators, of our fellow man, and of the natural world that sustains us. And it does it in a very elegant way. There’s a temptation, perhaps, to say: “Oh, you thought creativity was a good thing? It’s actually a bad thing; it’s forbidden to you.” That’s not what the Torah says. We are told to work for six days; we are allowed to eat chametz; we are allowed to go and encouraged to go out into the world and create. But Shabbat and the mo’adim oppose that creative energy, oppose the energy of doing with an energy of being… and that recalibrates us.  It takes a creator who’s run amok and connects that creator to the Creator, to God, and to the larger world. It’s an idea that I find extremely moving, and I hope you do too. 

Credits:

This episode was written and recorded by our lead scholar, Rabbi David Fohrman. 

When this episode originally aired on Aleph Beta, it was edited by Rivky Stern. 

Into the Verse editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman. 

Our CEO and editorial director is Imu Shalev. 

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