Are You a Member?

Synagogue communities around the world rely on members for support. As virtual synagogue attendance rises, what does it mean to be a member?

Written Format

This week’s podcast is all about synagogue membership, and why it’s important to have one, even if it doesn’t feel important. But we’ll get there.

This week’s Torah portion, Parshat Emor, at first reads like a Cliff Notes version of the core elements that came to make up Israelite society—priests, sacrifices, and responsibility to one another. The Torah lays out a series of holidays that include weekly observance of Shabbat, and annual festivals like Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot.

What I love about this portion is how familiar it is, on the surface. It’s easy to feel the connection between the religion of the Torah and modern Judaism. But within this sense of familiarity, part of Parshat Emor feel completely unfamiliar, and out of touch with modern Judaism, at least on the surface.

Let’s start with sacrifices, which as the text points out, are food for G-d. An unclean priest can’t hope to offer a clean sacrifice, and making an unclean sacrifice might incur G-d’s wrath, as demonstrated previously in the fiery death of Nadav and Avhihu. So the Torah lays out a series of restrictions designed to keep priests pure, and distance them from anything perceived to be unclean.

As the elite rung of Israelite’s society, each priest’s social standing is based in their individual purity, and the Torah lists a variety of prohibitions meant to maintain a distance between priests and everything unclean.

“They shall not shave smooth any part of their heads, or cut the side-growth of their beards, or make gashes in their flesh. They shall be holy to their God and not profane the name of their God; for they offer the LORD’s offerings by fire, the food of their God, and so must be holy.”

Beyond the ways they keep their distance from physical impurities, the text also obligates priests, and those associated with priests, to avoid moral impurities.

The Torah makes female members of the priest’s family, in particular, subject to these rules. The text says priests “shall not marry a woman defiled by harlotry, nor shall they marry one divorced from her husband.”

A few lines later, the text reads, “When the daughter of a priest defiles herself through harlotry, it is her father whom she defiles; she shall be put to the fire.”

These rules are important, it turns out, in determining who can eat from the priestly sacrifices. You might recall from past portions that not all sacrifices are offered the same way. Some sacrifices are completely burnt, as an offering to G-d, and some are merely offered and then eaten by the priests.

In every class based society, there’s a flow of resources designed to support an elite, and usually small, segment of the larger group. In this case, sacrifices brought by the community become the chief source of food for the priestly class—priests and the members of their households. “A person who is a priest’s property by purchase may eat of them; and those that are born into his household may eat of his food.” The holiness of the priests extends to their entire family, at least as far as benefitting form the perks of their station.

I started this episode talking about how relevant this portion feels to modern Judaism, with its description of holidays we still celebrate. And while we don’t offer sacrifices anymore, and probably aren’t going to anytime in the future, we can still find meaning in the system of sacrifices that fed the priestly class.

The name of this portion, which deals so heavily with the structure of Israelite society and how sacrifices support the priestly class, is Emor, which can be translated as “said.” And that makes sense, because after Moses dies, at the end of the Torah, priests serve as the guardians of the text, the keepers of what was said.

Here’s where this part starts to feel more like modern Judaism again. After the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, the main function of the priests—offering sacrifices—was no longer possible. And as such, the main source of sustenance for the priestly class disappeared overnight, along with it the luxuries afforded by not having to produce your own food.

The priests didn’t go away, they’re still among us today, in a lineage still passed from father to son. Their role, however, as keepers of what was said, did change, as the spiritual center of Jewish life shifted from the Temple to the Torah. They were replaced by Torah scholars, experts in “what was said” who endlessly debated the written and oral traditions passed down from Moses to the Israelite people. The Hebrew Bible, and most importantly the Torah, form the written tradition. The Talmud contains both the oral tradition, the Mishnah, and generations of thoughtful interpretation of both the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah.

And while we no longer offer sacrifices that support the priestly class, for two thousand years Jewish communities around the world have built their spiritual lives around the leadership of people devoted to full time study and application of Jewish law. Cash donations from people who never attended a class supported academies of learning in the early rabbinic period, and numerous yeshivot across Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

It’s easy to look at the Torah this week and feel negative towards the priests, who sit at the top of a system designed in large part to support them in being on top, and if it weren’t for our current crisis, maybe this episode would focus more on class divides and the dangers of wealth inequality. But we have to read the Torah in our time, and put it in conversation with the world. And our current situation reminds me that community is something that we need when we need it.

Today, synagogue membership rolls are filled with the names of people who rarely attend, but still invest in a center of Jewish learning and Jewish life. That’s what synagogue membership is, after all, an investment in having Jewish life close at hand, even if you don’t access it all the time. And that’s the secret—membership isn’t about access, it’s about investment.

Ask any synagogue professional, and they’ll tell you that membership is down across the board. And yet, the desire to engage with Jewish community remains as strong as ever. We’ve seen this statistically in recent studies of the American Jewish community, and anecdotally in the rise of virtual synagogue attendance during the pandemic lockdown. And that space is available to us all, because of the investments made by synagogue members.

If you and I are both members of the same synagogue, then the period of time when I need a synagogue may or may not over lap with the period of time that you need a synagogue. But if both of us are members, we’re inherently supporting the other person by making sure the synagogue, and the comforts of community and ritual it brings, is available by sustaining it with our memberships during good times and bad.

Of course, you don’t have to be a member to show up at a synagogue, during most of the year at least. But membership isn’t about access. It’s about investment. So, during this pandemic, if you’re finding yourself turning to a community of any kind—a synagogue or a nonprofit or some other form of community, consider making an investment in that community, so that future people in need of comfort, of any kind, can step into the same strong community that support you when you needed it.

Shabbat shalom.