Parashat Emor
Parashat Emor
NNLS, Assif Service
2 May 2026/15 Iyar 5786
Adam Rose
Ultimately, because I am a lawyer and not a rabbi, I plan to focus this dvar Torah on the legal case told in Parashat Emor, where the alleged offence is not violence, theft, or fraud, but speech. Speech directed at the sacred. Speech that crosses a boundary that even today the law struggles to define, and yet many (indeed, perhaps many of us here) insist must exist. This is the Parsha that brings with it the duality of Chillul Hashem – the forbidding of profaning the Divine Name – and Kiddush Hashem – the positive injunction on every Israelite to respect the Name of God.
It is worth noting, given what I will come to later, that this the very parsha that uses the phrase “a life for a life…, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; as he has maimed a man, so shall it be rendered unto him”, and also, which is the topic that I will be spending more time on: “he that blasphemes the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death.”
Parashat Emor does not begin with blasphemy. It begins with the laws of priestly holiness, the kedushat kohanim, and proceeds through the Jewish calendar, the festivals that mark and sanctify time – it talks of Pesach, the counting of the Omer, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, and the Temple and the oil and bread. It notes the importance of boundaries, between the everyday and the sacred; between the kohanim and my lot, the plebs. And then right at the end, it introduces the blasphemy narrative.
The Parsha’s very structure suggests that the offence of blasphemy is not an isolated legal problem. It is part of a far larger question: how does a society define and protect the boundaries of the sacred?
The accused, the story tells us, utters a curse involving the Divine Name. The Torah tells us that he blasphemed but refuses to tell us how. The words are never recorded.
I would like to turn from the ancient record to the modern courtroom, because the issue has not disappeared. It has, in fact, become contested again: where is the line between campaigning online and on the streets and antisemitism? Indeed, what is antisemitism? Should people be protected from the violence of words? And do words have consequences?
To make it real, I am very clear that words do have consequences. That the terrorists of Golders Green and of Heaton Park didn’t act spontaneously but as a direct result of the words used about me and you – that I am a racist, a fascist, a child murderer, a genocidist, above all, a Zionist. That in the words of the former Bristol professor, David Miller, the Jewish community needs to be dezionised. What it means is that our friends stand outside our shul today in stab-proof vests, as I did two or three weeks ago, alongside CST and our professional colleagues. As I wrote on behalf of the Board of Deputies to the director general of the BBC on about 9 October 2023 about his corporation’s refusal to call Hamas terrorists: words matter.
In many contemporary legal systems, particularly across liberal democracies, the very concepts of free speech and blasphemy have been fundamentally re-examined. In the United Kingdom, the common law offence of blasphemy was formally abolished in 2008: the state should not act as the arbiter of religious truth, nor punish individuals merely for offending religious sensibilities. Similarly, courts interpreting the First Amendment to the United States Constitution have consistently held that even deeply offensive speech about religion is protected, because freedom of expression must include the freedom to challenge, criticise, or even mock the sacred.
And yet, this is not the full picture.
Across other parts of the world, blasphemy laws remain not only in force but actively enforced, sometimes with the most severe of penalties. These systems argue that religion forms the moral fabric of society, and that attacks on it are not merely personal expressions but threats to public order.
So we are left with a tension, one that mirrors, in a different form, the very tension embedded in our ancient case.
On one side: the protection of the sacred.
On the other: the protection of free speech.
Yes, Parsha Emor defines blasphemy as a grave offence punishable by death.
But it surrounds that definition with such stringent requirements, such procedural safeguards, that prosecution becomes almost impossible.
There is a detail in the narrative that deserves particular attention. When the blasphemer is seized, Moses does not pronounce judgment immediately. Instead, the man is placed in custody until judgment can be reached וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ בַּמִּשְׁמָר לִפְרֹשׁ לָהֶם עַל־פִּי יְהוָה (Transliterated: Vayanichuhu bamishmar lifrosh lahem al-pi Adonai.) – and they placed him in custody, so that a decision might be declared to them by the word of the Lord – Moses did not rush to judgment but instead imposed a procedural pause, holding the accused in custody until a definitive ruling could be obtained from God.
It is, in effect, a legal system that says: “We affirm the value, but we hesitate to punish.” Or, as the statement misattributed to Voltaire says: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Nowhere is hesitation, before punishment, more apparent than in the Mishnah Sanhedrin 5:1. That tract starts by saying that “the court would examine the witnesses with seven interrogations” and the Mishnah builds from there, ultimately concluding that “with regard to all judges who increase the number of examinations,” that is, who add questions about the details of the event, “this is praiseworthy.” This becomes a defining feature of Jewish criminal law: the system actually prefers delay, doubt, and restraint over retribution. In the Talmud, the court must work harder to save a life than to defend the law. In fact, the rabbis in Sanhedrin 78b go on to say that you can’t make any permanent rules about the blasphemer’s case in the Torah because that was an הוֹרָאַת שָׁעָה (hora’at sha’ah) or a temporary suspension, justified by circumstance.
This is not so far removed from modern approaches as it may seem.
Consider contemporary “hate speech” laws. While many societies reject blasphemy laws, they still recognise that certain forms of speech, those that incite violence or target vulnerable groups, can justifiably be restricted. Somewhere there is a line drawn between free speech and hate speech.
In other words, the question has shifted from “Is this offensive to God?” to “Does this speech harm society?”, but the underlying tension has not vanished.
But even here, the caution remains. Democracies struggle constantly to draw the line, because once the state begins regulating free speech, the risk of overreach is ever-present.
And here is where this week’s Parsha offers a profound contribution.
It distinguishes between moral condemnation and legal action.
The Torah clearly condemns the act.
But the legal tradition that follows makes conviction extraordinarily rare.
It is as if the system is saying:
“Not everything that is wrong must be punished by the courts. Some things are left to conscience, to community, to education.”
Rabbi Louis Jacobs, in whose name the Louis Jacobs Foundation was set up to promote his teachings and whose body of texts and works has been taken over by Masorti Judaism a few weeks ago in an effort to extend the reach of his teachings, made a similar observation. He argued that the Rabbinic tradition’s insistence on near-impossible evidentiary thresholds for capital offences, including blasphemy, was not a procedural accident but a deliberate theological statement: that authentic faith cannot be coerced, and that a legal system which punishes heterodox (or non-mainstream) speech too readily undermines the very tradition of questioning and intellectual honesty upon which Judaism depends.
So, let me come back to the defendant in our Parashat Emor case.
The Torah tells us that the blasphemer was the son of an Israelite woman, Shelomit bat Divri of the tribe of Dan, and an Egyptian father. The Midrash elaborates: the blasphemer’s act of defilement of the Holy Name followed a dispute about belonging. He had sought a place in the camp of Dan, but tribal membership followed the patrilineal line, and he was refused. His father, as you just heard, was Egyptian. The blasphemer’s identity was, in the eyes of the law, incomplete. He was neither fully inside nor fully outside the community.
The Parsha concludes the blasphemy episode with a legal principle that is remarkable when one considers when it was being applied: “You shall have one standard for the stranger as for the homeborn alike, for I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 24:22). This is one of the earliest articulations of equality before the law, and it is no accident that it appears precisely in the context of speech offences, where the temptation to treat the outsider more harshly than the insider is greatest.
There is one final detail worth reflecting upon. Immediately before the blasphemy narrative, the Parsha describes the eternal lamp, the ner tamid, and the showbread or the bread for display, the lechem hapanim, set continually before the Lord. These are acts of sustained, quiet devotion, the very opposite of the blasphemer’s outburst. The juxtaposition seems deliberate. The Parsha places side by side two responses to the sacred: one of reverence, maintained day after day without fanfare; and one of destruction, a single act of speech that tears at the fabric of communal holiness. The task of the law, then and now, is to protect the conditions in which the former may flourish, without itself becoming an instrument of the latter. A system that punishes speech too readily, that reaches too eagerly for the coercive power of the state, risks inflicting its own kind of violence upon the very thing it seeks to protect. A legal system that silences dissent in the name of the sacred or the state may, in time, profane the sacred more deeply than any blasphemer could. But when the state conscripts holiness into the service of coercion – I am thinking of the Inquisition, or the IRGC, or the Taliban, for example – the damage is structural and enduring.
The challenge, therefore, is one of restraint as much as of enforcement: to affirm what is holy without wielding holiness as a weapon, and to defend the dignity of belief without denying the dignity of the person who questions, denies faith or even, for that matter, offends.
Getting that balance right is the rather tricky bit. Then again, if it were easy, we wouldn’t need lawyers, or indeed rabbis. And certainly not lawyers giving divrei Torah.
