sphere of the sacred worm

Short post tonight- didn't take any clips out of a mix of nothing quite catching my eye tonight and also suffering from tiredsleepy.

So! We continue our way through Leviticus and start discussing the kohanim! For those who don't know, those are the descendants of Aaron, and they have additional rules concerning behavior and marriage, such as extra prohibitions around sharing space with corpses and being limited in who they can marry. We also get a discussion of blemishes that disqualify one from serving as a priest- a lot of talk was had around why G-d may care about that, how it sets out a clear social power dynamic, the ways in which idealized national bodies are constructed. We then go through rules around sacred donations, during which we learn a surprising amount about crushing balls and find a prohibition against castration¹ in animals, along with some surprisingly poetic terms for crushing one's testes.

Afterwards, we get further commands regarding the sabbath and the major festivals of atonement, booths, and passover, as well as the omer. We revisit our relationships to labor and the sabbath and festivals; we discuss yom kippur and fasting and when it's appropriate to break fast; and we have a nice time reminiscing of sukkot and etrogim. We also learn of "Testimony", which is either a reference to the Ark or to a lamp that was lit in the Holy Place that miraculously stayed lit long enough for the priests to complete their work in the dark and may have given some precedence to the later, more famous lamp in the temple miracle story.

The portion closes on a story of a man who blasphemed the Name² and goes on to tell of him being stoned to death, as well as listing several other prohibitions on murder and manslaughter of humans and animals. Of particular note, though, is that it talks about his parentage, and so we see with the sages some of the logic and developments that came about that shifted judaism from focusing on patrilineal to matrilineal descent. Weirdly, they also derive a legal principle that an agent can act in your stead on the basis that "obviously all 600k israelite men didn't stone this guy at once". Fucked up story! Also we think one of the first times we've come across stoning as a punishment.

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1. "is human castration prohibited by halakah? what about force femme?"

2. the Tetragrammaton or Explicit Name, specifically. Jews have always had a complex relationship with G-d and their names and titles

We return to this portion! On review, we went over a lot of similar topics, with more diversions to discuss some basic principles and definitions with the newer members of the study group.

On large question was around what exactly constitutes a blemish. It turns out that it's quite a lot of things, actually¹. There's some ideas from us around how the restrictions for priests reflect a number of the rules for the sacrificial offerings, but a lot of it really comes down to the politics being encoded in the rules about who has direct access to the temple service and not, and it's not pretty. There's also some back and forth about slavery and consuming the temple offerings, and how slavery was constructed, as well as looking into the rules on priests, divorce, and remarriage (they have more stringent standards).

After this we get to the major festivals and break down how a sukkah is put together and possible blessings to use for if you were to acquire a ram's horn for a shofar from, hypothetically, a biodynamic farm:

degen figurafloris — Today at 10:38 PM
so, there's the standard shehechiyanu, as well as:

Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam hatov v’ha’meitiv.

Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the universe, who is good and who does good.
also found the proper hebrew:
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יהוה
אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶך–הָעולָם
הַטּוב וְהַמֵּטִיב .

nb. this blessing is apparently also for receiving good news?

anyway this was the source for the uh. used car purchase suggestions:
https://aish.com/shehechiyanu-blessing-on-major-purchase/

Not too much else to say here, though it's always a bit fun getting to something and going "oh hey it's the omer/shofar/sukkah/etc, shoutouts to that".

In the final part of the portion, we once again discuss the evolution of matrilineal descent in judaism, as well as how verses concerning murder and an eye for an eye seem bleak in isolation, but become much less so when taken in context of the broader text and commentaries, as well as a principle we'll see a lot- arguing from minor to major².

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1. Bekhorot 6 discusses animals, and 7 discusses priests. As a side note, having a dick that was too long or big was disqualifying for temple service.

2. essentially, a lot of argumentation starts with a passage in a very specific context that they then work out from to more general cases to formulate the broader applicability