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.
-
"is human castration prohibited by halakah? what about force femme?"
-
the Tetragrammaton or Explicit Name, specifically. Jews have always had a complex relationship with G-d and their names and titles