Parshah Commentary
Parshat Naso
Anti-Jewish Christian theologians often claim that Judaism is based on a casuistic legalism that demands rote ritual performance, leaving no room for love. But in this week’s parshah, Naso, we find that law and love are not opposing categories, but can coexist within ritual practice.
Naso contains instructions for the priestly benediction with which Aaron, the High Priest, and his sons are commanded to bless the Israelites. The blessing reads: “May the Lord bless you, and keep you; May the Lord make God’s face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; May the Lord lift up God’s face to you, and give you peace.” Unlike most rituals performed by the priestly class in ancient Israelite worship, which have not taken place since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE, this benediction is still practiced in many traditional Jewish communities today by those considered to be descendants of the biblical priests. With its prescribed Hebrew liturgy and legal requirements dictating when and by whom it is recited, it might seem that this blessing is one of the rote rituals maligned as loveless legalism. But the Zohar, a foundational text of Jewish mysticism, insists in a comment on this week’s parshah, “a priest who does not love the people or is not loved by the people should not raise his hands to bless them.” This stipulation is echoed in the formula the priests recite before offering their benediction, thanking God for “commanding [them] to bless God’s nation with love.”
The words “with love” at the end of the blessing could be read as a description of the benediction’s content, meaning that love is what the priests are bestowing upon the people. But the 20th-century Talmudist and theologian Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik interprets the phrase as describing the manner in which the priests must offer their blessing. “Love is in fact a stated pre-condition for the fulfillment of this commandment,” he writes; in other words, love is a mandated requirement of this legal observance. Here love and law are not opposed but intertwined.
Rabbinic commentators also understand the physical choreography with which the priests are required to perform this ritual as an expression of love. According to later commentators, the priests should offer this benediction while spreading their fingers in a particular gesture (the basis for Star Trek’s Vulcan salute), which a midrash reads as analogous to a passage in the Song of Songs: “My lover stands behind the wall, gazing through the window, peering through the lattice.” The priests’ spread fingers, the midrash explains, form a lattice through which God gazes lovingly at humanity. Perhaps this lattice, a kind of physical scaffolding, is analogous to the legal structures of ritual practice that allow love to exist tangibly, instead of as a spiritual abstraction. Even this seemingly arcane and arbitrary rite is not merely a legalistic requirement but is also the embodiment—in this case, quite literally—of divine love.
In the priestly benediction, we thus find a law that can only be fulfilled through love and a love that can only be enacted through the minutiae of legal observance. Through this example, our parshah reminds us that obligations are unique opportunities to express love. This is true not only of rituals that demonstrate care in obvious ways—like the traditional Hebrew formulation one says to mourners, stating a hope that they find comfort—but also of much more mundane duties, even (and sometimes especially) when they are tedious and seemingly arbitrary: When I put away clean dishes in the precise patterns that my partner prefers, even though it feels illogical to me, I can understand the activity of placing mugs in the cabinet just so as an embodiment of the love I feel. Repeated consistently, these minor, methodical acts can become a grand architecture of intimate devotion.
Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.
