Last Thursday and Friday were, hands down, the best days in Chicago social media history. Why? Because, in the words of the ginormous headline in the Sun-Times Friday morning, the papal conclave had elected “Da Pope.” Robert Prevost, born on Chicago’s south side, became, overnight, Pope Leo XIV–and Chicago, where I live, was here for it.

The memes were flying: The Wiener Circle, one of Chicago’s many beloved (treif) sausage vendors, posted an image of their marquee: “Canes nostros ipse comedit” (translation: “He has eaten our dogs”). “Chicago produced a pope before a quarterback who throws for 4,000 yards” (a reference to the Bears’ long and miserable history of quarterbacks). “God bless Pope Leo XIV! Since he is from Chicago, I heard that of the 133 Cardinals that voted, he received 140 votes!” I saw an AI-generated image of the Pope wearing imaginary Chicago Bears-branded papal garments with the caption, “Popes from Chicago:1. Popes from Green Bay: 0. I rest my case.” It was spectacular.

While Chicagoans, understandably, are fascinated by the new pope (and fascinated isn’t the right word for it–it’s probably closer to the Yiddish term “schepping nachas”), I’ve noticed that people from all walks of life, whether or not they’re Catholic, seem to be really taken with the pomp and ceremony surrounding a papal election in general. The success of the movie “Conclave”–even many of the cardinals watched it as preparation, apparently–testifies to that.

Perhaps part of the fascination, for Jews at any rate, is that so much of the papal office seems to be drawn from our own kohen gadol, or high priest, as described in the Torah. Most notably, of course, he wears white all the time (even a white kippah!)–a white robe, a white sash, a white mitre. The office of pope seems designed to draw on the conception of the kohen gadol: the holiest person among holy people. So while we no longer have a high priest, my guess is there is something about seeing someone who taps into that same vein that touches us as Jews.

Parashat Emor opens with a description of some key rules for the kohanim in general, and for the high priest in particular: Who they can marry, how they have to cut their hair, who they’re allowed to bury (since, according to the Torah, contact with a dead body conveys ritual impurity). While regular priests are subject to pretty strict limits in all these areas, the high priest, predictably, encounters even greater constraints. Most notably, perhaps, the Torah instructs that the high priest “shall not go in where there is any dead body; he shall not defile himself even for his father or mother” (Leviticus 21:11). 

It seems important to point out right away that, in reserving this level of stringency for the high priest, the Torah throws into high relief that this is not an expectation for the rest of the Israelites, i.e. that we are not even remotely to think of ourselves as failures in comparison. If anything, I find myself experiencing some compassion for the kohen gadol at the idea that the ceremony of his office would prevent him from properly mourning for those he loves. 

Yet later in the Torah we find that there exists a mechanism where the rest of us can voluntarily take on some of these stringencies: the institution of the nazirite. The Mishnah notes the parallel: “A High Priest and a nazirite may not become ritually impure even to bury their deceased relatives. However, they become impure to bury a corpse with no one to bury it” (Nazir 7:1). While the Rabbis generally seem to frown on the practice of taking nazirite vows, the fact that the institution of the nazirite exists, and that it holds out a way for regular folks to experience the quasi-monastic life of a priest, seems like it’s meant to teach us something. 

Perhaps that something is the intuitive need we may experience for depth and significance in our spiritual practice. On its own, the way of the Torah is meant to be a meaningful spiritual path: we eat special foods (discussed later in Emor); we mark special time through Shabbat and the Jewish calendar (also discussed later in Emor); we hold our possessions lightly and share what we have with all who need it through the practices of tzedakah (the subject of next week’s Torah portion). When these practices become routine, though, we may feel a stirring toward something more, something deeper, something renewing. In ancient times, that may have resulted in taking the vows of a nazir; today it might lead us to go on retreat.

I wonder whether the collective fascination with the pope might reflect some of this too. Though our political leaders today might be a particular case study, I think it’s safe to say that such leaders have more rarely than frequently been our spiritual role models. Nor, for that matter, have many popes, or perhaps even high priests in their day. Yet we seem to have a natural thirst, a desire to project images of leadership that reflect holiness, sacredness, spiritual depth and significance. I think we do that because, deep down, a voice within us wants that for us. And I would suggest that the Torah reminds us that the act of projection may, in fact, be a distraction. As Moses himself reminds us at the end of his life: That spiritual significance we seek isn’t in heaven or across the sea–or, perhaps, in the guy in the white robes. “It is very close to you–on your lips and in your heart, that you may do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14).

My very favorite TED talk is by the Israeli conductor Itay Talgam. It’s called “Lead Like the Great Conductors.” In 20 minutes, Talgam shows clips of some of the greats of the twentieth century: Richard Strauss, Carlos Kleiber, Riccardo Muti (who is still alive and well, conducting here in Chicago and around the world), Herbert Von Karajan, and ultimately Leonard Bernstein, who was Talgam’s teacher and who he regards as an exemplar of leadership.

The talk closes with Talgam playing a memorable clip of Bernstein conducting the final movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 using only his face. The lesson being: When you’re doing everything right as a leader, you should be able to simply get out of the way as the group does its work.

Along the way, Talgam draws a contrast with Karajan in particular, who was something of a rival to Bernstein—and something of a foil as well. Where Bernstein refused to change the last name that broadcast his Jewishness to the world, the Austrian-born Karajan joined the Nazi Party in 1934 to further his career. (Though we might also note that in 1942 he married a woman who was one-quarter Jewish.)

But the key difference Talgam highlights doesn’t have to do with their identity or politics, but with their eyes and hands. Talgam plays a clip of Karajan conducting Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 with his eyes closed and with very fluid hand motions—which are hard to read if you’re a member of the orchestra. The message, as Talgam puts it, is this: “The real music is only in Karajan’s head. And you have to guess his mind. So you are under tremendous pressure because he doesn’t give you instructions, and yet, you have to guess his mind. So it’s… a very spiritual but yet very firm control.”

Talgam contrasts this with Bernstein, who conveys with his face, his hands, his whole body, that everyone—the composer, the orchestra, and the audience—is invited to share in the story and meaning within the music-making. Bernstein becomes a kind of conduit for all of that energy, not stopping it up with him, but letting it flow through him.

Now this binary is, of course, overdone. Bernstein was not a saint (see the Bradley Cooper movie), and Karajan is not a simple villain. But I find this basic message about leadership instructive.

There’s a story told about Rabbi Shlomo Hakohen Rabinowicz (1801-1866), founder of Radomsk Hasidism. At one point the rebbe traveled through the Jewish metropolis of Krakow, where he was greeted by a throng of the city’s Jews and its elders, including Rabbi Shimon Sofer, the chief rabbi of the city. They of course asked him to share words of Torah.

Rabbi Rabinowicz (also known as the Tiferet Shlomo, the title of his most famous work), said, “Any leader (tzaddik) who does not bring to their community a flow of blessing and material well-being is not a tzaddik, and is not fit to be a leader of the Jewish people… This was the sin of Nadav and Avihu: They only ‘brought their offering before YHVH,’ (Lev. 16:1, the opening verse of Parashat Acharei-Mot) but they didn’t create a flow of blessing and material well-being to the rest of the community.”

The story continues that Rabbi Sofer spoke up and asked, “Does the good Rabbi know what purpose Heaven may have had in mind in establishing a Chief Rabbi in Krakow?”

The Tiferet Shlomo paused to consider the question, then answered: “Does the Chief Rabbi think that he was appointed simply to answer questions about whether this or that pot is kosher? There are rabbis to answer such questions in every street and alley in Krakow. I will tell you: A Chief Rabbi was appointed in a great city such as Krakow in order to bring blessings, economic prosperity and good health to the community. That is what heaven wants.”

The crowd was silent, trembling at how their Chief Rabbi might respond. And then he did: “Thank God—now I am aware of a new duty of my office, one that hasn’t been written down in the legal codes, but that I will be mindful of from now on!”

Like the orchestra conductor, the Chief Rabbi confronts multiple approaches to leadership. I remember an interview in which the great violinist Isaac Stern said that a conductor should convey that she or he knows more about the score in their pinky fingernail than the entire orchestra does put together. That’s one way to do it: to lead through authority and intimidation. But, in Rabbi Rabinowicz’s formulation, that’s not a kind of leadership that is going to cultivate blessings—spiritual blessings or those of material well-being. A more elevated kind of leadership might be one in which leaders understand themselves to be temporary custodians of the responsibility to help those they serve to “secure the blessings of liberty,” as the United States Constitution puts it—to realize, individually and collectively, our potential as images of the Divine.

I would suggest this doesn’t only apply to leaders in positions of authority, but to all of us. As the great writer on education, Parker Palmer, writes: “What does it take to qualify as a leader? Being human and being here. As long as I am here, doing whatever I am doing, I am leading, for better or for worse. And, if I may say so, so are you.” All of us can and should strive to show up, to lead, in ways that increase the flow of blessing. It isn’t only the High Priest or the orchestra conductor or the chief rabbi who exercises leadership—if each of us carries within us a spark of divinity, then all of us are leading all the time.

In the weeks leading up to my physical this week, I was a little nervous. I had noticed a bit of pain in a sensitive area on my skin that’s not easy to see, and I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. There was nothing debilitating or life-threatening, but it was on my list of things to talk about with the physician.

But then I made what those of us who grew up watching “The Princess Bride” might call “one of the classic blunders:” I googled it.

I don’t need to tell you what happened next. I found out all the possible things that could be bothering me. Dr. Internet told me I could have various types of rashes, infections, cancers. My breath became shorter, my heart started racing. You know the drill. After a minute or two I recognized my mistake, closed the browser window, and took a deep breath. Just wait for the doctor’s appointment.

My physician asked me some questions and did some looking around. “Well,” he told me, “it looks like you have a tiny little abrasion here that’s probably causing the pain you’re experiencing.” Aha. He asked a few more questions, did a couple more checks, and then prescribed the very complicated remedy of… vaseline. “You just need to let it heal.”

Later the same day, I came across an article on The Atlantic by Helen Lewis about a recent appearance by the conservative writer Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Murray seems to have provoked something of a firestorm in the “Roganverse” by going on Rogan’s show and questioning the host’s platforming of Holocaust-deniers directly to his face.

“This is the crux of the argument between Murray and Rogan,” Lewis writes. “Does the latter’s huge success and influence confer any responsibility or duty on him to patrol the borders of allowable discourse on his show?” She explains: “Instead of making the eminently supportable accusation that the media and the scientific establishment both make mistakes from time to time, Rogan now disparages expertise as a concept. In the episode, Murray… [said], ‘it’s pretty hard to listen to somebody who says: I don’t know what I’m talking about, but now I’m going to talk.'”

I couldn’t help but think of my physical earlier in the day, and the difference between “doing my own research” and visiting a board-certified, state-licensed physician. Who knows what I would have done had I listened to the unfiltered advice of the internet. But my physician is someone whose expertise and judgment is legitimated by multiple institutions, who is accountable to those institutions, and who I—and the rest of us—can therefore trust.

Tazria-Metzora opens with a memorable if slightly uncomfortable scene: “When a person has on their skin a swelling, a rash, or a discoloration, and it develops into a scaly affection on their skin, the person shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons, the priests” (Lev. 13:2). It goes on to elaborate, in intimate detail, how the priest is to diagnose what he sees. But we can hover over this opening passage for a moment.

Abraham ibn Izra, the great 12th century commentator on the Torah, notes that the verse is directed at “a person,” which includes everyone, not only Israelites, because tzaraat, the skin disease in question, “is transmitted from the sick to the healthy,” regardless of their tribal identity. Further, he notes the Torah’s phraseology: the afflicted individual “shall be brought”—”with or without their consent.” Because, it would seem, this is not only a matter of individual health, but of general social well-being—what affects one may infect others.

As my own story illustrates—to say nothing of our collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic—it’s not hard to imagine ourselves into this scene: You notice something on your skin, you wonder what it could be, you worry about what it could be—but also about what the consequences of “testing positive” might be for you (seven days of quarantine, maybe longer). You may have an impulse not to go to the authorities, to “do your own research” and make the decisions that you think are best for you—especially since the truth seems to be right in front of you, there on your little device.

Similarly, we can imagine authority could easily be misapplied (perhaps the priest proclaims a precautionary quarantine that has unintended significant adverse effects on mental health), how mistakes could be made (the priest misdiagnoses the case), or even how authority could be abused (the priest says, “How much is it worth to you for this rash not to be tzara’at?”). We can imagine that individual priests make mistakes or are indeed corrupt, and that the whole institution of the priesthood, our collective ability to place trust in the institution—which is what authorizes the institution to have authority over us in the first place—ebbs, fades, and erodes.

Lewis sums up the problem with this state of affairs: “Beyond decadence, this is nihilism.” Our ability to live together in society depends on our ability to trust one another, which is perhaps why the tradition understands such a strong link between the mysterious skin disease described in the Torah and lashon hara, unmindful and negative speech.

More than anything else, our worlds are made by our words: the words through which we communicate, make promises, and enact laws; the words through which a physician helps shape our reality by pronouncing a cut is a abrasion that needs vaseline and not a melanoma; the words through which an ancient Israelite priest pronounces someone is ritually pure or impure. And since all of us are images of the Divine and all of us hold a piece of the sovereign collective power, all of us have a responsibility to practice mindful speech, whether we are a podcaster with millions of followers, a physician examining a patient, or simply a citizen using their voice.

On Wednesday night I had to run to the drug store. We were out of antihistamine, and, being springtime, the air in Chicago is thick with stuff that makes me sneeze.

There’s a Walgreens around the corner from our house. As I walked up to the entrance, I saw a man holding a sign in Spanish, but headlined with “Please help.” He had three young children with him, the oldest appearing to be no more than 7 or 8.

The drug store was surprisingly busy—maybe a lot of us found our antihistamine supply was low that night?—and I saw a few people walk by the family: stiffly, uncomfortably, hands in pockets.

But then I saw one neighbor, a Jewish man, who walked up to them and asked, “What do you need?” “Food for the baby,” the eldest daughter said. “Ok.” He went inside and, as he shopped for other things, I saw that he bought a gift card for the store, which he gave to them on his way out. Inspired by his example, I did the same.

As I gave the card to the father, several things flashed through my mind at once: Questions, of course, about what led this family to be in this situation, begging outside a Walgreen’s after 9 pm. Questions about where they would sleep that night. Questions about their legal status and how governmental policies and actions were affecting them. Questions about whether in aiding this family my neighbor and I might, naively, be sticking our own necks out.

But what also went through my mind was something I took to heart years ago from Pope Francis, who died this week. Like other people, I find my mind often generates reasons not to give when I see someone asking for money on the street. I imagine they might spend it on something unwholesome, or that I’m being conned. But among the late pope’s most moving teachings was that if someone is asking, we should make it a habit to err on the side of giving. Simply put, giving to someone in need “is always right,” he said.

Parashat Shemini includes a horrible story. For weeks we have read about the Israelites’ construction and inauguration of the Mishkan, a long process that reaches its climax at the opening of the Torah portion. Aaron performs all the prescribed rituals just as they had been commanded. There is perfect alignment between the Divine and human will, between intention and outcome. It’s a scene of blessing, culminating in the people shouting for joy and prostrating themselves.

And then, of course, it all goes wrong. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, go off script and lose their lives in the process. Aaron is bereft, silent. Moses, who we also imagine to be shattered at the loss of his nephews, becomes focused on the rules to be followed in this complicated case. In chapter 10 he channels his energy into articulating, in painstaking detail, exactly what sacrifices are to be eaten and where. When, in the course of all this, he “investigates deeply” (darosh darash), he finds that the burnt offering was eaten improperly, and he becomes angry with Eleazar and Itamar, Aaron’s surviving children, castigating them for their failure.

Aaron responds to Moses, “Look, today they brought forward their offense offering and their burnt offering before YHVH, and things of this sort befell me. Had I eaten an offense offering today, would it have seemed good in the eyes of YHVH?” Now it is Moses who is silent: “Moses heard, and it seemed good in his eyes.” Rashi, following other traditional commentaries, reads this as a dialogue about the complex halakhic status of Aaron, who is navigating both his responsibilities to the dead and his special role as High Priest. Robert Alter, whose translation I followed here, offers a more straightforward and, to my mind, compelling reading: “The grieving father asks his own brother whether God could really expect him to constrain himself to ingest meat in this moment of his grief”—that is, to follow the prescribed rules in spite of his natural, human emotional need—”and Moses concedes that Aaron is right.”

There is much we could say here—about regulations and emotions, about the duties of office and the duties and realities of personal mourning, about the varied ways we respond to enormous personal loss. As I reflect on my experience outside the drug store the other night, I find my ruminations hovering around the ways our religious practices can suppress or channel our heart-minds. Sometimes these dynamics can serve us well (for instance, if we’re angry at someone), and sometimes they can serve us poorly (if we excuse our not giving to someone in need by a rule-based tale we tell ourselves). In my own life and in the lives of many others, I have found the structure of Jewish law to be an enormously helpful anchor during the storm of grief. But, like all structures—which are expressions of gevura, limitation and boundedness—these rules can, if misapplied, smother our hesed, the holy font of loving connection.

One other thing went through my mind outside Walgreen’s on Wednesday night: It was the beginning of Yom HaShoah. In the current political environment, I found it hard not to imagine what could potentially befall this family—and what, perhaps, contributed to the banal, if slightly uncomfortable, indifference so many people seemed to demonstrate as they walked by a father and three small children with a cardboard sign that plaintively asked, “Please help.”

The lessons of the Shoah are too many and too numerous to discuss here, at the end of my weekly message. But drawing on the story of Aaron and Moses in our Torah portion, I would suggest that we all can and should be checking in with ourselves: As a people defined by a commitment to law and justice, and as citizens in a democratic republic who therefore each bear a portion of the collective sovereign power, are the laws we live by diminishing or enhancing the image of God? Do our actions, as individuals and as a society, cultivate cruelty or compassion? Are our hearts becoming harder or softer?

The high point of the inauguration of the Mishkan—the high point, perhaps, of the entire Torah—achieved just before everything goes so wrong, is blessing: “Moses and Aaron then went into the tent of meeting. When they came out, they blessed the people; and the glory of YHVH appeared to all the people” (Lev. 9:23). This is a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham: “And you shall be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). The simple question we should ask ourselves all the time is: Is my action, is our action, a blessing in the world?

Last month I was honored to share some words of Torah during a plenary session at the convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Chicago, alongside two wonderful colleagues: Rabbi Yael Vurgan and Dr. Claire Sufrin. The three of us were asked to spend 15 minutes each sharing a text that has helped us cultivate resilience over these recent difficult months. 

The text I taught came from Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl’s Meor Einayim, along with a poem by Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt. You can view the sources here and you can watch my talk—along with the other two talks—at this link, using the password: ccar2025. My talk is first.

The other day I found myself thinking back five years, to the first Pesach we celebrated during the Covid pandemic. I remembered the strange feeling of loneliness and isolation. I remembered how families struggled to figure out whether and how they could do “Zoom seders” (and, frequently, how they would manage to get less tech-savvy relatives into the “room”). I remembered the unusual experience of cooking just for my family and no guests. Perhaps you remember that time, too.

I also remember that Pesach 2020 afforded new insight into what it might have felt like for our ancestors to seek protection inside their homes as a plague raged beyond the threshold. Home became even more of a refuge than it normally is, and in those early days many folks went to even more extraordinary lengths to keep their homes pure: Wiping down items from the grocery store before they came into the kitchen, keeping repair workers standing at a distance beyond the front door. While I had an academic sense of purity rituals before Covid, Pesach 2020 provided a deeper understanding.

Purity is, of course, a theme of Passover. In ancient times, in order to offer the Pesach sacrifice one had to be in a state of ritual purity (tahor). At the same time, offering that sacrifice was a sacred duty of every Israelite. So what happens if, through no fault of your own, you’re ritually impure at Pesach and can’t offer the sacrifice? In Numbers 9 we find the highly unusual provision of Pesach Sheni, a make-up opportunity: you offer the sacrifice a month later. No other communal observance quite compares. (If you were ritually impure for the make-up, then you’re out of luck. There’s a limit.)

While we don’t offer a Pesach sacrifice these days, the impulse toward purity remains a deep part of Pesach for many. Most prominently that shows up in the way we relate to chametz. In his very first entry on the laws of Pesach, Maimonides writes, “Anyone who intentionally eats an olive’s size of chametz on Pesach… is liable for karet, being spiritually cut off from the Jewish people, as Exodus 12:15 states: ‘Whoever eats leaven… will have his soul cut off.'” Likewise, he subsequently reminds us, it is forbidden to own or derive benefit from chametz on Pesach (though this prohibition doesn’t carry quite as high a penalty).

In many Jewish homes, including my own, all of this serves to make the atmosphere thick with a sense of purity and impurity around Pesach. Many Jews want to get the chametz out of their homes. Stories are told of Jewish mothers and grandmothers (permit me to gender essentialize for a moment—though in my own house this character would be played by me) who ruthlessly police the household for wayward children munching on a sandwich or a cookie after the kitchen has been kashered. The slightest trace of impurity is a threat.

All of which has, I think, given purity a bit of a bad rap. Certainly it can be misapplied. A focus on purity can, of course, lead to a heavy emphasis on policing the boundaries and thus to exclusion, persecution, and worse—see the Nazi racial purity laws, American laws against miscegenation, or Pharaoh’s own maniacal effort to eradicate Jewish baby boys, for textbook examples. Yet in the appropriate wariness to purity many of us have developed in response to these abuses, I think we may have left behind some good things.

In a recent talk at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, Gil Fronsdal pointed toward what we might experience in a healthy approach to purity. After he first began meditating in a monastery, Gil shared, he “started feeling this amazing sense of purity within. And I could feel that if I had certain thoughts that were not so pure, how it was a kind of violence… that shut down this place of purity that felt so healthy and good, that felt like home in a way… I felt free from a lot of the kind of inner conflict, the way that greed and hatred were a kind of a loss of freedom because they become compulsions that are difficult to put down, they drive us. And so there’s a kind of freedom from living with a deep sense of virtue.”

As I listened to Gil’s talk, it struck me this kind of purity was akin to the deeper spiritual experience of the practices of purity and impurity that surround Pesach. Chametz, of course, is not only about the food—it’s about the inner chametz too, the inner compulsions that keep us from being truly free servants of the Divine. The practice of eating matzah can be understood as an invitation to “flatten” ourselves—to let go of ego and self-centeredness. Maimonides himself reminds us that the commandment to destroy and rid ourselves of all chametz in our possession is not simply a physical or legal maneuver, but ultimately involves the work of the heart: “What is the destruction to which the Torah refers? To nullify chametz within one’s heart and to consider it as dust, and to resolve within the heart that one possesses no chametz at all: all the chametz in one’s possession being as dust and as a thing of no value whatsoever.” (Laws of Chametz and Matzah 2:2).

While I have no desire to return to Pesach 2020, nor to descend into the oppressive potentialities of a discourse of purity and impurity, the tradition invites us into this richer spiritual experience of reclaiming purity as a form of recalibrating what we hold onto and what we let go of. My sense is that, in some communities at least, while observing the Seder ritual remains a central part of Pesach, for many folks this notion of giving up ownership of our chametz—either by giving it away or by selling it to someone who isn’t Jewish or doing the true heart-work of relinquishing our claim of ownership over it and thus its claim of ownership over us—is not as front of mind.

So this year, as issues of borders and possession and purity swirl powerfully around us in current events, I suggest we step into the challenge and invitation of our tradition—that alongside the physical work of preparation, we do the heart-work as well. For Jews, Liberation Day is not a political slogan, and it is not limited to questions of economic or political freedom. It should not be about nationalism or racism or other oppressive misapplications of purity. For Jews, Liberation Day is Pesach, the time when we see ourselves as once again leaving the political and spiritual constraints of the stifling confines of Egypt. To leave behind that constriction and step into our freedom—that is an experience of genuine, wholesome purity. May we experience it this year.