“Humiliation as Blasphemy”
Parashat Emor — May 8, 2004

Just yesterday, when the Cantor and I were reviewing the maftir portion with our Bar Mitzvah, we were reflecting on the fact that the last section of the Torah reading, the one in which we’re told about the blasphemer, seems to come out of nowhere.

There we are, reading about the Tabernacle, with its Ner Tamid, its weekly loaves of bread arranged every Shabbat; having just finished reviewing the holidays and how they are to be observed, and then, in the middle of all that, comes a disturbing episode: a particular, simple Israelite, about whom we don’t know very much, blasphemes. We’re told that Moses doesn’t know what to do, so he’s put in detention, and then God declares that he should be taken outside the camp to be stoned by everyone. At the very end of the parashah, we’re told that this is exactly what Moses and the Children of Israel did.

Occasionally, as part of our Torah study, we do a psychodrama—we actually act out a scene from the Bible as a way of coming to understand it better. I’m sure it’s fairly obvious to all of us why this isn’t a particularly appropriate passage for a psychodrama: it’s disturbing for so many reasons. First, why did that person behave the way he did? We are told that there was a fight, and so the suggestion is that he acted in the heat of anger. But why, really? And the punishment is so severe, and carried out in a way so contrary to our modern sensibilities!

The verb “he blasphemed” is “va-yikov”. It helps us to understand its significance if we reflect on the fact that it’s described as “cursing” God in the same verse. Now today, blaspheming isn’t the problem it once was—at least in our society. (It’s not true worldwide, of course: my understanding is that blaspheming is still a grave offense in other parts of the world.)

But what make it wrong? What’s the problem? The reason it’s condemned is that it is an example of behavior that doesn’t just bring down condemnation on oneself—it also reflects poorly on God. It is, then, an example of hillul ha-shem—profaning God’s name. What is hillul ha-shem? It’s behaving in such a way that others think badly not just of you, but of the values, the people in the community you stand for.

Jews have long been acutely conscious of this. When a Jew would publicly behave reprehensibly, the old expression used to be, “What will the gentiles think?” “This will disgrace us in the eyes of the nations among whom we dwell.” (This kind of response is as old as the Bible. When Jacob’s sons Shimon and Levi go out and murder the citizens of Sh’chem in response to the rape of their sister, Dina, Jacob cries out: “Your act will cause me to stink among the people of the land!”)

But hillul ha-shem, the desecration of God’s name, doesn’t just include acts which reflect badly on one’s people in a general sense; hillul ha-shem includes acts which, by their nature, are an affront to God—as much an affront as blaspheming.

A classic example of such an act is humiliation. Humiliating another person in public (halbanat pnei havero ba-rabim) is considered to be akin to shedding innocent blood. Why is this? Because when you humiliate another, you cause the blood to flow in his face, as he alternately blushes and blanches. And why is such an act a hillul ha-shem? Because human beings were created in the image of God. And when we humiliate another human being, it’s as if we’re humiliating God.

The Talmud gives us examples of things we might say that can be humiliating, and which are therefore forbidden. For example, we are not to remind someone of his humble origins. We are not to remind someone of something shameful in his past that, having forsworn, he would like to forget. We can’t tease someone in a way that is humiliating. The Talmud gives a wonderful example: If there’s a case of a hanging in someone’s family record, we don’t say to him: “Hang this fish up for me!”

Interestingly, these are all things we might say that might be humiliating; needless to say, acting toward another in a demeaning way would be prohibited by a kal va-homer argument: if words are forbidden, how much more so is behavior?

Humiliation is, for us Jews, a serious issue. We see it in the siddur: In the ahavah rabbah prayer right before the Sh’ma, we say, “v’lo nevosh l’olam va-ed,” “May we never be brought to shame.” We Jews know what it means to be brought to shame. During the Holocaust, it was part of the Nazi strategy to humiliate Jews, sometimes just prior to slaughtering them. Demeaning Jews helped their oppressors to see them as less than human, allowing them to treat them that way.

Ironically, Jewish sensitivities to humiliation became so well-enshrined in law, that the punishment that we read in the Torah today, the public stoning of the blasphemer, would never be carried out in that way today, for the simple reason that it would be seen as humiliating to the accused to be publicly put to death in that way. Today, we have done away with public humiliation as an element of punishment. The stockades of Salem are now, thank God, just tourist attractions—at least in our part of the world.

I don’t think I need to say another word about this: we all know how disgraceful it is to publicly humiliate another. We all can see that it is the closest thing we can imagine today to blasphemy. Everything is at stake when we demean another—most of all, our humanity.

But a people, a society, should be judged not by how those who may be in a position to represent it misbehave, but how it responds when such behavior comes to light. I hope and pray that we will one day be believed throughout the world when we say that we believe that all human beings were created in the image of God and that we are committed to acting accordingly.