SPIRIT
TORAH PORTION
Good Leadership Must Include Love
W
festivals and the prohibitions of hat is the most the Sabbath. important quality One of the greatest for a relitransgressions a Jew can gious leader — a sharp commit is bitul zman, mind or a sensitive heart, wasting or nullifying a commitment to study time. Conversely, one of or a commitment to the greatest accolades the lovingkindness? Rabbi Talmud can bestow upon This week’s parshah Shlomo Riskin anyone is that “their opens with the laws mouth never ceased applying to the Kohanim, Parshat Emor: from studying” (lo pasik the religious, ritual Leviticus pumey mi’girsa). leaders of Israel. The 21:1-24:23; There are many bibreading provides their Ezekiel 44:15-31. lical and talmudic statequintessential leadership ments which strengthen role: to direct the Jewish the need for humane sensitivity people in areas of the sacred and mundane, the ritually pure as a critical subtext for any leader’s decision. For example, and impure, the teachings and the Biblical definition of God’s the statutes, the details of the
ways and God’s glory, insofar as these concepts may be at all understandable to mortals, is “A God of love, a compassionate, powerful One who gives grace freely, long-suffering, filled with lovingkindness and truth” (Exodus 34:6). This passage is the very source for the oral law and the way it is to be applied. The Talmud declares, “He who has Torah learning without good deeds is as if he is bereft of God.” Our response literature, from Rabbi Moshe Isserles to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is replete with amazing examples proving the importance of humane compassion as an overriding factor in halachic decision making. Haim Grade, in his moving novel Rabbis and Wives, tells of a great Torah scholar known as the porush (the separated one) of Vilna, who refused
to answer halachic questions. This self-imposed “exile” came about because when he was a student in Slobodka, his mother had made a long trip to see him, but he was so involved in extra Yom Kippur Katan prayers and Talmudic studies that he had no time to see her. He was haunted by her last words, “I have a son, a tzadik [righteous man]” because he feared that these words were said not with pride, but rather with sarcastic irony. I believe that the Kohanim, descendants of Aaron, the High Priest, who “loved all creatures and brought them closer to Torah,” must bless the congregation “with love” in order to stress the importance of love in meting out religio-legal judgments. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is chancellor of Ohr Torah Stone and chief rabbi of Efrat, Israel.
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