.webp)
Holy, But Not Here
- Avigail Gimpel
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
On disability, dignity, and what the Temple could not hold
A Dvar Torah for Parshat Emor
In memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and the Land of Israel:
Ephraim son of Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi son of Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo son of Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim son of Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel son of Revital and Elad, Yakir son of Chaya and Yehoshua, Ran son of Sara and Kenny.
Dedicated to my brother SonyPerlman, and the holy work of TheVillage, a Jewish sober community in Rockland County, a place that understands that the cracks are part of the whole, and that healing comes through them.
In a world that often recoils from brokenness, you do something radically different: you embrace it. You invite people in, you sit with them, you nurture them, and you remind them, again and again, of their own beauty, even when they have forgotten it themselves.
At The Village, those carrying deep and hidden mumim are not managed or fixed; they are met within their brokenness, and slowly restored from the inside out with love, with faith, and with full acceptance. This Torah is for the work you do every day: revealing that what looks broken on the outside is often where the deepest light lives.
THE QUESTION THAT HURTS
There are psukim in the Torah that feel almost scandalous to our Western sensibilities.
This is one of them.
As I read this pasuk, my first reaction was indignation. How can the Torah sound this unjust?
Parshat Emor tells us that a Kohen who has a physical disability may not perform the Temple service.
אִישׁ מִזַּרְעֲךָ לְדֹרֹתָם אֲשֶׁר יִהְיֶה בוֹ מוּם לֹא יִקְרַב לְהַקְרִיב לֶחֶם אֱלֹהָיו
"אִישׁ מִזַּרְעֲךָ לְדֹרֹתָם אֲשֶׁר יִהְיֶה בוֹ מוּם לֹא יִקְרַב לְהַקְרִיב לֶחֶם אֱלֹהָיו" (Vayikra 21:17)
The list is long — blindness, deafness, a broken limb, certain skin conditions, disproportion of limb. The Torah calls it a mum — a blemish, an imperfection, a visible mark of incompleteness.
The person with disabilities did not choose his disability. In many cases, he was born this way. This is simply the way God made him. Yet he is barred from the holiest service in Israel.
This feels like unfair exclusion, as though the Torah is saying that someone with a limitation stands farther from God.
The Torah is supposed to be just. What are we missing?
THE TORAH'S OTHER VOICE
Before we can begin to understand this command in Emor, let us go back to Kedoshim to understand how the Torah relates to disabilities.
Just one parasha earlier, the Torah says:
לֹא תְקַלֵּל חֵרֵשׁ וְלִפְנֵי עִוֵּר לֹא תִתֵּן מִכְשֹׁל וְיָרֵאתָ מֵּאֱלֹהֶיךָ אֲנִי ה׳
"Do not curse the deaf, and before the blind do not place a stumbling block — and you shall fear your God, I am Hashem." (Vayikra 19:14)
This is strong language from God. The deaf person cannot hear the insult nor can the blind person see the trap. No one may ever know what happened. The crime of hurting this vulnerable group of people usually goes unpunished.
That is exactly where God inserts His Name.
וְיָרֵאתָ מֵּאֱלֹהֶיךָ
Fear your God.
Where human accountability disappears, God says: I am still here.
The Torah is telling us something very clear. Vulnerability creates obligation. The weaker the person, the greater your responsibility.
Let's move even further back, to a conversation God had with Moshe at the burning bush.
When Moshe tells God that he cannot speak well, God answers:
מִי שָׂם פֶּה לָאָדָם אוֹ מִי יָשׂוּם אִלֵּם אוֹ חֵרֵשׁ אוֹ פִקֵּחַ אוֹ עִוֵּר הֲלֹא אָנֹכִי ה׳
"Who gives a mouth to man? Who makes one mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind — is it not I, Hashem?" (Shemot 4:11)
That is a shocking pasuk.
God takes full ownership. Blindness is not outside His plan, deafness is not a mistake, and human limitation is part of creation itself.
So now the question gets stronger.
The same Torah that commands us to protect the vulnerable, the same God Who says I created them this way, is the Torah that bars the Kohen baal mum from the altar.
How do those truths live together?
WHAT THE TORAH ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT THE BAAL MUM
The Torah first defines who the Kohen baal mum is, and only then addresses his role.
לֶחֶם אֱלֹהָיו מִקָּדְשֵׁי הַקֳּדָשִׁים וּמִן הַקֳּדָשִׁים יֹאכֵל
"The bread of his God — from the most holy things and from the holy things, he shall eat." (Vayikra 21:22)
He still eats from the korbanot and is permitted to enter the Kohen areas of the Mikdash. He still belongs.
Rashi points out that בני אהרן includes even בעלי מומים. He is fully a Kohen.
The Torah does not remove his kedushah; it limits the role of standing at the altar to perform the avodah.
The Torah is not asking whether he has worth. That was never up for discussion.
The question is narrower: what does the specific role of doing the avodah require?
WHY DOES THE ROLE REQUIRE WHOLENESS?
The classic commentaries are almost all working to answer the same problem: if the baal mum is still holy, why can he not serve?
Ramban compares the baal mum Kohen to the baal mum korban. Just as a korban brought on the mizbeach must be physically whole and free of visible blemish, the Kohen serving at the altar must reflect that same visible shleimut. The Mikdash is the place where people come to stand before God, and it must create awe, order, beauty, and a sense of wholeness. The issue is not the worth of the person, but the representational wholeness of the avodah (Ramban on Vayikra 21).
The Kohen is not standing there as a private person. He is part of the avodah itself.
Sforno also frames this around kavod haMikdash — the honor of the Sanctuary. The avodah must create reverence and visible dignity in the holy space.
Sefer HaChinuch frames this in practical human terms: people are affected by what they see. Human beings respond to form. We are calmer in beauty and trust order. We are drawn to symmetry. The Torah works with human psychology, not against it.
The baal mum is not spiritually lacking. The people coming to the Mikdash need a certain kind of visible order to help them approach God.
That changes the entire conversation. The Torah teaches that the Mishkan was built as a symbolic space. Visible wholeness belongs to the role, not to a person’s worth or holiness.
V. THE GOLDEN CALF — WHY PEOPLE NEEDED A PERFECT CONTAINER
This week, while I was working through this question, one thing kept me up at night. I understood the halacha and the commentaries, but I still could not understand why visible wholeness mattered so much.
Then I suddenly got a flash of the Golden Calf, and went back to that story to look for the missing piece.
Moshe is gone for forty days and the nation panics.
וַיַּרְא הָעָם כִּי בֹשֵׁשׁ מֹשֶׁה
Ki boshesh Moshe is more than a delay. It is fear. The anchor is gone. A newly freed people are standing in the desert without the person who held their connection to God.
So they do something deeply human.
They reach for something visible and stable. They build the Golden Calf.
The fear is justified. The need for order and calm is human. The mistake is where they place it.
Instead of using structure and beauty to help them search for God, they turn the structure itself into the answer.
Ramban explains that the building of the Mishkan is a repair for that mistake.
God does not remove the human need for a container. He validates it and gives it form.
Build a space of order, symmetry, predictability, and beauty. Create something structured enough to calm fear, something stable enough to hold you. Let the physical space settle the chaos inside you.
And then—once you feel held—use that space to reach toward God instead of replacing Him with it.
That is why the Kohen is so vital.
He is part of that container. His visible wholeness helps create a space where people can arrive with their own brokenness and still move toward God.
The real issue is what the people need to approach God. The role requires a vessel that creates enough stability for that movement to happen.
A SHORT STORY
Years ago, I was working with a client in a deep and meaningful process.
One day, she ran into me at a hospital. I was there for a health issue of my own.
At our next meeting, she asked why I had been at the hospital. I answered honestly.
That was our last meeting.
She had seen my mum.
She began worrying about me. She felt guilty taking up space. Once she saw my brokenness, I was no longer the stable person holding the room, and the work collapsed.
That is exactly what Sefer HaChinuch is describing.
The Kohen with a mum is excluded from the avodah because people often need the container to look whole in order to trust what it is holding.
WHY DOES GOD CREATE LIMITATION?
The deeper question is why Hashem would create a mum at all.
Why blindness? Why deafness? Why limitation that a person never chose?
When Moshe says he cannot speak, God answers:
מִי שָׂם פֶּה לָאָדָם אוֹ מִי יָשׂוּם אִלֵּם אוֹ חֵרֵשׁ אוֹ פִקֵּחַ אוֹ עִוֵּר הֲלֹא אָנֹכִי ה׳
Who makes one mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I?
God takes responsibility. That means disability is inside creation, part of our experience by design.
The Maharal describes galut itself as a state of broken order — something outside the natural wholeness of the world. Human life carries חסרון, incompleteness, limitation, and dependence, while true שלמות belongs only to God.
The person with a visible limitation is not the exception. He is the mirror. All of us are fragile, all of us have limitations. Some people simply carry it where everyone can see it.
But many mumim are hidden.
Addiction is a mum. Trauma is a mum. Emotional disconnection is a mum. The person who looks whole on the outside may be carrying an enormous fracture inside.
Some people arrive at life with visible brokenness. Others spend years hiding invisible ones. The Torah is speaking to both.
The deepest self is never defined by the wound because the tzelem Elokim cannot be damaged by what happens to the body. Sometimes the broken place becomes the place of the deepest light. A person who has walked through darkness often sees differently, reaches differently, and holds others differently.
The Gemara says (Nedarim 41a):
אין עני אלא בדעת
The deepest poverty is inner poverty — loss of connection, loss of self, loss of relationship with God.
That is the mum that matters most.
AFTER THE TEMPLE FELL
The Mishkan could not hold forever. The Beit HaMikdash stood, and it fell, twice. The perfect container was lost.
It was a devastating destruction, with immense ongoing loss and suffering for the Jewish people. And yet, alongside that pain, there is also a way to understand it as a turning point—one that forced something new to grow.
As long as the Temple stood, people could rely on an external structure to create holiness. When it fell, that work moved inward.
Prayer replaced korbanot — וּנְשַׁלְּמָה פָרִים שְׂפָתֵינוּ (Hoshea 14:3).
The heart replaced the altar. And perhaps this is already in the Torah itself: וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם — not in it, but in them (Shemot 25:8).
The Mishkan trained us in a human language of connection — structure, beauty, symmetry — so we can feel held and learn how to reach. But the destination was always deeper: that the Shechinah rests within imperfect people.
Without the Beit HaMikdash, we begin to experience that more directly. The external container gives way to an inner one. The same need for order and holding is still there, but now it is carried by tefillah, by Torah, and by the human heart learning to become a place where God can dwell.
And then something else happened — something we are still living inside of.
The Temple was destroyed.
Not just lost. Destroyed. With blood, with fire, with exile. A people torn from their place, from their center, from the very structure that was meant to hold them.
And into that space, Chazal say something almost impossible:
כָּל מָקוֹם שֶׁגָּלוּ שְׁכִינָה עִמָּהֶם
Wherever they were exiled, the Shechina went with them. (Megillah 29a)
Right there — in the displacement, in the fracture, even before rebuilding, even before any sense of wholeness returned.
The Zohar takes it even further:
לֵית אֲתַר פָּנוּי מִינֵּיהּ
There is no place empty of Him.
He is present in exile, in the broken body, in the shattered psyche, even in the wound that never fully healed.
David HaMelech gives us the language we live with until today:
לֵב נִשְׁבָּר וְנִדְכֶּה אֱלֹהִים לֹא תִבְזֶה
A broken heart — God does not reject.
He receives it, He meets us there.
After the destruction of the Temple, the broken heart does not stand outside the avodah, it becomes the avodah.
Suddenly, the whole structure shifts.
The Mishkan taught us how to connect through order, beauty, symmetry, and visible wholeness. But once it is gone, something deeper is revealed:
God was never contained there.
The Mishkan was how we learned to reach Him, but He was always willing to be found right inside what looks broken.
WHERE THIS LEAVES US
History moves us somewhere.
The Golden Calf generation needed a perfect external container. The Mishkan generation needed visible wholeness. Galut asks more of us: to hold structure and brokenness together.
Can we see the mum and still recognize holiness?
Can we trust that a broken vessel can still carry light?
That is the movement of Emor—from surface to depth.
The Kohen with a mum is still holy. The wounded person still bears the Divine image. The broken vessel still holds light.
Real spiritual maturity is learning to see that.
There is no place empty of Him.
For more information about #TheVillage, or to support them, visit their website. You will surely be blessed by the remarkable work they are doing, saving neshamot daily:
Comments