Parashat Emor
I tend to receive a lot of calls during the week, but let me tell you about one of the funnier ones.
My dad called and asked if I wanted to go see Elvis. At first I was like what? When I figured he was talking about an impersonator, not the king of rock himself, my second question was “Is Nicky (my sister) coming?” My third question was, how can I relate this to the parasha? (Obviously)
There is a linguistic redundancy in this week's parsha. In it, Hashem tells Moshe to “Say to the Kohanim, the sons of Aaron, and tell them…”
It seems that the Torah is repeating itself, (“say…tell”), what is the significance of this repetition? A common understanding is that “say” refers to teaching the Kohanim, while “tell” refers to the importance of the kohanim teaching these laws over to their children. This highlights the importance of going above and beyond when we teach our children, and practicing what we preach when telling others to do the same thing.
Now, bringing it back to Elvis whose image lives on today in a way that many other artists do not. He has a huge fan base, and a great amount of people that live their life as his impersonators. These impersonators really embody the character of Elvis and go above and beyond trying to perfect their technique, hair and voice trying to replicate his true image.
In the same way we should try and teach the morals and values of the Torah and embody them completely. Rather than superficially teaching children about the classroom lessons of Judaism, our actions, the way we speak and our choices should embody Judaism, through this, we will truly learn it and teach it to others.
I landed up going to the concert (Nicky came too), to be honest, the guy looked nothing like Elvis, and he seemed a bit old to be doing the ‘jailhouse rock’, but he had a passion for Elvis, that was evident. That’s all we should have, evident passion, no matter if we are as off key as this guy was.
Shabbat Shalom
Sammy ✌️