Devar Torah on Parashat Acharei Mot - Kedoshim given at Temple Israel on 5/9/2025
(Leviticus 16:1 – 20:27)
We have another double-portion this week, Acharei Mot (which comprises Leviticus chapters 16 through 18) and Kedoshim (which comprises Leviticus chapters 19 and 20). I’d like to focus my dvar torah this evening on a few aspects of the first of those two portions.
Parashat Acharei Mot opens with a chapter-long description of Yom Kippur. Indeed, that chapter also comes up on Yom Kippur itself as the special holiday Torah portion for Yom Kippur morning.
First the parasha describes in close detail the role that Aaron, in his capacity as Kohen Gadol or “High Priest”, would carry out once a year on that specially designated day, the tenth day of the seventh month of the Biblical Calendar, the date we still observe today as Yom Kippur.
The Torah decrees the observance of Yom Kippur would be “chukat olam”/ “a law for all time.” And yet, our contemporary practice of Yom Kippur – even in the most Orthodox of settings -- is quite different from the Yom Kippur of the Biblical era. Our religious worship focuses on prayer rather than animal sacrifices. Our “atonement” is focused on our own moral failures rather than on ritual purification of a central sanctuary. Our process of teshuvah is between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and our fellow people, rather than being a ritual done on our behalf by a hereditary High Priest.
And yet, as far as Judaism is concerned, this is all still the expression of “chukat olam” – a law for all time – because we understand that the contours of the law, and the details of the law – evolve over time and vary in their application as context changes.
I was thinking about all of this because of a detail I noticed for the first time today after all these years of reading this Torah portion. In Leviticus 16:32, right after the Torah has described the practices of Yom Kippur for the second time in the chapter as “chukat olam”/ “a law for all time”, it says this:
וְכִפֶּ֨ר הַכֹּהֵ֜ן אֲשֶׁר־יִמְשַׁ֣ח אֹת֗וֹ וַאֲשֶׁ֤ר יְמַלֵּא֙ אֶת־יָד֔וֹ לְכַהֵ֖ן תַּ֣חַת אָבִ֑יו וְלָבַ֛שׁ אֶת־בִּגְדֵ֥י הַבָּ֖ד בִּגְדֵ֥י הַקֹּֽדֶשׁ׃
The priest who has been anointed and ordained to serve as priest in place of his father shall make expiation. He shall put on the linen vestments, the sacral vestments.
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything ambiguous about that verse. However, Rashi, commenting on that verse, notes that, according to the Talmud (Horayot 12a), during the days of King Josiah, the anointing oil specified in the Torah was hidden away, and yet, generations of High Priests after that continued to be ordained without it. And so, here also, we can see that a so-called “chukat olam” (“law for all time”) can be interpreted in a flexible manner when conditions change.
Earlier this week, the Roman Catholics of the world experienced the election of a new Pope, a post that we might think of as being in some ways analogous to the role of the ancient Kohen Gadol (“High Priest”) of the Biblical and early Rabbinic Eras.
All of us in the Jewish community, and all of the other billions of folks who are not Catholic, still have a stake in hoping that the new Pope will be a force for good in the world. Much has been made of the fact that Cardinal Robert Prevost, originally from Chicago, Illinois, has taken the name Pope Leo XIV. Thus, his choice of name invokes the memory of Pope Leo XIII who, in his famous 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, outlined the rights of workers to a fair wage, safe working conditions, and the formation of trade unions. News coverage I’ve been seeing this week suggests that, like Pope Francis before him, he is expected to focus much of his energies on the needs of the poor.
This is all to the good.
However, it has also been reported this week that back in 2012, he expressed some views on social issues that would strike us as reactionary.
As the New York Times reported:
“In a 2012 address to bishops, he lamented that Western news media and popular culture fostered ‘sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel.’ He cited the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ and ‘alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.’”[1]
However, that was thirteen years ago, and we can hope that the new Pope’s views have evolved on this issue, just as the practices around Yom Kippur in Parashat Acharei Mot have evolved – as even Rashi recognized back in the eleventh century.[2]
Parashat Acharei Mot is also, notoriously, the Torah portion which includes the verse, Leviticus 18:22, that has caused so much grief and injustice over so many centuries – the verse that states: וְאֶ֨ת־זָכָ֔ר לֹ֥א תִשְׁכַּ֖ב מִשְׁכְּבֵ֣י אִשָּׁ֑ה תּוֹעֵבָ֖ה הִֽוא׃ (“Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman, it is an abhorrence.”) Thankfully, many folks who take Torah seriously have come up with many ways to contextualize and to evolve our understanding of such problematic teachings so that folks like yours truly can feel welcome in Jewish community and, indeed, even train to become rabbis.
I want to say something about a gay Catholic author and activist who has had a great personal influence on me.
Back in the early 1970s, Brian McNaught was a writer and columnist for The Michigan Catholic, the weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Detroit. In 1974, McNaught founded the Detroit chapter of Dignity, the national gay Catholic organization. When McNaught, in an article about Dignity in the Detroit News, publicly came out as gay, the Michigan Catholic newspaper responded by dropping his column, and soon thereafter he was fired by the Diocese.
When I was coming to terms with being gay back in the late 1980s, I came across a book by Brian McNaught which consisted of a collection of his writings from the 1970s and 1980s. The book is called On Being Gay: Thoughts on Family, Faith and Love.
[Note: I then showed the congregation my copy of the book, which I had brought with me from home.]
Here’s my copy of that book which I purchased in 1989. Or rather, here’s my copy of the book that my straight woman friend Susan Weinstein, one of the first folks I came out to, purchased for me at my request because I was too embarrassed and scared at that time to have the nerve to bring it by myself up to the checkout counter of the book store in Falmouth, Maine where I had seen it --- and where I had previously, surreptitiously, briefly browsed its pages.
Well, decades later, Brian McNaught is alive and well and living with his longtime spouse in Florida. Here’s what he wrote in a public post on Facebook earlier today:
Thirteen years ago Pope Leo said unwelcoming things about LGBTQ people. His record on the issues is going to slowly change, if it hasn’t already.
Why do I say so? He comes from a humble schoolteacher background. He’s an Augustinian and he will hear from fellow Augustinians who are building bridges to LGBTQ people. Pope Francis was among his best friends and he plans to continue focusing on the needs of all people.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of the Archdiocese of Detroit said he couldn’t support me when I was being fired for being Gay by the Michigan Catholic Newspaper. When his brother came out, the wind shifted in his sails. He became one of the best known bishops to stand with us. Over the years, including just prior to his death, Bishop Gumbleton wrote to apologize to me for not being there for me when I asked. He said, “Brian, you were ahead of your time.”
I was ahead of his time. The same Holy Spirit that has guided me as a Gay Catholic educator on LGBTQ issues for over fifty years is guiding the papacy of Leo. If you don’t believe me, look at the blood vessel-popping outrage of conservative Catholic Republicans.[3]
In Brian McNaught’s book On Being Gay: Thoughts on Family, Faith and Love, one of the chapters is an essay that he originally wrote in 1985 entitled “Listening to the Voice Within.” In that essay he recounts how the Israelites complained against Moses after they came forth from Egypt, and as they found themselves at the shore of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s armies chasing after them.
I’ll conclude my dvar Torah with McNaught’s inspiring words that ring out to me on this Shabbat when the Catholics of the world have a new Pope — and when Jews around the world are reading Torah portions that call upon us to evolve in our outlooks if we are to continue to see our heritage as chukat olam/ “a law for all time.”
And so McNaught writes:
If we gay people listen carefully, we can hear other voices of history echo our anxiety.
When the Jews left Egypt, many of them did so with mixed emotions. They were excited by the sense of independence and self-determination which Moses promised them, but they were also frightened of the unknown. When they realized that Pharaoh and his army were rapidly pursuing them, some of them yelled at Moses, “Why did you do this to us? Why did you bring us out of Egypt? Did we not tell you this in Egypt when we said, ‘Leave us alone. Leave us serve the Egyptians’? Far better for us to be the slaves of the Egyptians than to die in the desert.”
Moses was probably hurt and confused by the frightened and angry responses of his people. Had he made a mistake in leaving Egypt? Was it better to be a slave? Why had he left in the first place?
It was the voice which had led Moses out of Egypt and it ws the voice in which he ultimately placed his trust. The voice which led Moses and the Jews out of slavery is the same voice which led gay men and women out of the closet. It is the same voice which whispered a dream to Martin Luther King, Jr. The voice which led an entire nation of Jews into a forty-year wandering in the desert is the same voice which led Gandhi to burn his English-made clothes; which led Caesar Chavez to politically organize his family and friends in the vineyards of California; which led Margaret Sanger to defy the law by providing birth control information to women.
The voice which speaks is the voice of God, which is the voice of life, which is the voice of self-affirmation. Moses heard the voice say “I am what I am.” Albin clears the stage in La Cage Aux Folles to proclaim “I am what I am.” The voice within is a constant but generally subtle longing to live life fully and equally; to live life authentically and to die knowing that you have bloomed to your full potential.[4]
Shabbat shalom.
© Rabbi David Steinberg (5785/2025)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/world/americas/pope-candidate-cardinal-robert-francis-prevost.html?searchResultPosition=2
[2] https://www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Leviticus.16.32.2?lang=bi
[3] https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16DmhWECB6/
[4] Brian McNaught, On Being Gay: Thoughts on Family, Faith and Love (St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp.160-161
