Ellen & Emor 2021

Hebrew 

I would like to dedicate these words to memory of our friend Ellen Carlebach z"l, who passed away about three-and-half years ago. I’ve been thinking about her a lot in the last six months, because she was one of the last children in the United States to contract polio before the vaccine became available. Nothing made her angrier than opposition to vaccines. Any time I see a picture of children hospitalized in iron lung respirators (as frequently appear in online vaccine debates), I remember her telling about the horror she felt when hospitalized and treated in an iron lung. She eventually recovered only to become ill with post-polio syndrome in her later years, which required her to use a wheelchair. Ellen died in England while visiting her daughter and was buried there. Therefore, the congregational memorial was delayed until the week we read Parashat Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23). I was asked to speak and so I turned to the portion and began to read.

If once I could have discounted verses like  Leviticus 21‎‏:‏‎17 “Speak to Aaron and say: No man of your ‎offspring through the ages who has a defect shall ‎be qualified to offer the food of his God” as the relic of another age, I couldn’t any longer. The insult cried out to the heavens.

I could not put the text aside, so I kept searching. A drasha by Rabbi Meesh Hammer-Kossoy of Pardes pointed me to a text from the BabylonianTalmud, Megillah 24b, concerning the priestly blessing – the last ceremonial remnant of the Temple service. Rav Huna and Rabbi Yohanan discuss whether a disabled priest could participate. Their conclusion was that they could but only if the townspeople were accustomed to him. That helped but only a little. The rabbis were willing to soften the rule, but only for “insiders.” Ellen would not have been satisfied. She wanted to go everywhere and do everything.

As the Torah, Talmud and Ellen raged at each other in my head, I began to think about them in the light of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s three eras of Jewish history. The first era was the time of the Temple when holiness was concentrated in one place, distant from daily life. There was a more centralization, severity and emphasis on externals (not mention the actual physical work that the priests needed to do). The verse from Leviticus made a certain amount of sense its time and place.

After the destruction, in Greenberg’s second era, holiness spread in the world, but also became more concealed. Rabbis took over the mantle of leadership, and were committed not only to the written text but also the lives of the real people with whom they lived. In the process they permitted integration people with disabilities who were otherwise part of the community.

Now in the third cycle, God is more distant, and communal responsibility increasingly rests on the community as a whole, which gives us the opportunity to expand the circle even further. 

Ellen truly believed that everyone has a mission in life and spoke of her work as an art instructor at a rehabilitation center as the mission for which polio had prepared her. I think she had an additional mission: being visible and present in the public sphere, so that an increasingly large number of people would learn to be comfortable in the presence of people, images of God, with differing abilities and varied forms.

The task Ellen bequeathed us is to continue building a world that is increasingly accepting, even when its hard. Perhaps especially when its hard.