The Torah portion of Emor is filled with the laws of the priesthood and holidays. It is a portion about holiness in its most elevated forms. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the Torah introduces us to a man who cursed God.
“The son of an Israelite woman went out, and he was the son of an Egyptian man among the children of Israel, and they fought in the camp” (Vayikra 24:10).
The story is jarring. Who is this man? What is he doing here, in the middle of a section about holiness?
The Torah gives us almost nothing. His mother was Shlomit bat Divri, from the tribe of Dan. His father was Egyptian. And his name? The Torah doesn’t say. In a book that meticulously records the names of tribal leaders, census counts, and priestly lineages, this man doesn’t even get a name.
According to Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein, that is the beginning of his tragedy.
The Midrash fills in what the Torah leaves out. He came to pitch his tent among the tribe of Dan, the tribe of his mother. And the tribe of Dan turned him away.
“What business do you have pitching your tent in our camp?” they said. He answered that he was the son of a woman from their tribe. They cited the verse from Numbers— each man under his father’s flag — and sent him packing. He appealed to Moshe’s court. The ruling went against him. And then he blasphemed.
Rabbi Lichtenstein draws the portrait with unflinching clarity: this man had no social identity. No father’s tribe. No name. No place in the camp. The legal ruling was correct — the court ruled as it had to rule. But Rabbi Lichtenstein asks the question that haunts the story: did it have to end this way?
“The ability to greet and speak peaceably to even a blasphemer, to accept him and contain him, might have allowed him to reconnect with a sense that there was a place for him on the social level within the nation.”
The men of Dan weren’t wrong on the law. They were wrong on the person. They saw a ruling, not a human being. They gave him the correct answer and sent him away — and never stopped to ask what he actually needed. They never asked for his name.
This is precisely why the Torah places this story where it does. Rabbi Meir Goldwicht teaches that Leviticus is organized around different dimensions of holiness: the holiness of man (expressed through the laws of purity and impurity); the holiness of time (the festival calendar); the holiness of the land (Sabbatical and Jubilee years). Each domain has its laws, its boundaries, its requirements.
But the story of the blasphemer teaches that all of these forms of holiness rest on a foundation: holy speech.
This is also why, immediately following the story of the blasphemer, the Torah reviews the laws of damages: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. We tend to think of damages as the domain of physical harm. But the Torah places these laws here deliberately. The destruction you can wreak with your mouth is no less than what you can do with a rock or a sword. “Death and life are in the hand of the tongue” (Mishlei 18:21). King Solomon isn’t speaking in metaphor. He means it literally.
The men of Dan killed this man with their words — and they were sure they were just citing the law.
There will always be people in our communities who don’t quite fit. Who fall between categories. Whose origins are complicated, whose identities are unclear, whose presence makes others uncomfortable. The law may not always give them what they want. But the law says nothing about whether we greet them, include them, or acknowledge that they exist.
The blasphemer is remembered in the Torah for one terrible moment. But his story begins long before that — in the silence of people who answered his question correctly and never once looked him in the eye.
The book of Leviticus is about building a holy nation. The lesson of the blasphemer is that you cannot have a holy nation if your words are weapons. You cannot have holiness in time and place while destroying the person standing in front of you.
The crown of all holiness is not the Temple service. It is learning to speak — to the powerful and the marginal, to those who fit and those who don’t — as if every word matters.
Because it does.
