Synagogue Sermon
Aristocracy in Jewish Society (1973)
The quality and the character of a society can usually be measured by the kind of people it chooses to honor. A nation’s heroes are normally a good index of its mores. You can know a people by observing whether it esteems bull fighters or poets, cloak-and-dagger operatives or philosophers, politicians or musicians, men of wealth and success or spiritual personalities. With this in mind, it is instructive to inquire what kind of society Judaism envisions for us, and how successful we Jews have been, in practice, in conforming to this normative society and the ideals laid down for it by our faith. At the end of the last portion, Bamidbar, we read the commandment נשא את ראש בני קהת מתוך בני לוי, to take the census and assign duties to the family of Kehat, of the tribe of Levi. This morning’s sidra, Naso, continues with the commandments of the census: נשא את ראש בני גרשון גם הם to take the census and assign the duties to the family of Gershon. Now, it has been asked: why is Kehat given precedence over Gershon, especially since Gershon is the בכור, or first born? The Rabbis of the Midrash put it this way: אעפ״י שגרשון בכור, ומצינו בכל מקום שחלק הכתוב כבוד לבכור, לפי שהיה קהת טוען הארון ששם התורה, הקדימו הכתוב לגרשון.Although Gershon was older, Kehat received priority because his task was to carry the Ark which contained the Torah.We learn, therefore, that כבוד התורה is greater than כבוד הבכורה, that scholarship in Jewish life ranks over primogeniture.Jewish law clearly lays down the priorities of respect and honor due to different categories of persons, and this order represents the ideal hierarchy of Jewish society. In it, primacy is given to the sage, the wise man, the scholar. Unlike Plato, the Rabbis did not place at the apex of society the Jewish version of the philosopher-king. They did not identify the man of intellect with the man of political authority and civic sovereignty. Rather, they gave the highest esteem to the חכם, the Jewish equivalent of a philosopher…
