I write this from a hospital bed in Tel Hashomer with a fever of 102 F.
I celebrated Yom Ha’Atzmaut last week like a true Israeli: a mangal with family, fatty meat well past what my gallbladder had agreed to, and the patriotic conviction that a holiday is best honored through cholesterol. My gallbladder protested and a few hours later I was in the hospital doubled over in excruciating pain. The admission was for gallstones; I am on IV antibiotics, awaiting surgery.
Being back in a hospital stirs up a torrent of deep emotions. My last extended hospital stay was with my late father, accompanying him through his battle with cancer. The last time I was in a hospital room was the day he died. To me, a hospital is a colosseum, the arena where one duels the angel of death.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe pushed back against exactly this framing. He refused to call hospitals by the standard Hebrew “beit cholim,” house of the sick, and insisted on “beit refuah,” house of healing. His counsel to the cardiologist Dr. Bernard Lown was even sharper: “Do not sanctify illness, sanctify health.” Words, he understood, shape reality. Call the building a place of sickness and you sanctify the disease. Call it a place of healing and you orient the institution toward life.
And yet my visceral reaction to the hospital as the colosseum where one battles the angel of death persists. Why?
Atul Gawande gives part of the answer in Being Mortal. He argues that modern medicine’s organizing question has narrowed to one objective: prevent death. The result is an industry that often extends life at the cost of living. The colosseum, ancient or modern, is built around the wrong question. He believes medicine should shift the goal from survival to well-being.
In almost every ancient civilization, priests were the masters of death. Egyptian priests embalmed corpses and conducted them through the Book of the Dead. Canaanite priests offered children to Moloch. Aztec priests cut beating hearts from sacrificial victims. Greek and Roman priests presided over offerings to the gods of the underworld. To be a priest in the ancient world was, in large part, to manage the boundary with death.
This week’s parsha, Emor, draws the line in the opposite direction. So does much of Sefer Vayikra.
Read carefully, the book is preoccupied with death. The yoledet, the woman after childbirth, is tameh and brings a chatat offering because of her brush with death. The metzora is sent outside the camp and sits alone, effectively in shiva for himself. The nevelah, an animal that dies in the field, is tamei. Shadal explains the logic. Death, in the Torah’s view, is an expression of G-dly wrath, and whatever brushes against it carries the residue. None of this is morally accusatory.
Modern practice quietly concedes Shadal’s point. We do not actually go to the hospital to give birth. We go to avoid dying from the complications of giving birth. That is why the long-predicted mass migration to home births has never quite happened. Childbirth is, and remains, a brush with death.
By contrast, when a person performs shechita, the halachic slaughter, the animal does not become tamei. The killing is human and deliberate, not the wrath of G-d breaking into the field.
And then comes Emor. The opening verse is unambiguous: “He shall not become impure for the dead among his people.” The kohen, central to Israelite religious life, is forbidden to engage with death. He may not enter a cemetery, attend most funerals, or bury even the ba’al b’amav, the great one of his nation. The exceptions are narrow, limited to closest relatives.
Set this against the priest of the ancient world, see the reversal of the role of the priest. Where the Egyptian priest’s authority came from his command of the corpse, the kohen’s authority requires distance from it. The kohen embodies a Torah of life. Contact with death would dilute that representation. The kohanim were spread among the tribes, without a land of inheritance, so that the channel of holiness would run through the country itself. Effectively bringing the experience of kedusha of the Beit HaMikdash to the “everyman.” They were not chaplains of dying. They were teachers of living.
Here the parsha pivots my whole frame.
I came into this hospital thinking the hospital colosseum was the main arena in life. Where one battles for survival. The kohen teaches a different perspective. The hospital colosseum is not the main arena of life. The main arena of life, metaphorically, is the Beit HaMikdash, and its contest is not the duel with death. Its mission is the formation to “anshei kodesh,” people of holiness.
The kohen’s holiness is intrinsic and hereditary, conferred at birth. Ours is not. The rest of us are not born kadosh. We are commanded to become anshei kadosh by building a life of kedusha, of sanctity and purpose. The kohen represents the destination. We are still walking the road.
So when I leave this beit refuah, I want to leave it with the right map. The colosseum was never the main arena. The main arena is the days I will, iy”H, return to: family, constructive work, learning, prayer, the slow construction of a life that has direction and kedusha. The duel with the angel of death is real, but it was never the main event. The main event is the kedusha a person builds in the time he is given.
May we have the clarity and conviction to spend that time well.