Priestly Blessing / Birkat Cohanim (handout)

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

What feelings and memories (if any) does the threefold Blessing evokes for you?

Making Memories

I love that scene in the original 1961 movie "Parent Trap" when Susan (played by Hayley Mills) hugs her grandfather, sniffing his collar, refusing to let go.

When her grandfather asks what she’s doing, she responds:

“I’m making a memory. Someday when I’m quite grown up I’ll remember my grandfather, and how he smelled of peppermint and pipe tobacco.”

What questions do you have that arise from our text ?

Textual Analysis

There are in fact three separate blessings, which progress from

the blessing of physical protection, through the blessing of spiritual shelter, to the blessing of shalom – wholeness, completion or peace.

Accordingly, the three sections of the priestly benedictions illustrate an ascending order, starting with a blessing concerned with man’s material needs and then dealing with his spiritual wants, and finally reaching a climax combining both these factors together, crowning them with the blessing of peace. This ascending order and increasing surge of blessing is reflected in the language and rhythm.

Studies in Bemidbar, Nehama Leibowitz, p. 67

Part of the blessing’s power lies in the simplicity of its structure, which Bible scholar Jacob Milgrom describes as “a rising crescendo”: There are three words in the first line, five in the second, and seven in the third; fifteen consonants in the first line, twenty in the second, and twenty five in the third. The sense conveyed is of increasing, overflowing divine blessing.

BLESSING AND LOVE

For the past several hundred years this blessing has been recited by parents at the beginning of Shabbat as a way of invoking God's blessing upon their children.

R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (Netziv, 1816-1893) picks up on the fact that the blessing, recited over the whole people, is nevertheless stated in the second-person singular, and interprets that each person be granted blessings appropriate to them. "For the one engaged in Torah-blessings for their study; for the one engaged in trade- for success in business," and so on. We can take the Netziv's point one significant step further: Divine blessing is not generic but specific to each individual and her needs, dreams, and yearnings. God sees and cherishes us as individuals,and we pray for blessings accordingly.

The Netziv's explanation of "and protect you" goes further:. "May God protect you, lest the very blessing you receive turn into a stumbling block." The blessing of wealth, for example, can lead to greed, or stinginess, or lack of empathy. Or it can lead to a perpetual state of anxiety that one does not have enough or that one may lose what one has earned Crucially, the Netziv points out, even the blessing of Torah learning can yield rotten fruit: The Torah scholar can easily become arrogant or cause a desecration of God's name.

The blessing traditionally recited by the priests before blessing the people is highly unusual.

Two questions emerge from this formula: First, why do the priests talk about being sanctified with the sanctity of Aaron instead of employing the usual formula, "who has sanctified us with God's commandments"? And second, why the mention of love at the end of the blessing?

The answer to our two questions is identical: Blessing depends on love. The Torah does not assign the priests the task of rote recitation. On the contrary, it calls upon them to love the people. Indeed, the Zohar declares that "a priest who does not love the people or is not loved by the people should not raise his hands to bless them" (Naso, 147b). Aaron, the first priest, is remembered as "a lover of peace and a pursuer of peace, one who love[d] people and brought them closer to Torah" (Mishnah, Avot 1:12). "The holiness of Aaron," says R. Shalom Noah Berezovsky (1911-2000), "flowed from his love." A priest devoid of love is a priest in name only.

In Reb Zalman's book "Davening", he describes in his chapter "Who am I to Bless?" how he once went for an audience with the late Lubavitche Rebbe. Reb Zalman tells how the Rebbe knew who he was and said to him "Zalman, you're a Priest, please keep me in mind when you recite the Priestly Blessing, during the high holy days".

By doing this the Rebbe was offering him a lesson, that when you offer a prayer to bring down a blessing it requires a postal address, don't do it just as a routine - keep specific people in mind. Bring down blessings for them.

He was, also, I think, showing Reb Zalman his own love by showing that he recognized him and also his important role as a Cohen.

In Midrash there are numerous parallels and interpretations of the verses of the Blessing all derived from the Song of Songs.

Midrash Tanhuma understands the hand-raising ritual as evoking the relationship between God and Israel. Song of Songs relates how one lover glimpses another: "There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the window, peering through the lattice" (Song of Song 2:9). In the midrashic interpretation, God is the lover peering at Israel through the lattice and window formed by the shape made by the hands of the priest raised in the priestly blessing.

In Midrash Tanhuma the people of Israel question the role of the priests in the blessing, saying to God: "We only need Your blessing." God responds, "I will stand with the priests and bless you."

"Behold, it is the litter of Solomon; sixty mighty men are about it, Of the mighty men of Israel. All of them wearing the sword, all experienced in battle, each with his sword at his side, prepared for the terrors of the night."(Song of Songs 3:7-8) -

in one interpretation of Midrash Numbers Rabbah the 60 armed men in the verse are the 60 letters of the 3-fold Priestly Blessing.

Customs and Practices

In Israel this blessing is recited daily at shacharit (and at mussaf on shabbatot and yom tov) in the synagogue in the Repetition of the Amidah, during which the kohanim, members of the hereditary priesthood, lift their hands over the congregation and recite this text, word by word. It is not recited in the afternoon, because kohanim must be sober, and so it is not said during those times of day when the kohen might have drunk wine; for that same reason, it is recited at Minhah on fast days, and on Yom Kippur is even recited at Neilah

In Ashkenazi Diaspora it is done at mussaf of festival days.

The formulation of the mitzvah of Birkat Cohanim shows it is a mitzva De'oraita - a positive mitzvah from the Torah for the Cohanim to bless the Jewish People every day. This is how it is codified by the Sefer HaHinuch. So how did the custom of not doing Birkat Cohanim daily start in the Diaspora?

Reasons given include:

The custom was to immerse in a mikveh before doing Birkat Cohanim. This was very hard to do in the Winter in Eastern Europe so they stopped doing it every day.

Rabbi Moshe Isserles wrote that "It has become the practice that the Cohanim do not raise their hands in blessing except on Yom Tov, as then they are in a state of happiness because of Yom Tov and a person who is in good spirits should administer the blessing. They are not in a state of happiness on other days even on Shabbatot as they are preoccupied with thoughts concerning their sustenance and over the cessation of their work. Even on Yom Tov they only do it at Musaf as then they are about to leave synagogue and rejoice in the celebration of Yom Tov."

Sephardi communities in diaspora also vary about when they do it - only days torah is read/ only shabbat/ every day/ only yom tov.....

The Reform/Conservative/Liberal Movements no longer classify Cohanim as a separate category, on the twofold basis that they no longer connect with God through Temple ritual and no longer pray for its rebuilding, nor for the return of the sacrifices, and because we cannot any longer be sure that those who believe themselves to be Cohanim really are of that priestly descent nor that there has not been a dislocation in their status. Because there are religious laws which disbenefit Cohanim they have abolished any meaning in this category in order to free the people to marry whom they will etc.

The Birkat Cohanim/Nesiyat Cappayim is therefore not given in Progressive liturgy in the way that the orthodox world does it. However the words of the prayer are powerful and meaningful, so this blessing is often given by the service leader at the end of the service, and in other liturgical contexts.

Antiquity:

It is very, very old.

An archaeological find in a burial chamber in Ketef Hinnom (South of the Old City of Jerusalem) in 1979 shows that this blessing goes at least as far back as the 7^th century BCE when the 1st Temple still stood and before the Babylonian exile.

Two tiny folded silver scrolls with different versions of this blessing and some other fragments of verses were discovered, each including the words “May YHWH bless you and guard you; may YHWH make his face shine upon you.”

This is the oldest text ever found, that occurs in the Hebrew Bible.

The scrolls must have been used as amulets by ancient Israelites more than 2,600 years ago.