Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l
Emor contains a chapter dedicated to the chaggim of the Jewish calendar. It is distinctive from the other accounts of the festivals in the Torah. Unlike the Shemot and Devarim passages, this chapter includes Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Shabbat in the list of the festivals. Strangely, the Torah here seems to be calling Shabbat both a moed, an appointed time, and a mikra kodesh, a sacred assembly, which it does nowhere else.
The list of the chaggim in Vayikra emphasizes not the social dimension we find in Devarim, or the sacrificial dimension we find in Bamidbar, but rather the spiritual dimension of encounter, closeness, the meeting of the human and the Divine. This explains why we find in this chapter, more than in any other, two key words. One is moed, the other is mikra kodesh, and both are deeper than they seem.
The word moed does not just mean “appointed time.” We find the same word in the phrase Ohel Moed meaning “Tent of Meeting.” If the Ohel Moed was the place where God met the people, then the mo’adim in our chapter are the times when God meets His people. This idea is given beautiful expression in the last line of the mystical song we sing on Shabbat, Yedid Nefesh, “Hurry, beloved, for the appointed time [moed] has come.” Moed here means a tryst – an appointment made between lovers to meet at a certain time and place.
As for the phrase mikra kodesh, it comes from the same root as the word that gives the entire book its name: vayikra, meaning “to be summoned in love.” A mikra kodesh is not just a holy day. It is a meeting to which we have been called in affection by One who holds us close.
Much of the book of Vayikra is about the holiness of place, the Mishkan. Some of it is about the holiness of people, the Kohanim, the Priests, and Israel as a whole, as “a kingdom of priests.” In our parsha, in Vayikra chapter 23, the Torah turns to the holiness of time and the times of holiness.
We are spiritual beings, but we are also physical beings. We cannot be spiritual, close to God, all the time. That is why there is secular time as well as holy time. But one day in seven, we stop working and enter the presence of the God of creation. On certain days of the year, the festivals, we celebrate the God of history. The holiness of Shabbat is determined by God alone because He alone created the universe. The holiness of the festivals is partially determined by us (i.e., by the fixing of the calendar), because history is a partnership between us and God. But in two respects they are the same. They are both times of meeting (moed), and they are both times when we feel ourselves called, summoned, invited as God’s guests (mikra kodesh).
We can’t always be spiritual. God has given us a material world with which to engage. But on the seventh day of the week, (and originally seven Yom Tov days each year), God gives us dedicated time in which we feel the closeness of the Shechinah and are bathed in the radiance of God’s love.
