APRIL 29 • 2021 | 35

W

hat is the most 
important quality 
for a reli-
gious leader — a sharp 
mind or a sensitive heart, 
a commitment to study 
or a commitment to 
lovingkindness?
This week’s parshah 
opens with the laws 
applying to the Kohanim, 
the religious, ritual 
leaders of Israel. The 
reading provides their 
quintessential leadership 
role: to direct the Jewish 
people in areas of the sacred 
and mundane, the ritually pure 
and impure, the teachings and 
the statutes, the details of the 

festivals and the prohibitions of 
the Sabbath. 
One of the greatest 
transgressions a Jew can 
commit is bitul zman, 
wasting or nullifying 
time. Conversely, one of 
the greatest accolades the 
Talmud can bestow upon 
anyone is that “their 
mouth never ceased 
from studying” (lo pasik 
pumey mi’girsa). 
There are many bib-
lical and talmudic state-
ments which strengthen 
the need for humane sensitivity 
as a critical subtext for any 
leader’s decision. For example, 
the Biblical definition of God’s 

ways and God’s glory, insofar 
as these concepts may be at all 
understandable to mortals, is 
“
A God of love, a compassion-
ate, powerful One who gives 
grace freely, long-suffering, 
filled with lovingkindness and 
truth” (Exodus 34:6).
This passage is the very 
source for the oral law and the 
way it is to be applied. The 
Talmud declares, “He who has 
Torah learning without good 
deeds is as if he is bereft of 
God.
” 
Our response literature, from 
Rabbi Moshe Isserles to Rabbi 
Moshe Feinstein and Rabbi 
Ovadia Yosef, is replete with 
amazing examples proving the 
importance of humane com-
passion as an overriding factor 
in halachic decision making.
Haim Grade, in his moving 
novel Rabbis and Wives, tells of 
a great Torah scholar known 
as the porush (the separated 
one) of Vilna, who refused 

to answer halachic questions. 
This self-imposed “exile” came 
about because when he was a 
student in Slobodka, his moth-
er had made a long trip to see 
him, but he was so involved 
in extra Yom Kippur Katan 
prayers and Talmudic studies 
that he had no time to see her. 
He was haunted by her last 
words, “I have a son, a tzadik 
[righteous man]” because he 
feared that these words were 
said not with pride, but rather 
with sarcastic irony.
I believe that the Kohanim, 
descendants of Aaron, the High 
Priest, who “loved all creatures 
and brought them closer to 
Torah,
” must bless the congre-
gation “with love” in order to 
stress the importance of love in 
meting out religio-legal judg-
ments. 

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is chancellor of 

Ohr Torah Stone and chief rabbi of Efrat, 

Israel.

Good Leadership 
Must Include Love

Rabbi 
Shlomo 
Riskin

Parshat Emor: 

Leviticus 

21:1-24:23; 

Ezekiel 

44:15-31. 

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