The Boundaries of Blame: Emor

Freud and Adler: Agency and Blame

We live in a culture saturated by blame. It is far easier to shift responsibility onto others—our parents, the system, God—than to accept it ourselves, or to acknowledge that life at times is simply unfair.

Two major figures in modern psychology, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, disagreed fundamentally on this issue. Freud's deterministic worldview saw the past as a defining force in human behaviour. Adler, his student, argued for the ongoing agency of the individual—the power of people to make conscious choices in the present, irrespective of their past.

Modern Israel exemplifies this Adlerian spirit. Emerging from the horrors of the Holocaust, its citizens did not remain victims. They became builders, dreamers, and architects of a new future. They did not drown in the traumas of the past but used their energies to rebuild Jewish life with vigour and purpose.

This tension—between blaming the past and building the future—finds voice in one of the Torah’s most difficult narratives, that of the blasphemer in this week’s Parsha. Set in a book largely focused on sanctity—from the laws of the Kohanim and sacrifices to the sanctification of festivals and language—the blasphemer's story is striking in both tone and content. It is one of only two narrative episodes in the book of Vayikra and it is both enigmatic and unsettling.

The Blasphemer and Moshe

A man, the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father, gets into a fight and blasphemes the Name. He is brought to Moses and, after divine instruction, is taken outside the camp and stoned to death by the congregation.

Questions abound. Why is this story placed here? What does it have to do with the themes of Emor? Why are we told his mother's name—Shelomit bat Divri? And why such a severe punishment?

Commentators and midrashim offer a range of interpretations. Some say the man had tried to claim a place among the tribe of Dan but was rejected due to his patrilineal descent. Others say he had lost his share in the World to Come. Some view the core sin as blasphemy, others as the violence he committed.

A close reader might notice a powerful parallel to Moshe’s early life in Parshat Shemot that I believe holds the key to understanding what lies beneath this narrative.

וַיִּגְדַּל מֹשֶׁה וַיֵּצֵא אֶל-אֶחָיו, וַיַּרְא, בְּסִבְלֹתָם וַיַּרְא אִישׁ מִצְרִי, מַכֶּה אִישׁ-עִבְרִי מֵאֶחָיו וַיִּפֶן כֹּה וָכֹה, וַיַּרְא כִּי אֵין אִישׁ; וַיַּךְ, אֶת-הַמִּצְרִי, וַיִּטְמְנֵהוּ, בַּחוֹל.  יג וַיֵּצֵא בַּיּוֹם הַשֵּׁנִי, וְהִנֵּה שְׁנֵי-אֲנָשִׁים עִבְרִים נִצִּים; וַיֹּאמֶר, לָרָשָׁע, לָמָּה תַכֶּה, רֵעֶךָ in those days, when Moses was grown up, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew, one of his brethren. 13 And he went out the second day, and, behold, two men of the Hebrews were striving together; and he said to him that did the wrong: 'Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?'

וַיֵּצֵא, בֶּן-אִשָּׁה יִשְׂרְאֵלִית וְהוּא בֶּן-אִישׁ מִצְרִי, בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיִּנָּצוּ, בַּמַּחֲנֶה 10 And the son of an Israelitish woman, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the children of Israel; and the son of the Israelitish woman and a man of Israel strove together in the camp. 11 And the son of the Israelitish woman blasphemed the Name, and cursed; and they brought him unto Moses. And his mother's name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan. 12 And they put him in ward, that it might be declared unto them at the mouth of the LORD

There are obvious linguistic parallel's between the two episodes, but there are also thematic parallels:

Both Moshe and the blasphemer are caught between identities—neither fully insiders nor complete outsiders; Both use violence to advance their cause; Both are 'rejected' by their people. But while Moshe uses that tension as fuel for moral courage, the blasphemer allows it to corrode his sense of purpose. One acts from empathy, the other from grievance. Their responses to exclusion shape their legacies: Moshe becomes a leader; the blasphemer, a cautionary tale.

Both stories involve conflict, identity, and questions of justice. Moshe, raised between two worlds, might easily have chosen detachment. But he doesn’t. He chooses action. He listens to the call of conscience. What he does may be legally questionable, but it is morally decisive. Moshe represents Adler's ideal: a man who defines himself not by his past, but by the choices he makes in the present.

The blasphemer, by contrast, collapses under the weight of identity and exclusion. Born of a forbidden or possibly violent union, a man with no clear place among his people, he chooses resentment over responsibility. Instead of building a future, he curses the very foundation of that possibility: the Name of God. We can empathise with him. His pain is real. But his actions are destructive.

And yet the blasphemer’s punishment still feels troubling. How can we reconcile such a harsh outcome with the broader Jewish moral framework?

Between the Good and the Holy

Let’s turn to the book of Vayikra that asks not only what is right and wrong, but what is holy. There are laws in Vayikra that disturb our modern sensibilities: about blemished priests, disqualified sacrifices, and illegitimate children. The text does not apologise. It sets boundaries that are often hard to accept. Holiness, it suggests, is not always aligned with fairness as we understand it.

As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, sanctity is a powerful moral foundation in its own right—rooted not in logic or fairness, but in our deep psychological need to preserve what is sacred, to guard against spiritual or moral contamination. While modern liberal ethics tends to prioritise harm and justice, religious systems often emphasise sanctity because it helps bind communities and elevate life with meaning. Violations of sanctity feel viscerally wrong—not because they hurt someone, but because they desecrate something we feel must remain untouchable.

But sanctity, by the terms of its own definition, requires—indeed mandates—boundaries. And as we know, to our postmodern sensibilities, boundaries can make us deeply uncomfortable. They suggest exclusion, hierarchy, limitation. Yet in the biblical worldview, boundaries are what protect and sustain the sacred. They define the contours of holiness, shaping the spaces, times, and behaviours through which the Divine becomes accessible.

To engage with the Divine requires the human being to meet certain conditions of purity, presence, and preparation. Language, time, space, even lineage, are part of that architecture. Misusing any of these, particularly the Divine Name, is seen not just as a moral transgression but as a rupture in the fabric of sacred relationship.

That does not mean we must be comfortable with it. Quite the opposite. Our discomfort is itself a sign of moral alertness. But it also invites humility. Vayikra dares us to hold the tension between our moral instincts and the Torah’s sacred categories. We are asked not to resolve the discomfort, but to live within it—to seek God not only in what we understand, but precisely in what we do not.

But alongside law, there must be empathy. We are commanded to pursue justice, but never without compassion. That, perhaps, is the reason for the Torah’s emphasis that the people obeyed God’s command in stoning the blasphemer—not out of hatred, but in obedience. As Ramban explains, they did not act out of vengeance, but with solemn responsibility.

A midrash on mamzerim captures this tension powerfully:

“The tears of the oppressed, with no one to comfort them... their mothers sinned, but what did these children do? The Holy One says: 'It is for Me to comfort them.'”

This is the paradox of Torah: even when law demands justice, boundaries and sacred living, we are called to feel the pain of the one punished. To see his humanity. To remember he is made in the image of God.

In closing, we return to Victor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist who built upon Adler's philosophy. Even in Auschwitz, Frankl taught, humans retain one freedom: to choose how they respond to suffering. That choice defines our dignity. As jews we are mandated to respond to injustice, suffering, unfairness not through cursing God, or making a chillul hashem, but rather by sanctifying God and life.

This is the legacy we inherit. Not one of blame, but of responsibility. Not denial of pain, but the courage to move through it with empathy and purpose. May we, like Moshe, live in that tension, and continue to teach our children to do the same.

Shabbat Shalom.