Tefillah 072

39:
We have seen [Tefillah 071] that the fact that when the kohanim [priests] invoke God's blessing they should do so "in love" was the major consideration that led to certain communities requiring the kohanim to perform this duty only on very special occasions. (To be specific: on YomTov which falls on a day other than Shabbat and only at the Musaf [Additional] service.) However, we have also seen [Tefillah 071] that in Israel it is customary for the kohanim to perform this ceremony every day, as was done in the Bet Mikdash. (However, even though this ceremony was performed in the Bet Mikdash also during the offering of the Minĥah sacrifice this is not done today – except on fast days – for fear that the priests may have drunk wine during the day, which would disqualify them temporarily fro performing the cenermony.)

40:
Regarding this ceremony today, whenever and wherever it is performed, I think that we can perceive three salient trends:

1. there are priests who perform the ceremony as a matter of course;
2. there are priests who excuse themselves because they feel uncomfortable about performing the ceremony;
3. there are women who wish to perform the ceremony when men do.

There is no need to address the first item in our list. But let us now address the two remaining items.

41:
A man is identified as a kohen by inheritance from his father. In ancient times the priestly bureaucracy in the Bet Mikdash kept geneological records which would show who was a valid kohen and who was an invalid kohen (because of some imperfection in the line of descent). Of course, there are no such records today, and a man who says he is a kohen (because his father was a kohen) is credited as being a kohen, and he passes on that status to his male issue as a matter of course.

42:
We should, however, note parenthetically that it has recently become possible to verify that the systerm works! in 1997 Prof. Karl Skorecki and collaborators from Haifa, Israel, published in the most prestigious scientific journal "Nature" the results of a scientific investigation he had conducted. The bottom line was that a man who was a kohen had a distinguishing gene that he did not share with other men, and that the provenance of this gene could be traced back some 2600 years or more. Those interested in learning more about this development might find it useful to read a short "layman's" synopsis written by Talya Liben. Talya's paper can be accessed here.

43:
Let us return to our discussion. The Torah [Numbers 6:22-27] does not make this a voluntary mitzvah, whereby the decision to perform the ceremony or not to do so is left to the discretion of the individual kohen; the Torah instructs every kohen to perform this ceremony. Only a valid kohen who suffers from certain physical 'blemishes' or has committed certain acts is permanently excused from performing this mitzvah. We shall relate these invalidating factors to the actual mitzvah later on.

44:
Thus, every observant kohen should perform this ceremony whenever possible out of a feeling of love for the Jewish people. The reasons put forward by those valid kohanim who refrain from fulfilling the mitzvah usually have something to do with a subjective sense of unworthiness. This is entirely to misconstrue the ethos of the ceremony! The priest does not bless the congregation! No human being can do so. The priest invokes God's blessing on the congregation. That is to say that he is the physical channel through which we can hear God's blessing pronounced. Our tradition does everything possible to remove from the ceremony any 'personality', and it just leaves the voice, the words.

45:
Sometimes a kohen will claim that he is not fit to perform the ceremony because he does not observe all the mitzvot. This is completely irrelevant! In his halakhic compendium, Mishneh Torah [Tefillah 15:6] Rambam explains this most succinctly:

You can find the Hebrew original of Rambam's statement here.

46:
The physical disabilities that preclude a kohen from performing the ceremony include blindness, lameness, facial irregularlity, disproportionate limbs, a crippled foot or hand and eyebrows that grow profusely. There are more, but these are enough to indicate that the reason why priests with such 'blemishes' are excused may well be because their physical appearance would detract from their desired anonymity: instead of concentrating on the words of God's blessing people might concentrate their thoughts on the physical peculiarity. Three other 'blemishes' preclude a kohen from performing this ceremony. He may not do so if he has a speech defect or if his pronunciation of Hebrew is egregiously incorrect; he may not do so if he had previously converted to another religion; nor may he do so if he has killed someone (though most poskim [decisors] say that this does not apply to a kohen who killed someone inadvertently).

To be continued.

Hayyim Halpern writes conerning the translation of the sixth benediction, modim. See Tefillah 063.

Some feel that the prayer does not mean: We thank You…, but rather: We acknowledge that You… The good old Silverman Siddur goes with the comprimise: We gratefully/thankfully acknowledge You… I see that Sim Shalom goes with: We proclaim. Birnbaum is simply grateful. Artscroll is extremely beholden with: We gratefully thank… In the footnote he writes about accepting authority. Appreciate your views on this.

I respond:

Any translation is inevitably an interpretation because it is well night impossible to successfully transfer all the possible shades of meaning of a certain word or phrase from one language to another – especially when the languages are so different in structure as Hebrew and English. Thus, in a sense, any of the above translations could be correct. In a broader sense they could all be correct! However, in order to do a modicum of justic to Hayyim's query I did a quick check on the word 'modim' as it is used in Tannaïtic literature. It seems to have as many connotations as in the translations offered by Hayyim in his message.

In Mishnah Pe'ah 3:1 it seems to mean "Bet Hillel admit that…" In the very next mishnah is appears to mean "the sages cede to Rabbi Akiva…" In Eruvin 3:6 we find that "Rabbi Eli'ezer said to them, 'You grant my point…'

However, wherever in the Talmuds the phrase modim anaĥnu lakh occurs in a liturgical setting it always seems to bear the meaning 'we thank You'. In Berakhot 14b "we thank You for taking us out of Egypt"; in Berakhot 59b "we than You for every drop of rain".

So, it seems best to leave the exact shade of meaning to the individual worshipper. Some words do not only have a dictionary meaning, but they also have enormous emotional or intellectual overtones for different people, and in worship it is perhaps best to leave the words with a slightly amorphous ambiguity. Raĥmana libba ba'é – 'God wants the heart'.