Torah Study: Emor 5782/2022

(6) וינצו במחנה, “they quarreled in the camp.” This prompts us to ask that if the two people quarreled about something why would one of them use this as a pretext to curse G’d? He should have been angry at Moses, or he could have attacked Moses physically if he felt wronged. Why did he curse the name of the Lord? Perhaps what happened was that the blasphemer told Moses during the trial that his father had been killed and he mentioned to Moses how he had been killed, i.e. that Moses had uttered the holy name of G’d and cursed his father who died as a result. This is why now, when he was found guilty by Moses, he in turn cursed the name of the Lord who had been the cause of his own father’s untimely death. He used the name which he had heard for the first time when he stood at Sinai and listened to the Ten Commandments. The fact that this paragraph is followed immediately by the portion commencing with mention of Mount Sinai is an allusion to the relevance of Mount Sinai to what occurred here.
Seeing that the blasphemer had not been willing to come to the Tent of Meeting, the Torah reports hat the people brought him to Moses. This may be the reason why here — contrary to Numbers 15,33 where the Torah reports the man who gathered wood on the Sabbath as being brought before Moses and the whole congregation — the words ואל כל העדה, “and to the whole congregation,” are missing.

(7) I wonder why the Torah bothered in this instance to tell us that while the Israelites were in the desert that one of them cursed the name of the Lord thus causing disrespect for G’d? Surely if all the Torah wanted was to teach us the penalty for such a blasphemer, all it had to write was a verse informing us (as it did anyway in verse 15) that anyone who curses the Lord employing His holy Name the tetragrammaton when doing so is guilty of being stoned to death? Even the Gentiles had been warned not to curse the Lord (compare Sanhedrin 56) seeing it is one of the seven commandments which is applicable to all of mankind. There certainly was no need to teach Israelites that this is a cardinal sin!
I suppose we must answer that the Torah hoped to achieve two objectives when not only spelling out this legislation here but illustrating it with a personal example so that we would remember this better. 1) The fact that this individual who was guilty of this sin is named is a compliment to the Jewish people, seeing that only one single person had been guilty of that sin during the forty years in the desert and even that person had been the son of an Egyptian father. 2) the story teaches the important principle that the only way to become guilty of this ultimate crime is to first pronounce the holy Name and then utter a curse upon it. This we derive from the wording of the Torah: ויקב בן האשה הישראלית את ה' ויקלל, “the son of the Israelite woman pronounced the name of the Lord and cursed it” (verse 11). The sequence in which the blasphemer acted made him liable to the death penalty...