Hashem spoke to Moshe, saying: Instruct Aharon: Any man of your offspring throughout their generations in whom there will be a blemish shall not come near to offer the food of his God. For any man in whom there is a blemish shall not approach: a man who is blind or lame or whose nose has no bridge, or who has one limb longer than the other; or in whom there will be a broken leg or a broken arm; or who has abnormally long eyebrows, or a membrane on his eye, or a blemish in his eye, or a dry skin eruption, or a moist skin eruption, or has crushed testicles. Any man from among the offspring of Aharon the Kohen who has a blemish shall not…come to the Curtain, and he shall not approach the Alter…and he shall not desecrate My sacred offerings for I am Hashem, Who sanctifies them. Moshe spoke to Aharon and to his sons, and to all the Children of Israel. (Vayikra 21: 16-24)
With the expected meticulousness of an astute physician, this explicit commandment has been modernized by Rambam (Mishneh Torah). He begins by noting the six singularities that disqualify a Kohen from pronouncing the Priestly Benediction: abnormal speech, physical blemishes, transgressions, inebriation, senility, and unclean hands (Tefilah 15:1). Regarding physical blemishes, Rambam proceeds to list no less than 140, all well-known to clinical geneticists, including several craniosynostoses, colobomata of the iris, Brushfield spots in the iris, colobomata of the eyelids, cataracts, auricular malformations, depressed nasal bridge, bifid nose, cleft lip, prognathia, microglossia, fused cervical vertebrae, eczema, alopecia, asymmetric limbs, hypospadias, ambiguous genitalia, and cryptorchidism.
And so, Hashem commands what the essayist, Leslie Fiedler, termed the "tyranny of the normal," and Rambam codifies it for contemporary practice. Moshe was not infallible. Perhaps he misunderstood? Perhaps this was mere imitation of pagan practice? If so, why does the "tyranny of the normal" persist? ....Whenever I read Parashat Emor, it brings to mind Mr. Segal, a Kohen.
Mr. Segal was a short and stout man. His rather sparse moustache poorly hid the wide scar that traversed from his nose through his lip, an unskillfully repaired cleft. I and my classmates in cheder afforded him the opportunity to express the full range of human emotions from uncontrollable laughter to measured anger, always in a voice with unusual tonal resonance. Mr. Segal afforded us opportunities as well: the opportunity to generate inner excitement for seemingly dry religious proscriptions; the opportunity to fathom the modernity and relevance of an ancient language; the opportunity to grow; the opportunity to wonder years later, as we race toward old age, what our inner selves would be like if our paths had not crossed that of Mr. Segal’s. All this notwithstanding, Rambam would have us bar Mr. Segal from bestowing the Priestly Benediction. And worse! In our own time, first trimester ultrasound might have precluded the likes of Mr. Segal from postnatal life.
Primitive fears of "unnatural" outcomes from naturalistic processes establish the "tyranny of the normal" as a principle without limit: the nonperson, the second-class human. Jews reflexively recoil from a taxonomy that includes the untermensch, but not always: "Part of knowing who we are, is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, that agony we cannot feel, that death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other. And the Jews have their Jews. And now, now above all, you must see that you have yours---the man whose death leaves you relieved that you are not him, despite your decency." (Arthur Miller, Incident At Vichy).
The tyranny of the normal: an intolerance of singularity and idiosyncrasy. The tyranny of the normal: an inability to know the other in his concrete uniqueness. Even the Jews have their Jews! Jews like you, Mr. Segal, wherever you are.