Parashat Emor is unsettling too. And perhaps that is precisely where its power lies. It confronts us with a tension that runs through the entire human experience: it speaks of “whole” bodies and those that are not, of closeness and distance, of who may draw near and who must remain on the margins. At first glance, it appears to present a theology of perfection. But when read in the context of our own lives—marked by fragility, by wounded bodies, by memories that ache and resu