In the province of Quebec, when a couple gets married their names remain the same. From one perspective, this is a lot easier than all the paperwork to change one’s legal name after marriage. From a different perspective …it sometimes leads to other bureaucratic conundrums (so what name to I put on this cheque to pay my kid’s friend’s mom back!). While here in Quebec this is actually a legal matter, in other modern Western countries, many women make this choice as a statement of independence (which is different than those who do so because of an already developed career under their maiden name). From this week’s parsha, however, one may be able to extract a bit of perspective on marriage and independence.

Before discussing marriage, let us look at the end of Parshas Emor, where there is the story of Shelomith’s son who was stoned to death for blasphemy and cursing God. Put that way, the story sounds appropriately…biblical. Obviously cursing God is a grievous sin, particularly from someone who had lived through all of the miracles in Mitzrayim and the splitting of the Sea. But the story, or the way it is presented in the Torah, is a bit…odd:

“There came out among the Israelites someone who was the son of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man. And a fight broke out in the camp between that half-Israelite and a certain Israelite man. The son of the Israelite woman pronounced the Name in blasphemy, and he was brought to Moses—now his mother’s name was Shelomith daughter of Dibri of the tribe of Dan—” (Vayikra 23:10-11).

 The Midrash adds a great deal of important information that helps us understand exactly what the fight was about and why the nameless man was specifically described as the son of Shelomith. Let’s face it, not many people in the Torah are identified by their mother. To recap for those who are not familiar with the Midrash, as the son of an Egyptian, the blasphemer did not have a patrilineal line to connect him to a tribe. His mother, however, was from the tribe of Dan, and so they went to live among them. Some in the tribe felt he didn’t belong…and, well, one thing led to another. (If you’re interested on the Personal Parsha Prose insights on this Midrash… https://cthedawn.blogspot.com/2020/05/blog-post.html)

 There are many aspects about this small section of Torah that are unexpected and interesting. The history that led to the situation is complex, but at the heart of it all is a critical idea that identity matters on a family level. In building a civilization, which is what the Children of Israel were doing (and which we must continue to do), who you are matters. 

 This is not to say that Bnei Dan were correct in evicting this man from their camp because he had no patrilineal line – that is a far more complex question. It is, however, a recognition of the fact that the Torah wants us to build cohesive units within the greater nation. The great monument to Hashem’s eternity that is Klal Yisrael is make up of units* and tribes and families and, eventually, individuals. But each individual has significance to the units they are part of. 

 This concept also appears earlier in the parsha when the Torah discusses the daughter of a Kohein: “If a priest’s daughter becomes a layman’s wife, she may not eat of the sacred teruma; but if the priest’s daughter is widowed or divorced and without offspring, and is back in her father’s house as in her youth, she may eat of her father’s food. No lay person may eat of it—" (22:11-12).