In Emor, this week’s Torah portion, we learn about a lot of regulations for the priests and the yearly cycle of holidays. From there the Torah discusses the menorah and showbread in the Temple. Emor concludes with the incident of a man executed for blasphemy. In the middle of all of this is the interesting prohibition to slaughter an animal and its offspring on the same day. There we read:

But you shall not slaughter, from the herd or the flock, an animal with its young on the same day. (Leviticus 22:28)

What is the meaning of this commandment?

On a basic moral level there is a question of killing animals for our consumptions. At its core is seems cruel. If we are going to be killing animals we need to set up some other limitations to this cruelty. One healthy one is to not allow the taking of the life of the parent and the child at the same day. Obadiah of Bertinoro understood the prohibition to apply to both mother or father of the offspring. Rashi argued that the prohibition only applies to the mother; however  Hizkuni argued that while the Biblical prohibition applies only to the mother, a rabbinic decree of lesser stringency also prohibits killing the father with its offspring. The Shulchan Aruch rules that it is uncertain whether the father is included, and therefore one must not slaughter the father with its offspring, but if done the punishment of whipping cannot be applied. (Yoreh Deah 16:2) Why is gender playing out here?

Last Sunday we celebrated Mother’s day. Clearly we as a society lift up the role of the mother as unique to the life of the child over the father. This is echoed in the myriad of rituals around the Peter Rechem, the unique rituals he have to the first born. Both for human and animal children, there is something special for the child that made the female a mother. This is also all knit into our national narrative of being born out of the Egypt experience.

Rabbi Hirsch offers us another read of this commandment. There in Nineteen Letters he wrote:

Your duties towards humanity are more intelligible to you simply because you have only to think of yourself, your own views and feelings, in order to recognize and sympathize with the demands and needs of your fellow-man. Could you put yourself as thoroughly in the place of other beings, could you even understand the conditions of the union and the combined activity of your own body and soul, you would find it as easy to comprehend Chukkim as Mishpatim. They ask of you to regard all beings as God’s possessions; destroy none; abuse none; waste nothing; employ all things wisely; the kinds and species of plants and animals are God’s order; mingle them not. All creatures are servants in the household of creation. Respect even the feelings and desires of beasts. Respect the body of man even when the personality has departed. Respect your own body as receptacle, messenger and instrument of the spirit. Limit and subdue your impulses and animal actions under the law of God that they be used in a manner truly human and holy for the upbuilding of the holy purpose of the human race, that man sink not into a mere beast. (Nineteen Letters 11:4)

Hirsch is arguing that this commandment is an exercise in empathy.

In a reading of the Akeidah, Avraham explores sacrificing his son Isaac, only to refuse and put himself at risk of not having done what was asked of him. It seems to me that as much as different Rabbis want to read this commandment from Emor as a gender neutral way, the core commandment itself is actually very gendered. In this context this commandment for the mother and her child stands parallel to the Akeidah, binding of Isaac. And in both cases we are trying to explore the lessons of empathy through a prism of the primal drive of a parent’s desire to protect their progeny.