Why couldn’t priests with defects serve in the Temple?

It doesn’t seem fair.

Leviticus 21 rules that “no one who has a blemish shall draw near” in the Holy Place at the Temple “to offer the bread [of the Presence] of his God” (17).  No one “blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or limb too long . . . or hunchback or a dwarf or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles” (18-21).

Could this be the same God who inspires compassion and hesed love elsewhere in Leviticus and Torah?

William Herlands says Yes, this is the same God, and even this rule shows his compassion.  The clue, he says, is the next chapter of Leviticus, where ancient Jews were told not to bring as offerings animals that were “blind or disabled or mutilated or having a discharge or itch” (22.22).

The reason for the rule about the animals was the human tendency to offer to God what we really don’t want anyway.  We would rather give away what is worth less or nothing than what is valuable to us.

So too we would rather take those who are disabled or unpleasant to look at and hide them away somewhere–like behind the curtains at the Temple where they are rarely or never seen.  The point of this rule about human priests was to force society to find places for the disabled and unseemly in their midst.  Not to shut them away out of sight.

Presumably, this was about priests who were disabled and unpleasant to look at, for the text about human beings says, “He [the defective one] may eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy and holy things . . .” (21.22).  Only priests could eat this showbread.

The point here was to let young men who were disabled in one of these ways become priests in the towns where they would teach Torah, as rabbis do in synagogues today.  But they were not to serve in the Temple, where they would be hidden away forever.

So the rule is actually compassionate.  It protected those young spiritual men who wanted to serve but had a physical defect.

Here is another example of a Torah rule that seems off-putting at first . . . until one looks deeper.

See Herlands’ article here.