Q&A: A Priest (?) Who Stopped Reciting the Priestly Blessing and Blessing His People Israel with Love. Is He More Permitted Regarding a Divorced Woman?
A Priest (?) Who Stopped Reciting the Priestly Blessing and Blessing His People Israel with Love. Is He More Permitted Regarding a Divorced Woman?
Question
A priest who has stopped reciting the Priestly Blessing and blessing his people Israel with love, claiming that he is not a priest, because we do not have priestly lineage established by testimony, only presumptive priestly status. From today he considers himself an ordinary Israelite of valid lineage and not a priest. Is he permitted to marry a divorced woman? Can he work for the burial society?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question. Does he have some additional information about himself, or does he simply not rely on presumptive status? If this is a halakhic claim, then in my opinion it is obvious that a divorced woman is forbidden to him and he is forbidden to become impure through contact with the dead.
Discussion on Answer
There is some substance to the direction that in the past the issue of a divorced woman was apparently because he found in her some sexual impropriety or some other terrible matter, and it was degrading for a priest, who is honorable, to marry her.
But nowadays, when people get divorced, and often for a variety of reasons, not specifically because he found in her sexual impropriety or anything in that area,
and being a divorced woman is not degrading at all, but just another possible and legitimate status,
then in any case there is no prohibition regarding a divorced woman?
Unless she was divorced because of some sexual impropriety?
At some point, somehow, somewhere, one of his ancestors was "established" as a priest. It was worthwhile, because they gave him redemption-of-the-firstborn money, free Torah honors, maybe also respect and a seat in the synagogue without payment. Maybe they also thought that soon they would go up to the Land of Israel and give him challah, terumot, and tithes, and they lived in poverty and fairly constant near-starvation conditions, so there was an incentive to maintain such presumptions. And then they were "established."
Maybe, and most likely, they were ignoramuses, and some of them (most of them) did not know how to read or write. Not that this specific priest knows anything concrete, but it is a reasonable assumption that this was the condition of most Jews in previous centuries.
We have no testimony; we have presumptions.
Why should he restrict himself today because of those "presumptions"?
In his view, they are no more reliable than the reliability of anyone who claimed something and therefore made a slightly better living and received a bit more honor.
Nothing more than that.
And now five sela do not really make him rich,
and he wants to marry a divorced woman and cries out: why and how is he different from all the Israelites around him?
This "presumption" is not serious and not reliable,
and it is his right not to believe it.