Beginning with the year prior to my bar mitzva and until I left home for college, it was my practice to recite the Birkat Kohanim, the Blessing of the Priests, together with my father, in the synagogue on the festivals and the High Holy Days. That practice continued through most of my years at the seminary until recently, when the authorities determined that this ritual has no place in a service that confers no distinct honor to the kohanim or to the Levites in the Torah reading.

Indeed, in recent years I have rarely performed the ritual. Though I have heard of Conservative synagogues that have reinstituted it, by and large its use has faded with the spread of egalitarianism. Paradoxically, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative movement ruled recently that the daughters of kohanim are permitted to join their fathers in performing this ritual. My daughters did join me in reciting the blessing on two or three occasions in the seminary synagogue. For me, it was an unparalleled high!

From the outset, I was aware that there were fellow congregants of my father's generation who objected to this ritual. Their objections were directed less at my father and more at some of the other kohanim who joined us on the bima and whose personal life apparently left something to be desired. "Why should that [expletive deleted] bless me?" they would say before walking out.
I later learned that it is not the kohanim who do the blessing but rather God. This week's parsha, in which the blessing is recorded, is explicit: "Thus they shall link [God's] name with the people, and I will bless them." "I will bless them" – note well: It is God who blesses, not the kohanim. They simply channel God's blessing to God's people.

The contemporary objections to the ritual are somewhat more refined. I am as committed to an egalitarian worship service as anyone, but I would still defend the retention of this practice. It lends drama to a service that is singularly wordy and lacking in drama. The traditional nusah, or musical chant for the blessing, is hauntingly beautiful, and today's kohanim have precious little extra standing in the community. I do officiate at the occasional pidyon haben (redemption of the male first-born child) though I am usually expected to return the five silver dollars "because they have been in the family for generations." But few non-Orthodox congregations retain the kohen-Levi-Yisrael order at the Torah reading.

Theologically, what fascinates me about the text of the blessing is the double reference in the Hebrew version of the second and third blessings to God's "face": We pray that God's face (or countenance) "shine upon us and be gracious to us" and then that God "lift up God's face upon us and grant us peace."

But what does it mean to claim that God has a face? It is clearly a metaphor – God doesn't "really" have a face. But what does the metaphor convey? Probably, it is that through the notion of God's face we can have an interpersonal relationship with God. The face establishes the identity of a person, the sense of who that person really is. We can't relate to someone who doesn't permit us to see his or her face. These blessings express the wish that God look at us, smile at us, relate to and care for us.

The metaphor of God's face appears elsewhere in Torah. The metaphor of hastarat panim, the hiding of God's face, is used to signify God's abandonment of Israel. Then, in one text, God refuses to let Moses see the divine face, "for man may not see Me and live." (Exodus 33:20) But after Moses' death, we are told that never again did there arise a prophet like Moses "whom the Lord singled out, face to face." (Deuteronomy 34:10) Moses was unique among the prophets because of the intensity of his personal relationship with God.

If for no other reason, then, for those of us who seek a personal relationship with God, the blessing of the kohanim should be chanted and heard in our synagogues.