After Death, Speak Holiness

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“Acharei Mot Kedoshim Emor” the sequence of these three sidrot in the book of Leviticus are used as a moral teaching in their own right – “After death, holiness speak”

I don’t know where this ethical teaching originates in the Rabbinic sources- it seems to have a folkloric life of its own. But I do know that while it sounds like a Hebrew version of Chilon of Sparta’s 6th Century BCE epigram “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum” “Of the dead, nothing unless good” it is in reality quite a different formulation and comes from a very different understanding of the world.

“Acharei Mot Kedoshim Emor” does not mean, as some would like to have us believe, that we cannot ever speak ill of the dead and only say good things about them. Nor does it mean that we should rework the historical truth, so that after a death one has to suddenly say that the deceased was holy. The aphorism does not instruct us to speak only about sacred things rather than about the ordinary realities of life, once a death has occurred. Nor does it imagine that holiness is a state to be achieved only after a life has been lived, something that is not possible in the mundane ordinary world of our life.

In fact, the three central sidrot in Leviticus whose names make up this epithet, all deal with the laws of Kedushah, of holiness, which are precisely not about a heavenly ethereal righteousness – they are about practical ordinary detailed and everyday goodness. So when we say that after death one should speak holiness (kedushah) we are talking not the sacral and not the saintly, but the real meaning of kedushah – the dynamic, practical, societally cohesive and caring activities that imitate God’s being and that we try to emulate.

Kedushah/Holiness in Leviticus is far from the saintly spirituality it has sometimes come to mean to us. Look at the commandments in these three sidrot and you will see all of our lives come into their purview.  There are commandments about giving a fair and living wage on time for the worker to be able to support themselves. There are commandments about respect for others, about the fairness of weights in trade, about not trying to gain advantage through another’s weakness or vulnerability. There are commandments about sexual behaviour and about limitations of power. About what we choose to eat and about how we kill the animals we consume. Commandments about caring for the poor and ensuring there is food, shelter, clothing, respect for all in society. There are commandments about using time and about mandated rest for us, for those who work on our behalf, for the land and the animals we have in our control.  Holiness becomes an organising principle of Judaism, and if one had to boil it down to one sentence it would be something like “do not hurt others with your behaviour” or “love your neighbour as yourself” – itself of course, a phrase found in the Holiness Code of Leviticus, later quoted by Mark in the New Testament, and which for me is summed up in the idea that I have never put a limit on how much I care for myself, never decided that I have received all I deserve, never seen myself as ‘other’, and this self awareness should critically inform my thinking about the ‘other’ and what they deserve or need.

We are about to start reading this trio of sidrot, and all week we have been reading about and listening to the reaction to the death of Margaret Thatcher, and this has set me thinking. I have been caught by the level of vitriolic personal attack on a woman not yet in her grave;  the venomous rhetoric, the anger stirred up and directed towards a woman who is a quarter of a century out of being in political power, and who has died. I hold no candle for Margaret Thatcher nor for many of her policies, but I wonder a little if, instead of feeling it taboo to speak ill of the dead, or else feeling the need to break that taboo and speak very ill indeed, we followed the Hebrew dictum we might find ourselves in a different place. For if after death we spoke Kedushah – not kind or unkind or hurtful but truthful and healing, this might be a better response. The laws of Kedushah are designed for everyone in society to have an obligation to behave well towards each other and towards those over whom they have power – be it land, workers, livestock, vulnerable people, students…. There is in Leviticus what has been called a democratisation of holiness, in that it is something all of us must participate in, all of us are obliged to do, not something we pass up the hierarchy to rabbis or priests, politicians or other leaders. If both before and after death we use the organising principle of kedushah – of each individual and each family and each company doing their best not to inflict hurt upon others for their own gain then maybe the biblical ideal of a world where everyone tries to care for their neighbour would be reached. Before death there is always the imperative of the code in Leviticus which teaches us and requires from us ordinary active unhurtful behaviour in everything we do – that is a given and one we either choose to live by or not. But after death there is both a greater vulnerability of the powerless, and a greater power of the living to damage and hurt the deceased and those who are close to them. And so it is the greater imperative to do this, as it is so easy to ignore. Acharei Mot, Kedoshim Emor – After a death, when there is nothing the dead can do or say to help themselves, it is all the more important that we promote a healing in the breaches made or left by that person, rather than rent the fabric of our society even further.

ואהבת לרעךך כמוך אני יי

 

 

Tazria Metzorah – bringing back the outcast

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As we work our way through the scroll, reading a section a week till we have completed the yearly cycle, there are some sections which cry out in their relevance to the moment, and others with which we struggle to connect with at all.  Tazria-Metzorah is one of the latter.

The book of Leviticus brings us into a world we no longer understand.  Yet we still read about it, and it is important that we do, because it reminds us how ancient our tradition really is, and it brings us into the religious and spiritual world of our early ancestors.  We may find the detailed description of the ritual sacrifice of animals and of wine, oil and flour incomprehensible and off-putting, and the clear concern for the community to create a state of ritual purity in its encounters with God perplexing, but it such texts hold the memory and history of our people and must reveal to us something of what they meant in their time. 

The double portion Tazria-Metzorah is concerned with skin disease.  In particular we learn about the condition ‘tzara’at’ – a collection of skin diseases whose causes were unknown, whose duration was also unknown, but which we know were seen to be contagious and dangerously damaging to the community. 

The impurity brought about by tzara’at had serious consequences.  The sufferer was required to remove themselves from the sanctuary, stay on the periphery of the community and announce to all that they were in a state of ritual impurity. They were to tear their clothes, and to keep their distance from anyone else in the community. They were outcasts.

 While we are given a great deal of quasi medical information about tzara’at – all the signs and symptoms are elucidated in the text with a rather grisly fascination – the Torah is not in fact interested in its medical significance, but instead it cares about the ritual significance of the condition. The people who are to monitor and assess the cases are not the healers but the Cohanim, the priests, who are instructed about recognising the disorder, about declaring the individual ritually impure, and they are also trained how to restore the individual to ritual purity after the disorder has run its course.  This is a matter not of medicine, but of ritual. The priests don’t in any way treat the condition nor do they act as safe guarders against infection for health reasons. Their job is to patrol the borders of ritual purity and impurity, and, most importantly, to create the way back into the community for the one who had been afflicted and marginalised.

The priest conducted an elaborate ritual in order to bring back the sufferer into the community once the skin disease had run its course. This ritual was, as is all good ritual, transformational. The­­­­­­­­­­ rejected person was brought back into the people, their status cleaned up and made as if new. It was as if the priest, by power of the ritual, could conquer the fear of tzara’at embodied by the sufferer, and bring forth a new reality for them.

What is happening right throughout the purity/impurity issues which make up the bulk of the book of Leviticus is not some ancient superstitious magic, nor a primitive acting out of an even more simplistic understanding about God that we are long past.  What is being enshrined in ritual and social structures is a way of dealing with, and including, the frightening randomness of life, the sudden illness or ill fortune, the terrifying closeness of death to life, the way our bodies sometimes seem to be following a plan we know nothing about and would not willingly agree to if we did.  The role of the priests is to mediate in some way, and always to bring the person closer to God, even if there has to be a temporary alienation in order to demonstrate the return. 

The Book of Leviticus sometimes seems to be one of a world no longer relevant – altars and sacrifices, blood and smoke, white spots and red skin, magic and superstition.  But reading it carefully it reveals itself as something else, rather like an optical illusion, another perception makes itself known.  The Book of Leviticus isn’t primarily about the rituals and the spices, the prescriptions and the descriptions of priestly activity – it is first and foremost about what a priest should be, how a leader should behave.  Empowered by their role as leaders of the worshipping community the priests  use that power to create a society where everyone has access to God, everyone is able to be brought into the community.  Because the priest declares a thing to be, so it becomes.  Their job description is to effect ‘korban’ – translated often as ‘sacrifice’ but actually meaning  something about “to draw more closely together.” 

In Leviticus, the priest is the leader who holds the ability to create the community through the ritual system.  Nowadays this is not something we can expect from an hereditary priesthood. So where do we look and who can take on the role to make sure that everyone is included, everyone can overcome disability and disaffection in order to be part of the whole people, to be a valued member of community? We no longer have a prescribed ritual system but we still have the imperative to find ways to bring people from the margins back into our society. The Book of Leviticus still calls to us to find a way to do this holy work – it calls to us. So the question for us now has to be “How will we choose to respond?”

 

parashat shemini

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The laws of Kashrut can be sourced back to this sidra – the types of animals, fish, birds and insects that we as Jews may eat, and those we may not.  There is no explanation for these laws, just as there is no explanation for what happened to Nadav and Avihu the sons of Aaron who died after offering an inappropriate sacrifice – but both stem from a system that is both rigorous and spiritual. Both are about the spiritual discipline acted out in life. Judaism creates holiness out of the ordinary. Kashrut in relation to food is partly about choosing to partake or abstain, and in so doing to show that we are not ruled by our animal instincts, but always remember that we are human beings who have been created in the image of God.

 Kashrut is also a way to make choices in order to encourage spiritual enhancement – for example treifa (meaning torn) has at its base meaning a food that has been torn from its source, either through violence or disease.  And Nachmanides teaches that the character of the animal we eat will in some way influence us – so we should eat only peaceful and kind animals, and not animals who are predatory or vicious.

 The sacredness of food – be it as an offering to be burned or waved before God, or be it the food that we consume – is a primal sense. In the bible, Jews understood about God through food – be it drought or plenty, manna or abundant fruits and grains.  Through a consciousness of food, by choosing what, where and when to eat, Jews developed an awareness of the Source of all. Food was the symbol of our relationship with the earth, and that itself is a symbol of our relationship with God. Think back to Genesis when Adam and Eve are thrown out of the garden for eating the wrong fruit – and now they are told that they must earn their own food and work the earth hard for it in order to get what God had given so freely before. Food is the medium through which we learn about our tradition and theology – matza at pesach, cheesecake at Shavuot, the seven species that grow in Israel during Sukkot and so on. Two loaves of bread at each meal on Shabbat – teaching us through food about rest – the manna was given in a double portion in time for Shabbat so that we would not have to go out searching – and working – on that day. Food connects us to the seasons, to the earth and to God. So how we choose to use it, or to abuse it; how we choose to partake or abstain – this can be an important spiritual tool for us to learn, to experience, to teach.

Seventh Day Pesach and the Song of Miriam

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The preparations for Pesach begin in earnest at Purim. Any Jewish homemaker will tell you of the frenzy that begins to build from then, the cleaning out of cupboards, then whole rooms; the growth of boundaries within the house, the diminishing places to eat. The culmination of the whole activity is seder, then the week falls into a rhythm of its own, the hard work done for a little while. The festival at the end of the week has a different flavour, somehow more relaxed and reflective – before the work of packing away the Pesach artefacts and recreating ordinary life.

The exodus from Egypt may be acted out in the animated engaging ceremonies at the beginning of the week, but personal redemption for many of us is experienced more in the unassuming days that follow, and particularly in the service of the seventh day when the Song at the Sea is read from sidra Beshallach.

There are apparently two songs in this sidra – the one known as song of Moses, and then a fragment or apparent echo of it which is known as the song of Miriam. But modern scholarship suggests that the texts we have may not be given the correct ascription, that the songs of Miriam and Moses were one choral piece, different perspectives on the same event sung both antiphonally and together. Writings found in Qumran uncover another seven lines of Miriam’s song, and when these are put together with the unusual pattern of the words in the scroll, we find that a commentary on the main text emerges.  Miriam addresses her words to the whole community, focussing on the contemporary experience of the miracle, and bringing them into dialogue; Moses’ words are about his own understanding, his own leadership and strength.

The beginning of Pesach sometimes feels to be all about Moses, the upfront miraculous power of leaving Egypt in the chaos and turmoil of the exodus. But the ending of Pesach is about Miriam’s way of being – the quieter underpinning of experiencing change, of weaving it into normality, the import of the story and not the headline.

Miriam involves the whole community, singing to them of their history. While each of us must feel that we too came out from Egypt, how much more important is it to us that we did not come out alone, but as part of a people, and that our history is not just great events or great individuals, but a fabric made up of the lives of us all. Redemption is to be found in the quieter, deeper spaces of our tradition.

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The meaning of Matzah: affliction or liberation but always bread.

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The bible tells us that people cannot live by bread alone (Deuteronomy 8:3), a statement so powerful it is repeated in the New Testament.

 Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods. Evidence on rocks in Europe from 30,000 years ago shows starch residue left from the plants which had presumably been pounded to create flour in order to make early flat bread.

With the Neolithic age and the spread of agriculture, bread from grains became the mainstay of the human diet. Yeast spores are everywhere – in the air and even on the surface of cereal grains, so any dough left to rest in the open air will over time become naturally leavened. But people quickly learned to help the process along -Pliny the Elder reports that the Gauls and the Iberians used the foam skimmed from beer to produce “a lighter kind of bread than other peoples.” Those who drank wine instead of beer in the ancient world used a paste composed of grape juice and flour that was allowed to begin fermenting, or else they used wheat bran steeped in wine, as a source for their yeast. But the most common source of leavening was to retain a piece of dough from the previous day to use as a starter for the new dough.

Probably that is why every year or so one had to start again, to not keep on endlessly adding a piece of dough from before to the new mix of flour and water, but to break what we would see as the cycle of infection and make a new start with this important food.

Bread means so many things to us – it was used to pay the workers’ wages in ancient Egypt and the word is still used today to denote wealth – both ‘bread’ and ‘dough’ are slang expressions for money.  The word ‘companion’ denotes someone with bread (com + panis). The Roman poet Juvenal satirised superficial politicians and the public as caring only for “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses).

The cultural importance of “bread” goes beyond slang, to serve as a metaphor for basic necessities and living conditions in general. A “bread-winner” is a household’s main economic contributor whose role is “putting bread on the table”. A remarkable or revolutionary innovation is often referred to as “the greatest thing since sliced bread”. Bread is the staple requirement in all human societies.

The word “bread” itself is curious – it has been claimed to be derived from the root of brew though it may be connected with the root of break, for its early uses are confined to broken pieces, or bits of bread. But in Hebrew the etymology is even more curious – “Lechem”, the Hebrew word for bread, is the same root as “lochem” – to do battle, and unlike the Teutonic languages, the third possible root “lacham” means not to separate, but to join together.   Using all three meanings, Ludwig Kohler, the author of a dictionary of biblical Hebrew, suggests that this third root – to be joined together, explains both battle and eating bread – in battle there is hand to hand combat and soldiers are bonded together in groups, in eating bread together people bond together in solidarity – breaking bread with someone is a powerful signifier or peace with them. Of course, the opposite may also be true – wars are fought over resources, and what is the most basic resource alongside water? Bread.

So what has this to do with the emblematic food of Pesach?  Matzah is symbolic of two kinds of bread: both the bread of affliction and the bread of liberation.   As we consider this festival and the foods we don’t let ourselves eat – for Pesach should not be, as it increasingly seems to be becoming, a time when we can imaginatively create dishes that mimic chametz, with breakfast cereals and potato flour pasta made kosher for Pesach, – but we should be thinking of the staples of our lives, what they are based upon, how we are separated and how we are joined, how we add value to our lives rather than live them mechanistically.

By eating matzah we are helping ourselves consider what is freedom, what is poverty, and how fine the line between the two. We are reminding ourselves of what is basic and important in our lives and what is the froth of the leavening.  Every so often we have to stop, to break the chain of habit, to start again from the beginning and Pesach is that time. Just as we break the cycle of infection of using a piece of dough from the previous day by making our bread with no additions except the elemental flour and water, so we take a week to live our lives in simplicity, to think about what we have been doing unthinkingly.  Bread is freedom and bread is poverty. Bread is broken and bread is joined. As we navigate the ambiguity and the possibilities of lechem in the form of matzah, we have the choice to think again. Are we in freedom? Do we oppress? Are we broken and separated from what matters? Are we joined to others in a strong bond?

The festival of Pesach will soon be over, but I hope the thinking it demands of us goes into the weeks of the Omer as we build and count up towards Sinai and the accepting of Torah.

 

Parashat Tzav

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What can we do when we feel anxious about what is happening around us, when we have no clear sense of why or how things may have come to this point, and we are faced with the limits of our own power to understand, or feel ourselves to be only partially in control of our existence?

This isn’t a novel or even an especially contemporary anxiety. The subjects of the bible narrative knew it well.

All religions dedicate themselves to working with the unknowable in some way, try to find ways – rituals and words – which will help their adherents to at least survive the vicissitudes of a potentially hostile universe, and at best to learn and grow and be able to operate with a degree of confidence as they go through life.  The great innovation of Judaism was the unification of the deity, the belief that the universe was neither random nor hostile, and that it and we were not at the mercy of some conflicting or haphazard forces, but that there is One God who cares for us, who listens to our fears and who responds to our frailty. 

With this one insight Judaism transformed the human experience.  We no longer see ourselves as flotsam and jetsam that floats in an uncaring universe, subject to random disruption and indiscriminate forces; or as the objects of the whims of higher beings, whose pain and whose lived experience make no difference in the scheme of things. Instead we know ourselves as the children of a caring Creator, whose very being we reflect as we live our lives. God may not necessarily give us what we want or even protect us from suffering, but God does give us a context in which we can live lives of value, tries to teach us and to nurture us, and is with us in the pain and in the happiness.  Because of the One God, we have meaning. And how we live our lives has significance.  And we matter.

The book of Leviticus is also known as Sefer Cohanim – the book of the priests. It is the manual, so to speak, of the group whose job it was to provide a link between the One God, unknowable and impenetrable, and the people who strive to be more godly, who follow the imperative to be holy without being quite sure what that might mean.

It is a book that we can find quite troubling, or at the very least barely relevant, as the description of the system of animal sacrifice carried out by an hereditary priesthood with arcane ritual and shadowy setting.  We can respond to it in a number of ways – as being of only historical interest, as describing a stage in a process in which we are much further down the religious line, as holding deep secrets of ethical and spiritual significance which we must study and meditate upon in order to glimpse the esoteric meaning beneath.

But however we choose to view the sacrificial system, the burning fat and incense, the sweet savour rising up into the heavens, the sprinkling of blood upon the altar – what we must accept is that this ritual, like many rituals, was designed to create something different in the world – it was a way of being able to take on the randomness of lived experience and create something far from arbitrary.  It was a recipe for creating a conscious and purposeful existence, for dealing with the existential angst of the human condition. It gives us a role and a world view in which we are not simply unknowing and impotent pawns in a bigger game – usually warfare – between two or more powerful figures, but people who matter, who are able to impact upon their environment, who by doing specific things are potentially able to change outcomes, who begin to bring forth our own realities.

            Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah – a guide for every-Jew on Judaism, talked about some of the laws – the chukkim- as being unknowable.  He follows one strand of rabbinic tradition which tells us that some mitzvot exist whose reason is not known and for which no rational purpose can be constructed. We simply do them because God told us to. They might hold no meaning for us except that of submission to the will of God, even when – especially when – we don’t see any validation or underlying principle. 

But in the Guide for the Perplexed, a philosophical work that was not written for the ordinary Jew, he has a slightly different take on the subject.  Instead he sees such mitzvot as having an educational purpose quite different from one of blind obedience. The chukkim in this work are, so to speak, the gateways to the ethical and spiritual dimension – if we begin to understand them in their context then we will derive from them great lessons of principle and deep moral values.  Taking the sacrifices enumerated in the book of Leviticus, Maimonides uses the principle that it is impossible to ask people to take on too much at once, unfeasible to expect religious – or any – change to go from one extreme to the other. And so he explains that the ritual sacrifice of animals and of other produce was a tradition the people saw all around them, a deeply powerful ritual that, although pagan and idolatrous in origin, was able to connect the people to their spirituality. So Torah did not abolish the sacrificial system, it harnessed it for Divine Service, and it began to neuter it.  It did this, says Maimonides, by legislating a number of boundaries and limitations around the practise.  They could only be brought in one place, for example, only by the hereditary priests, only in ways that were specified in detail. The laws of purity also limited access to the Temple, and so limited people’s ability to participate in the sacrifice of animals.   This becomes yet more powerful when we realise that sacrifice is the only form of worship that Torah limits for us, and when we read the prophets who remind us continually that God does not want our sacrifices but our prayers and our good deeds. 

            If one reads Leviticus – and the notion of laws that seem to have no real purpose or use – in the way the Rambam reads them in the Guide, a number of ideas begin to emerge for us. 

One is that God is understood to be not only the Creator who provides for us a structure and a meaning that did not exist in the human world before, but that God is able to be compassionate towards us even when we are attached to behaviours that are not the most helpful. God will help us change in stages, as we are ready to take on the next step and not before.

Another idea to emerge is that God listens to us – even bends God’s will to what we are able to do and to give.  If God truly didn’t want sacrifices yet allowed us to practise them – albeit in a limited way – then we have some ability to change how God is towards us, or at least one might say that God is willing to adapt to and to accommodate our needs.

These are radical perceptions, and I find them helpful. They tell us that there is space, theologically defined and protected space, to feel insecurity and doubt. There is opportunity to try out ways of being until we find one that provides what we need to be able to say. We don’t have to be certain, we don’t have to know, we don’t have to face a hostile universe that doesn’t care about our state of mind, or about the very fact of our lives.  We can take our time to think, to cling to what we know, to explore innovative perceptions, to challenge and to be confronted in our long held perceptions.           

 

Pesach thoughts

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The story of Pesach is one of renewal. Originally it seems that there were two festivals to do with the Spring – there was Pesach which was a celebration of the new lambs, and there was Chag HaMatzah, a holiday which celebrated the first grain harvest of the year and the using up of the old. At some point, (maybe around 1250 BCE when the Exodus is said to have taken place), the two Spring festivals became one.  The verb ‘pasach’ means to jump over (the way that lambs jump about in the fields) so it became used to describe how God passed over the houses of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt and did not kill the first-born people inside. The word Matzah came to be understood as the unleavened bread that was eaten because of the haste of the departure of the Hebrews from Egypt.  As ever, Judaism is adept at taking what already exists in the ritual lexicon and reinterpreting it, renewing it in order to bring about a different significance and meaning.

Pesach was a primarily a festival which rejoices in the Springtime and the hope of renewal and revitalisation it brings. It is also now an historical festival, marking the real beginnings of the Jewish people, something that will find its culmination in Shavuot. And Pesach is also a festival dedicated to ideological and the spiritual renewal– it is a festival of freedom, a promise and foretaste of ultimate redemption.

With Pesach and the Spring we are at a new beginning. The physical world is waking up and there is a sense of possibility. As Pesach approaches we deep clean our homes, removing the hametz – the old and fermented goods. The process symbolises a kind of spiritual new beginning, the removal of the stale from our lives and the opportunity to start again. 

Preparation for Pesach is a very physical activity, from Purim onwards we carry on an extreme version of spring cleaning, doing what used to called in my Yorkshire childhood ‘bottoming’ (as in I’ll get to the bottom of that wardrobe / pile of papers / overstuffed kitchen drawer). The sheer upheaval is enough to make one tired, yet it also forces a sort of internal reflection.  While making free with the bleach and the various cleansers the mind can sort of disengage and has time to think.  In fact it is not unlike the way prayer works – as the mouth and body follow the prescribed words and choreography of the siddur, the mind finds itself free to range further.

But Pesach isn’t only about the physical renewal nor the spiritual replenishment it brings – Pesach requires us to locate ourselves in our ancient narrative, to tell our story once more and place ourselves within it. To make certain our children are also listening and hearing it and taking it for themselves. Hence the rituals around the Seder, many of which are designed to attract the children, to pique their interest and draw them in. Without the telling of the story and the conversation about it that follows, Pesach is simply a Springtime ritual in order to celebrate the new agricultural year that follows the cold and forbidding winters. Without the discussion and dialogue about what the story is teaching us about freedom then and now, we are simply following an empty ritual.

 A gloss on the word Pesach teaches that besides being the verb for jumping over, it can be divided into two Hebrew words – ‘peh’ meaning mouth, and ‘sach’ meaning talking or conversation. The whole point of Pesach is to talk, to tell, to sing, to describe, to discuss, to argue examine and consider what the meaning is for us now. If we celebrate only with ritual, if we simply plonk ourselves down at the nearest Seder and work our way through the haggadah, we will be doing this most powerful of festivals a disservice. Pesach, the preparation time leading up to it, and the Seder itself all sanction conversation between the generations – to tell the story again and again, to understand what it means in our day and age. So as we prepare the ritual items for Seder, we invite friends and family to join us in the retelling of the haggadah , and merge the stories of springtime lambing and first grains with the stories of exodus from Egypt and God’s dramatic re-entry into our history. We ask ourselves the contemporary meaning of our story. We talk to each other about what we each think about freedom, what we see in the world,  and we consider what we can do about what we see. That is surely worth all the work in preparation for the festival, and it gives us our work for the year to come.

Parashat Vayikra

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This week we are beginning a new book of Torah – the book of Leviticus, called in Hebrew “Vayikra”. The book deals in great detail with the minutiae of esoteric sacrifices and rituals – and of priestly purity, and for this reason it is also known in Rabbinic tradition as Torat Cohanim – the Book of the Priests, but surprisingly the book also contains within it the most accessibly ethical and spiritual texts of the whole bible – in particular it contains the list of behaviours in imitation of God that we call the Holiness Code.

            There is a time honoured tradition that when a child was considered ready to begin to study scripture at the age of five, they would begin by studying the book of Leviticus.  Many people find this somewhat bizarre – after all, a substantial amount of this book deals with the laws of the sacrificial cults, laws which are terribly complex and hard to follow, and which are also in abeyance since the destruction of the Temple –not something one would expect a five year old to understand and retain. Surely one would expect them to start with the stories in the book of Genesis, which would appeal to children and which benefit from being the very beginning of Torah, but the argument goes that as little children are innocent and pure (tahor) and as the book of Leviticus discusses the sacrifices which by their nature restore spiritual purity (taharah) to the person, then it is appropriate that the pure little children would begin their Jewish education with the topic of purity.

Other commentators point out that unlike the other four books of Moses, Leviticus does not open with subject matter in an historical setting – its main message is about individual and communal responsibility and accountability, and the means whereby we can approach God.  The Hebrew word for sacrifice “korban” is derived from the root meaning “to draw near” so the whole of the ritual system defined and described in Leviticus is all about bringing us closer to God.

 So the book which is physically at the centre of Torah is also spiritually at the centre – teaching that which is at the heart of Judaism – to recognise and to act on the need to come closer to God.  Each of us is obliged to do this, from the High Priest and the leadership through to what the bible calls the cutters of wood and the drawers of water, and each of us, wherever we are in the pecking order, brings our own personal daily sacrifice.

            Small children traditionally learn to read and study Vayikra, because in its mix of the ritual and the ethical, it embodies the timeless identity of being a Jew.  It is about doing, about how we behave towards God, and how we behave towards our fellow human beings. It may read like a manual for priests, but look a little deeper, and you will recognise that a real human need is being addressed, a need which has not changed in the intervening generations, even though our way of dealing with it may have altered. 

 

vayakhel pekudei

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In this week’s Parasha we find the prohibition against kindling a fire on Shabbat, otherwise known as Hav’arah.  The Torah says “Lo teva’aru eish b’chol mosh’voteichem b’yom ha’Shabbat,” “Do not light a fire in any of your dwelling places, on the day of Shabbat.” Shabbat without the use of heating and lighting would be a pretty miserable experience- but luckily the Rabbis had an answer: Since the Torah does not say, “Lo Tihiyeh,” “Do not have a fire,” the halacha is that it is permissible to have a pre-existing fire on Shabbat. 

Indeed, in response to the Karaites, the scriptural literalists of their day, the rabbinic tradition even had a bracha for the Shabbat lights– “Baruch attah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu le’hadlik ner shel Shabbat – Blessed be You our Eternal God, sovereign of the universe, who sanctifies us through doing mitzvot and who commands us to light the lights of Shabbat.” Even further, the Sages instituted the rule that people should eat hot food every Shabbat – hence the tradition of cholent or adafina!

But what else do we learn from this strange story of what might be called Rabbinic counter intuitive interpretation?

Firstly there is a real issue about lighting fire on Shabbat – but why? Why is it singled out in this way? Shabbat is the way we celebrate Creation, imitating the work of God by taking control of our own time.  Perhaps the answer can be found in the twin symbols around the Mishkan demonstrating the presence of God: – a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

Together the symbols are said to comprise the heavens – the Hebrew word ‘shamayim’ (heavens) is said by some to be an amalgam of the two words eish (fire) and mayim (water) – eternal opposites which in the heavens are able to live peacefully with each other.  So to create fire on Shabbat may be seen as encroaching too closely onto the work of God.

Or maybe it is seen as simply too dangerous, for fire, while it can bring warmth and a sense of security as one sits around it, is also potentially a symbol of destruction  and fear, the fires of Gehinnom come to mind.

So to create fire on Shabbat, without being able to carry water, might be dangerous in all sorts of ways Our passion for closeness to the divine as symbolised by fire is important, but just as important is its twin symbolised by water – Life, in its many and varied expressions

Rabbinic tradition does not think that lighting a fire on Shabbat is simply a practical hazard but that it is in some way a metaphor we need to take care about.

Possibly it is a metaphor for an inappropriate passionate union with God, or as the seventeenth century Rabbi Isaac Horowitz of Prague (the Shlah) writes: “This alludes to the fires of machloket / to disputes and ka’as / to anger.  A person must always be careful not to kindle these fires, but especially so on Shabbat.  On Shabbat, the “fires” of Gehinnom do not burn, but one who gets angry on Shabbat or causes machloket causes them to be rekindled, God forbid.  (Shnei Luchot Ha’berit: Torah Shebichtav).

He sees fire as a symbol for inappropriate passion – in this case anger towards others. By allowing ourselves to become angry on Shabbat we will destroy the essential meaning of Shabbat – or rest and recuperation and renewal. He brings to his argument also the folk tradition that those souls in Gehinnom get Shabbat off from their punishments, and that we would punish them even further by our actions.  It is a nice gloss, and certainly a teaching worth pursuing – by not allowing ourselves the luxury of becoming angry on Shabbat, we can teach ourselves self control and even learn to see our lives and its irritations in perspective.

The Rabbinic decision to take this verse and use it to not only ensure that there would be fire in the homes of the Jews, but that this would be sanctified is extraordinarily creative. It seems to have been the critical point between the Rabbinic Pharisaic tradition of Oral Torah, and the exacting tradition of the Saduceeas and Karaities that Torah must be understood only in a literal way, without the sophistication and the explication of the Oral Torah. In lighting Shabbat candles and blessing them, we are aligning ourselves with a tradition of thoughtfulness, and creative adaptiveness designed to meet the needs of the people. Shining a light into Shabbat in a contained and careful way addresses the issues of what fire might mean – too much passion towards God or else anger against others.

Maimonides, in his compilation of Jewish Law the Mishneh Torah (Hilchot Shabbat  5:1), explains the argument regarding starting a fire on Shabbat thus – “this law refers to the person who lights a fire on Shabbat when he needs the ash” – in other words, the action is only forbidden if it can be completed, if there is a final and physical product.
            The end product of our lighting Shabbat candles is real – a sense of peacefulness and connectedness to tradition. Creating a light in this way as Shabbat comes in (traditionally the candles are lit 18 minutes before Shabbat so as to be burning well before the onset of the new day) means that we create what Isaiah calls oneg Shabbat – the delight of the Sabbath day, something that surely mirrors the events of creation.

But while the end product of lighting Shabbat candles is a peacefulness that is almost tangible, rather than an act of creation in itself, the idea that the rabbis had that  for the action to be complete there had to have a product is one that continues to intrigue me.

The soul is described sometimes as a light for God, a candle that flickers sometimes more strongly, other times less so. But it is not enough to be a flickering light, we should aim to be beacons of light in the world which provide more than good intentions or spiritual yearning – there must be an end product – an action that creates a lasting effect.