Vayikra Sermon

Written by Dr Lisa Grant Saturday, 01 April 2006

Vayikra

This Shabbat we start reading from the book of Leviticus.
What are we to make of this difficult book? Here we find ourselves immersed in minutiae, the arcane and now obsolete laws of sacrifice and the related rules of purity. (Note Priestly cult – details essential for worship at the Temple…)
All of these laws are difficult to comprehend, seemingly irrelevant, and rather boring, other than the gory detail of the sacrificial rite, which for some may make them salivate for a barbeque
So, should we gloss over it? Find something more interesting to talk about?
This morning, I want to contend that we can read Vayikra as the most spiritual of the books of the Torah because so much of it focuses on the holiness of our inner being, of our souls – how to prepare for it, how to preserve it and how to regain it after we have sinned. Let’s see if we can dig in (in a metaphoric way) to this text a bit to uncover some sense of meaning for ourselves today.
This book appears to be an interruption in the grand narrative of the Israelites’ adventures out of Egypt. In the Torah cycle, last week we concluded reading the many chapters devoted to the construction of the Mishkan, the sacred space God instructs the Israelites to create so that God can “dwell among them”, or as we most commonly interpret it – so that we have a concrete and glorious reminder of God’s presence.
Mishkan as human mirror of God’s creation – including the strategic mention of Shabbat as a way to frame and delimit the process
Mishkan construction – sanctification of time and space
To my mind, there’s no better place on earth to experience the sanctity of time and space as in Jerusalem. The rhythm of the week begins with a mad intensity on Yom Rishon - Sunday (just try taking an inter-city bus first thing Sunday morning and you’ll get the idea as they are packed with soldiers returning to base after a Shabbat at home). And then, it winds to an almost complete stop on Friday afternoon. There’s an electronic clock on the road to the main entrance of the city that from Sunday-Thursday, cites a verse from
Psalm 122 –
Our feet stood inside your gates, O Jerusalem.
But, on Friday, it switches over to give you the times for candle-lighting and havdalah. At candle-lighting time itself on Friday afternoon, a long, low whistle blows throughout the city as a not so subtle reminder that Shabbat has come. Not long after that, you begin to feel the zig zag flow of foot traffic through the neighborhoods of Jerusalem as people make their way to any one of the multitude of choices for kabbalat Shabbat.
And then of course, there’s space – the vistas, the hills, the walls, the Golden dome, the graves – the heaviness of history is inescapable, but the stones bathed in the morning light can’t help but lift your spirits.
As the poet Yehuda Amichai says: “The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams.”
But, the poem continues by saying that the air “is like air over industrial cities; it’s hard to breathe.”
What makes the air in Jerusalem hard to breathe is not the holiness of time and space. They are in abundance, what is far more ambiguous and complex is the crucial third ingredient – the holiness of the soul -- human interactions and behaviors that are endowed with dignity and purpose; Holiness is when people act out of balanced sense of din v’rachamim, justice and compassion – imitating those two qualities of God that we invoke on the High Holy days when we pray for our lives.
And that brings us to the Book of Leviticus, the book that lays out in obsessive and sometimes troublesome detail the code of holiness by which the Israelites are enjoined to live. But before we get to those details, we spend the opening chapters learning the laws of sacrifice and purification, the prerequisites to the sanctification of the soul.
Most of the parshah focuses on the various kinds of offerings individuals and groups of people should sacrifice in the event that they sin. The system was quite egalitarian. Everyone is included from the high priest to the lowliest peasant. There’s even a sliding scale delineated so that if you can’t afford a large animal, you can offer a pigeon; if you didn’t have even the means for a pigeon, a simple meal offering would suffice. The presumption was that every member of the community would sin in one way or another so they needed a religious method of showing contrition and repentance— the prerequisite to attaining holiness.
Three key words in the opening lines of the parsha unlock a world of meaning:
“Adam ki yakriv mikem…,”
1. Adam and not the more conventional term “ish”– invoking the first human being– implying the generic, all of us
2. Yakriv – We translate this word as sacrifice or offering, but the literal meaning is to draw close. The 19th century commentator SRH suggests that this rite of offering something to God was intended a tangible expression of a desire for closeness to God, bringing something of ourselves to God.
3. Mikem – a grammatical conundrum – ki yakriv m’kem: The Plaut translation reads “when any of you present an offering,” but the literal translation is, “When a person will bring an offering of you.” The “of you” tells us that what we are supposed to be offering up is that aspect of ourselves for which we seek atonement or absolution.
So sacrifice is about drawing close to God, burning up a symbolic way that part of us that sinned, in a sense, restoring us to the original state of purity of Adam ha’rishon, the first human being.
This verse is teaching us to focus our attention on the person who brings the sacrifice rather than the sacrifice itself. But, we know that even such a fully sensory activity such as offering doesn’t mean the behavior is checked. The voices of the prophets are filled with frequent rebukes learn of the people for being over-zealous in performing the sacrifice, but altogether lax in the follow-through – going through the motions without modifying the behavior the sacrifice was intended to correct.
The text presumes we will sin and gives us an outlet for the expiation of that sin. Later in the book, we will learn the details of how to create a holy society, but first we learn the process for regaining a sense of closeness to God. Perhaps this is trying to teach us that the desire for the closeness forms the basis for our motivation to attain holiness – that before we can elevate our behavior, we must recognize our sin and undertake a ritual of absolution.
That’s the plan at least as mapped out in an idealized, heavenly way.
How do we measure up in our earthly Jerusalem?
I’m not sure that human behavior has changed all that much over time. Perhaps that’s why Amichai says the air is so hard to breathe.
• Rash of corruption among government officials
• Ever-widening gap between rich and poor
• Miserable state of schools
• Increasing violence among the young
• But things are even worse for the lowest rungs of society, the Arabs in Israel and the territories, and most often, we turn a blind eye.
Too few care about
• 3rd world roads in Israeli Arab communities – widely disparate distribution of resources for infrastructure, education, health and other basic human rights that we would all agree are essentials for living with dignity
• lockdowns in the territories that cause massive shortages of bread and sugar and other staples of life
• prohibiting an Israeli Arab author, traveling on behalf of the Israeli government, to wander freely in the airport while awaiting his flight
• recent poll that said 68% of Israeli Jews wouldn’t want to live in the same building as an Arab
• the fact that Arabs makes up 20% of Israeli citizenry but own only 3.5% of the land (within the pre-67 borders).
I’m not a political analyst and I am well aware that there are serious, substantive, and enduring concerns about security that drive many of these behaviors, benign and deliberate. But, nonetheless, the overriding sense I get is that we are cultivating an atmosphere of racism and hatred.
Small gestures to break this cycle within Israel. Some of the initiatives I’ve heard about in the last few weeks:
Arab/Jewish youth groups for teens (where it’s much easier to recruit Arabs than Jews),
Met a principal of an orthodox elementary school who is participating in a two-year seminar with principals of religious Jewish and Muslim schools
The kindergarten at Beit Shmuel, the flagship preschool of the Reform movement takes its children to a sports center for a bi-weekly meeting of Arab/Jewish preschool children
System of TALI schools looking to initiate some kind of dialogue
I’m encouraged by these small gestures, but know that ultimately their impact is tiny against the much stronger tide of opposition and apathy (deeply troubled by low voter turnout especially among the young). Israelis are rightly tired of fighting an endless battle to assure their security and rightness of place. But, I worry deeply about the inability to see the face of the other; to acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of innocent people are denied basic civil rights; and that most of us don’t really care.
In ancient times, sacrifice was the tangible act of contrition – The system was designed for everyone because everyone sins. But, the first step, before making the sacrifice was to accept our guilt.
This is not easy to say. Our cause is just. We deserve to live in dignity and safety; to preserve the integrity of the Jewish state and help it to flourish. But we cannot and must not let our own right to live in peace and security, allow us to act in ways that deny the right of others to live in human dignity. And as we stand on this first Shabbat of Nisan, the month when we celebrate our freedom from bondage and mark the beginnings of the Jewish people, can we truly revel in our own freedoms while we bear the responsibility of denying that freedom to others? Can we fully relish the holiness of time and space without a willingness to share a bit of it with others? Serving our own interests alone are not enough to create a just and merciful society. We need to act with holy intentions towards each other and even towards our enemies. And we cannot achieve this without deep sacrifice. This requires offering up that part of us that demonizes and discredits any point of view other than our own, that puts blinders on the suffering, hopelessness, and fear of those we oppress. Only when we fully commit to this process can we hope to draw close to God and that’s the essence of holiness.
Dr Lisa Grant