We seem to be on a bit of a roll here after last parashah’s tirade. This time we begin with a bit of a 10 commandments reprise. The underlying reason seems to be to remind the people to be like God in holiness, and several key commandments are associated with that: revering one’s parents, keeping Shabbat, and not worshipping physical idols. You’d think we’d have these down by now, but it’s always worth noting when and where things are repeated and what different connections might be made with them each time. Any such clue elaborates the way Torah commandments are life-ways within cultural contexts, not abstract principles.

More laws follow, and interestingly, some of them are restated fundamental commandments and others are entirely new or slightly different versions of more obscure ones we’ve seen. The text’s linear presentation of them indicates they are related and of presumably equal importance, so it’s interesting to note what laws are held up here as equal to ones we heard in the thunderous 10 commandments scene.

One is that a “well-being” or “completeness” or “peace” offering must be eaten within two days of the offering and burned on the third day; eating it on the third day is offensive, and one who does so shall be cut off from the community. We have seen this before, but I for one would not have thought it as important as “don’t worship idols.”

After that is a nice one that I hear referenced often in contemporary contexts: The people are not to harvest all the way to the corners of their fields, pick their vineyards bare, or gather the fallen fruit; they are to leave these extras for the poor and for the stranger. It’s nice to see this kind of charity enshrined in law.

Next come a few more 10 commandments remixes: Do not steal, do not deal deceitfully or falsely, do not swear falsely in God’s name.

Then another economic justice requirement: Do not defraud your fellow. Do not commit robbery. Do not keep your employee’s wages until morning (meaning, pay them right after work).

Then accessibility justice: Do not insult the deaf or place a stumbling block before the blind. God emphasizes this one.

Judge impartially, without deference to the powerful or your relatives. Do not exploit people for profit. Do not hate your kin in your heart; you can reprove them, but don’t incur any guilt because of them. Do not take revenge or bear grudges against your people. And then the big one: “וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ” — “Love your fellow as yourself.”

Even though commentators and translators make a big deal about how these seemingly universal social justice precepts only applied to other Israelites in context, I don’t think that matters too much. The text is inculcating humane values here. Think about what Bible verses are for: They’re for referencing in intense situations to bring the people there into a shared context. I am grateful to have this material for that.

Now some of the harder-to-explain, more magical-seeming stuff starts to come in, which makes this a good place to introduce the distinction between חקים (chukim) and משפתים (mishpatim), even though the clearest basis in the Torah for making this distinction comes a little later in Vayikra. Mishpatim are “judgments,” and chukim are “decrees.” In the rabbinic tradition, the distinction is that mishpatim are laws that can be explained by rational principles, and chukim are supra-rational edicts from On High that must be observed without the need for intellectual understanding.

Certainly this distinction suggests different ways to approach and integrate commandments, but the key thing to remember is that there is no difference in their importance. The people have to keep both kinds of laws, whether they can explain them or not. And certainly there are mystical explanations offered throughout the ages for various mysterious chukim, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. Sometimes we can understand the reasons for God’s laws, sometimes we cannot. There is a certain surrender in accepting this that decenters the individual and the ego in the pursuit of a life of holiness.

While the Torah hasn’t explicitly compared the two categories yet, Vayikra 19:19 does interject several chukim into this litany of otherwise quite rational commandments by explicitly introducing them with that word. The chukim given here are: Do not let cattle mate with a different species, do not sow your field with two different kinds of seed, and do not wear clothes made of two different materials mixed together.

There are plenty of commentaries on the meanings of these, but I suggest just letting the relationship between them speak: There is some kind of important cross-domain teaching here about not letting materials mix together.

Next is a boring one about how it’s not as bad to have sex with someone else’s female slave as it is with one who has been freed, but it still requires a ram of guilt offering. I gotta say, this one reeks of somebody doing his buddy a solid.

The next one is nice: When the people enter the Holy Land and plant a tree for food, its fruit is forbidden for three years. The word for “forbidden” here is etymologically similar to “uncircumcised,” which is pretty trippy. Lends hefty connotations to both sides of that symbolism. In the fourth year, the fruit is set aside for praising God (i.e. the priests eat it), and then in the fifth year you can eat it. The principle is explained as being to increase the tree’s yield, which makes the connection with circumcision even trippier, as that practice is clearly connected with “being fruitful and multiplying,” as it were.

Vayikra 19:26 is one of those pesukim that gets trotted out as a blanket prohibition against divination. I’ve covered this topic ad nauseam, but I don’t think we actually have to go very far here. The pasuk in its entirety reads:

לֹ֥א תֹאכְל֖וּ עַל־הַדָּ֑ם לֹ֥א תְנַחֲשׁ֖וּ וְלֹ֥א תְעוֹנֵֽנוּ׃
“You shall not eat anything with its blood. You shall not practice divination or soothsaying.”
— Vayikra 19:26

I’m not even going to bother playing some translation game with what those two nouns actually mean. Why are they connected with “eating anything with its blood”? It’s because, as we saw just last parashah, the concern is about foreign spiritual practices, of which eating blood (again, according to last week’s parashah, but what do I know?) is one that is particularly vexing to the priestly authors. The reason I don’t feel super stressed about figuring out precisely what kinds of divination practices are forbidden here is that there are plenty of examples of Jewish divination practices in the tradition, not just in later literature but in the Torah itself. I’m comfortable taking this teaching to mean, “Don’t appropriate or imitate the practices of other peoples; do Jewish stuff instead,” and moving on.

Next is the famous chok that men shall not shave the side-growth of their beards, which has been interpreted various ways across time and Jewish cultures, but the dominant Orthodox strain of it is pretty distinctive and well known.

People are not to make gashes or marks on their skin in mourning — a practice the commentators point to specific other cultures for — or to incise any marks on themselves. Some take the latter as a prooftext for blanket prohibitions against tattoos, although I’m not convinced that part is separable from the stipulation that this pasuk is about mourning practices.

Then it says you can’t sell your daughter into prostitution, which, whoa, but okay, good, I guess.

There’s never a bad time for a reminder to keep Shabbat and venerate God’s sanctuary, so that’s thrown in here.

Then there’s a prohibition against petitioning ghosts and spirits. Unlike the divination ones, which are clearly about foreign practices, I do take this one to mean that spirit work is not something regular people should generally do. However, if you want to see an example of a Jewish person trying traditional Jewish divination methods to no avail and then consulting a witch who speaks with ghosts about it, I give you King Sha’ul in the Book of Shmu’el. Once again, the source is in the Bible; I don’t have to stretch here. Clearly, this practice is done, it’s just a domain of highly trained specialists.

This chapter turns back toward social justice to end: Rise before and show deference to elders, do not wrong foreigners residing in your land, do not falsify weights and measures.

Next is the part concerned with Molekh, whom internet people may know as Moloch because this entity became a potent meme on Twitter and its environs as a stand-in for the godless yawning mouth of the modern capitalist hellscape or something like that. Molekh is dropped in here without explanation as though the people of the time would have known just who or what Molekh was, but we don’t, and the traditional commentators don’t really seem to, either.

I have written a little bit about this (because of the internet’s weird obsession with this one Torah concept). There is one tantalizing etymological clue in the name, which is that מלכ is also the root for “king” or “ruler,” and the Torah here clearly treats Molekh like some kind of being. Let’s just let Molekh stand for false gods and kings of the general kind, as many of the demonic forces we’re warned about in the Torah do, and see what these warnings say about him, or it.

Apparently the thing people do for Molekh is give their offspring to him/it, and the punishment for doing that, whether for an Israelite or a foreigner residing in the land, is public stoning to death by everyone. Anyone who does not participate in this execution or even looking the other way about the initial transgression shall be cut off from amongst their kin. God then throws someone who turns to ghosts and spirits into the mix for the same punishment. Whether this explicitly links that with foreign practices — constraining forbidden spirit work to kinds from other cultures, as in the case of divination methods — I am not sure, but it’s possible that’s what the Molekh section is about. Either way, given that we’re talking about giving away one’s children here, there’s clearly something ugly and demonic going on here, and God is establishing a public mass zero-tolerance policy for it.

God then resets the table with a “sanctify yourselves and faithfully observe My laws” bit, and then a few more elaborations on familial laws we’ve seen before. Insulting your father or mother gets the death penalty. Adultery gets the death penalty for both parties. Extra if it’s your father’s wife or daughter-in-law.

Then — again, I wish it didn’t — last parashah’s prohibition against male-male sex is elaborated the same way, with the same punishment. I feel I have addressed this troubling matter adequately in the previous post, so read that if you want my take on how to continue reading a text that says this.

This section goes on to elaborate more specific punishments for more sexual transgressions that have already been given. I don’t feel the need to restate them just to cover the specific brutalities of their punishment. Again, the previous post addresses the issue of the Torah’s sexual morality overall.

God wraps up this section with some colorful language that puts a lot of it into helpful context. God says the land will “spew [the people] out” if they don’t keep these laws. The whole parashah is seemingly then connected to not following the practices of the people being driven out of the land, in case that was still ambiguous anywhere. And separating pure from impure, both in terms of materials and species, is connected with inhabiting the land properly and is a demonstration of how God set this people apart to be God’s.

This is a potent time in which to be writing about driving people out of the Holy Land in order to inhabit it, and it feels important to me to remind everyone here that my thesis of the Hebrew Bible is that this doesn’t work. When I am talking about the driving out of the previous residents and the establishment of Israelite kingdoms in this land, I am not describing any kind of ultimate achievement or foregone conclusion. Unlike the people who wrote and redacted this text, I know how the rest of the story goes — even in the later books of the Bible — and what happens is those kingdoms fail, the Temples are destroyed, and the Jewish people are driven out and left to reckon with why and what to do. The question one has to ask when honestly reading this text and giving credit to its internal coherence is, “How could God let that happen?” And my answer is that brutal conquest and monarchy are not reflections of the real holiness underlying this all-too-human attempt to transmit this people’s wisdom down the ages.

And then, in a hilarious move that to me underscores my entire approach to reading the Torah, a public stoning law for a man or woman who speaks to a ghost or spirit is tacked on at the end of this parashah. It clearly belongs in an earlier section, and it smacks of some casual edit getting accidentally codified in the text. I love these, of course, because it shows the interplay of the particular human authorship with the flow of the text, which has been made holy by repetition and transmission.

I’m going to go ahead and say that this clearly visible seam at the end of this parashah provides us license to understand its laws this way. It’s not that they aren’t serious laws that inculcate serious values. It’s that they are laws as received by human beings, and we don’t have to receive them the same way in order to learn about how to live by studying the process of their reception.

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