Vayikra (Leviticus)
Vayikra (Leviticus) is my favorite religious text.
Unpopular choice, I know.
Why? Because it’s a manual for building, maintaining, operating, and living next to a nuclear power plant.
I’ll just stake out my own stance, and then both Jews and non-Jews can misunderstand me all day long: Leviticus contains the pure instructions for close communal relationship with the Divine. Everything more permanent and institutional than that results from G!d’s disappointment.
It’s tricky for moderns to learn Leviticus because it contains a lot of purity laws they find morally repugnant. People look at the particular behaviors outlined, assume they’re directed at them personally, and shut down.
But just look plainly at these laws’ function.
Purity laws are in Leviticus because, obviously, you need decontamination protocols in a nuclear power plant. The people who recorded these protocols in these forms didn’t need to ask why they involved, say, sex, any more than a nuclear plant operator would wonder why to wear PPE.
The EXACTLY WRONG modern way to understand these laws is to ask, “Hmm, what were the backwards sexual norms of the time, and how have we moved past those in our newfound wisdom?” The obviously correct way is to ask, “How does purity function in communal spiritual life?”
If you actually read the Torah (big ask, I know), it won’t take long to discover that G!d’s standards of purity CHANGE throughout the story, as people’s do. It’s a RELATIONSHIP. The Mishkan was the post-peak sustained high point of that relationship. What can we learn from it?
We can learn a ton from it. But what feels important to say for now is, we can’t sustain a COMMUNAL spiritual life without CONSTANTLY re-purifying our intentions before engaging in our communal practice-life. Otherwise, it degrades.
Bible people be like, “errr the prerpherts serd the Termperl wers BERD” and I’m like, “Yes. It was. Because there was this prophet named MOSES — heard of him? — and everybody just complained the whole time he was alive instead of maybe TRYING OUT his suggestions.”
I unironically love Judaism so much that I want to instigate a do-over of the last 3,000 years of it before it’s too late.
In my trippy days, I thought NEW PROPHECY was how we got unstuck. Now that I know what multigenerational community is like, I have chilled out a LITTLE.
“New” prophecy is nonsensical to me now. There’s nothing “new” to learn in that sense. It’s on the social level that our way of life must be constantly recalibrated. That means the most valuable prophecy is the OLDEST stuff that STAYED TRUE, and we have to re-relate to it.
What that means for Jews is that there’s no need to hang onto any secondary rabbinical sources as sacred texts. The era of “moderately Orthodox” Judaism needs to end. I’m sure Orthodox Jews agree.
What liberal Jews need to do is completely reassess their communal life.
That’s what Leviticus is a blueprint for. If you were to completely uproot from default ways of being and reorient THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY around G!d, how would you do it, and what would it take?
