Torah Posting: ויקרא
We have arrived at my favorite book of the Torah. Okay, it’s probably time for me to admit that I am a little bit kidding about that. The thing is, it depends on one’s perspective on what the Torah is for, and since it is ultimately something like a virtual extension of the entire life-world of Jewish people, it can be for many different things depending on the needs of the moment.
In the Torah’s function as emotionally and spiritually complete ancestral story — its literary function, you might say — clearly my favorite is Bereishit, and I doubt that’s a controversial or even surprising choice. As I began the entry on Parashat Shemot by saying, the first book of the Torah has the whole thing in microcosm, at least as far as the family history (inclusive of God) goes.
But the function of Sefer Shemot, I would say, is to expand the scope from a family story to a national story. Just as the first book describes a covenant between God and a family, the second describes a covenant between God and a nation. Sinai is like a constitutional convention.
Last week, the book of Shemot ended with the activation of the Mishkan — the spiritual capitol building, if you will, for this nation — which I have described elsewhere as a “nuclear power plant.” That is, it got us to Day 1 of the Jewish people as a fully operational nation. What has to happen next is, we have to learn to live together at that scale, bearing the responsibility of keeping the power plant from which we derive our life humming along without melting down.
The messy, painful, often thankless work of holding a people together is the form of spiritual practice to which I devote my life, as I have hopefully made clear. Sefer Vayikra is the case study in how my people have managed to do so for as long as we have, through everything we’ve been through.
It is, as many people often complain, full of long litanies of laws, some of which are utterly objectionable to me and probably a plurality of my contemporaries on Earth at this time. If I am to understand how the Jewish people for whom these laws were constitutive of who they were stayed together, and their children stayed together, and their children, and on and on down to me, I have to study these laws, and the Torah’s documentation of their meanings and effects, with my whole heart, even if I don’t hold by their exact requirements now.
That is the sense in which Vayikra is my favorite book of the Torah. It is the one that shows me how meticulous the work of holding a people together must be, and so — as someone spending my life trying to hold a people together — it teaches me how to do what I do.
Let’s begin.
The scene of the heavenly downloads has shifted. Mosheh is no longer at the top of the mountain; he is inside the Mishkan, with God’s Presence manifest to him from the Tent of Meeting. This illustrates the shift toward establishing the ongoing norms for life within the camp, and within the People Yisra’el by extension.
The first instructions given are those for the animal sacrifices that the people will make. It is made clear that offered animals should be excellent specimens, with no blemishes, and that before offering on up, the owner shall bless the animal, placing their hand upon its head.
If you need additional unpacking in order to even deal with the concept of animal sacrifice, I’ve written about that before.
The priestly procedure for what to do with the animal and all its parts, depending on the species, is given here in vivid detail, down to which directions certain things should face.
Then the instructions for a meal offering are given — choice flour poured with oil and dusted with incense. Then the offerings of baked cakes, which must always be unleavened. No leaven or honey may be offered as a fire offering to יהוה. Those substances may be offered whole, but they cannot be burnt to raise a pleasing odor. Meal offerings must always have salt. Then the instructions for offering first fruits, including ears of corn which must be parched with fire first.
Then different ritual purposes of offerings are introduced. The offerings in the first two chapters are general purpose, but in chapter 3 we are given the concept of שלמים, offerings specifically for peace, well-being, or (my recommended translation) completion. The mechanics of such offerings differ slightly from before.
This section is another one of those where there’s no point in recapping the details, but I urge you to read through it slowly and experience the sensations of it vividly — if you can handle it. Honestly, I feel like pushing it a bit harder for Jewish people than for non-Jewish people; there is part of me that feels that Jews should contend with the intensity of this kind of gory section as part of our inheritance of things to integrate.
It ends with one law, an eternal law throughout all Jewish settlements that all animal fat is for God, and people must not eat any fat or blood.
In chapter 4, we begin to learn about the consequences for breaking God’s commandments and how the people are to handle it, including by means of the sacrifices described above. It starts with a priest who has mishandled one of the priestly duties, which is fair enough, since that’s almost all of the conduct we have gotten laws about so far. This is the introduction to the second specific function of an offering: a חתאת, a sin offering. This one involves a lot of decoration with blood. Also the unused parts of the bull for the offering are to be taken out of camp and burnt in the ash heap there.
After the priests, expiation procedures are given for the council of elders, a tribal chief, and then any person from among the populace. The procedures are all similar, but different animal species are suggested in decreasing order of gloriousness.
In chapter 5, we start to get into more specific legal situations. I’ve always been fascinated by the way these sorts of Torah sections foreshadow the Talmud. The Torah is nowhere near as comprehensive in its legal coverage of the range of life situations, whereas the Talmud is pretty overwhelmingly exhaustive of them, but there’s something illustrative of the heart of Jewish values in the ones the Torah does choose to get into, and also you can really see the same kinds of reasoning on display in them, millennia before the Talmud was composed.
This first example is also fascinating for the many seemingly different kinds of infractions that are covered by the same procedure. They include witnessing some pertinent matter and withholding testimony, touching something impure (such as a carcass of an unkosher animal), touching a human impurity (we’ll get into those later), or uttering a problematic oath. What the connection between these acts is, I will leave open to further contemplation. In any case, when one realizes one’s own guilt in any of these situations, one shall confess and bring animal offerings to the priests for expiation. Another hierarchy of animal offerings is given, this time more explicit, providing backup plans in case one’s means are insufficient for the best kind.
There is then a break in the transmission with one of the most repeated lines in the Torah: “וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְהֹוָ֖ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃” — “And God spoke to Mosheh, saying:” — which is usually said when that was clearly already happening, like it was here, so let’s just treat it as a sort of section break. New law. This section is about what to do when you are unwittingly remiss about holy things, or when you unwittingly violate a divine prohibition against some behavior. Offering rituals are provided to recover from this.
Then another “וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְהֹוָ֖ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃”. Now we get into financial crimes: dealing deceitfully on a deposit or pledge, robbery, fraud, finding a lost item and lying about it, or giving false testimony about any of the above. In these cases, a 20% premium is added to the restitution one owes to the afflicted party, in addition to the animal offering, which by this point can be sort of tossed off, since we’ve gotten the gist of the procedure.
The key theme of all this is, if you do something bad — even though it’s something God has personally said is bad — this new religious community complex and its attendant ways of life provide means to be forgiven for it.
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