This week we begin Vayikra, or in English Leviticus, which starts with the procedures for different types of sacrifices. We learn how we are to essentially deplete farmyards of animals for different types of sacrifices, some for transgressions, and others for thanksgiving. For vegetarians we learn that only one type of plant material, grain, is burned while all others are not. First fruits are not to be burned according to the text, but part of the meal offering is. Different classes of sins are then enumerated.
Every year I get to this point and I ask myself the same question -So what? If one were to summarize the first two chapters of Leviticus, between the meat and grain offerings it would be a simple recipe for fajitas, though without the grilled onions, peppers and guacamole of course. For the last 1900 years or so, there has been no way any of this makes sense. Thus the question one must ask is why this is important to us today, so far away in time from animal sacrifices. One answer, of course, championed by some Orthodox, though by no means all, is that wee need to be ready for the days of the Messiah, when the Temple is restored and we will once again be killing animals to atone for sin. Yet this doesn’t sit well with me. I have another way of looking at this text historical in its outlook.
Further into Leviticus we will read about the practices of other religions, including bestiality and child sacrifice. Given the context, this not just the practices of other lands but their sacred practices. The Medieval commentator Maimonides believed that the Israelites were not yet ready for no sacrifices at all, and so God created a system of sacrifices which was a lot less damaging - animal sacrifice. Yet as we read in the text of Leviticus we are to bring this sacrifice “before the tent.” This was fine during the Exodus when everyone was surrounding the Mishkan every day. Getting to the tent was an easy walk. When the Israelites settle in the land, things are not so easy. To get from the territory of Dan to Shiloh where the Mishkan was would be quite the journey - particularly for every sin. So the people adapted a native Canaanite practice for their own use. Called bamot or high places, these were local community altars where sacrifices were taken for the community. Sometimes, however, the bamot would end up also making pagan sacrifices, or having ashera, idolatrous trees plated around them. Such was the situation in the story of everyone favorite biblical pyromaniac, Gideon, who cuts down the ashera of his father’s high place to Baal to use as firewood in a sacrifice to God (Judges 6:25-26). Yet Gideon does use the high place as an altar to God, and later so does Elijah, who repairs a high place of the Lord at Mount Carmel in his contest with the priests of Baal (I Kings 18:30). In either case the bamot were acceptable because the sacrifice itself was either ordered by God or accepted whole heartedly by God.
Yet a few generations after Elijah, King Josiah, after finding the dire consequences of disobeying God in a lost copy of Deuteronomy (II Kings 22), goes on a holy rampage and destroys everything, including the bamot, that could be idolatrous and centralizes sacrifice in the Temple in Jerusalem. (II Kings 23:8-9) Yet it was still difficult for people to go for every sin to Jerusalem to get expiated. Local communities came up with a substitute for the sacrifice and daily offerings. As Josiah was so obsessed with Deuteronomy, Passages of Deuteronomy would be read while standing together in an assembly of the community. Some of these included the Shema, and the Ten Commandments found in Deuteronomy. They also included a set of blessings which would be said while standing, a proto-amidah. Such were the beginnings of Jewish liturgy. When a generation after Josiah the first temple is destroyed, there was a system of prayer in place to take into exile. We read in Daniel 6:11 that Daniel prayed three times daily towards Jerusalem, thanking God. From the later Qumran documents of 1st century BCE there are pieces of the Qumran sect’s liturgy, including readings from the Ten Commandments and the Shema.
Yet when the second temple was built, and sacrifices returned, many people had forgotten much of the tradition. So as we read in Nehemiah 8, a Torah reading became part of the liturgy at the temple, including a panel of interpreters to explain the Ezra’s reading of the text. As this was easy enough to do anywhere, a community group would assemble in their own beit knesset, or in Greek a synagogue, and began to also read the text. Often one or two people would interpret the words there. There readers and interpreters became teachers and judges, in Hebrew rabbi. By the first century CE there was an established order of Rabbis involved in debate, most notably the rival schools of Hillel and Shammai. When Jerusalem was sacked and the temple destroyed in 70CE, there were no more sacrifices. Yet prayer continued to be used as a substitute, with the rabbis creating a more standard structure for the psalms, Shema and Amidah. But they also included something else:
The altar of wood three cubits high . . . . and he said to me, This is the table that is before the Lord (Ezek. 41:22) [Now the verse] opens with ‘altar’ and finishes with ‘table’? R. Johanan and R. Eleazar both explain that as long as the Temple stood, the altar atoned for Israel, but now a man's table atones for him. (B. Brachot 55a)
As we will do in a few weeks, the observance of the Passover lamb, which was supposed to be done in the temple, was transferred to a man’s dining room table. Symbol and signs like the maror’s bitterness and Haroset as clay were introduced to the Seder. All of this work of revising a world without a Temple became the corpus of literature knows as the Talmud, and its authors promoted among the highest of virtues studying this text, which of course took large amounts of time. Yet in 17th century Eastern Europe most Jews were exceedingly poor and unable to study regularly, if even able to read. Another movement which emphasized not just study but the deep intention to cleave to God came into being. Combining elements of 16th century mysticism and the Pietism of 12th century Germany, this new movement, Hasidism, once again arose to address the problem. In a much later time of the 19th century, the Enlightenment threatened Judaism in several ways. Technology was creating a world very different than only generations earlier, and science was finding new rationale behind how our universe worked. The new rational philosophy also created a few dilemmas for the Jews. Of most interest was the call by Immanuel Kant, whose definition of ethics defined Jews as amoral, and thus calling for their "euthanasia". Some reacted by making an ethical Judaism based not on the Law of Torah, but on the ethics found in the prophets and thus be ethical by Kant’s definition. Around the same time, many German Jews started moving across the Ocean to the new country of the United States of America, and took up residence in the new cities of the Midwest like Chicago and Cincinnati. Faced with being a more scattered and smaller minority than they were in Germany, in a world that was often highly anti-Semitic Protestants, they faced hard times from all sides. In this crucible many forged something that had not been there before: Reform Judaism. In the reform movement first statement of principles, the Pittsburgh platform of 1885, three of the planks read:
3. We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.
4. We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.
5. We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
In essence the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 created a religion which looked and acted like any other patriotic American religion, rejecting much of Torah in the process, and believing that the new Israel was the United States, and there would never be resettlement of Israel. Others disagreed and while the burgeoning Zionist movement took a while to enter Synagogue life, it eventually did, due in part to the tragic events of the Holocaust. Even Reform, who’s first platform opposed it, would eventually change their mind.
Over and over in this story, from a cut up cow to Reform Judaism, things change. Yezekiel Kaufmann, the Great scholar of the history of biblical Israel indicated that the Jews created something that no there people before them had ever created: the idea that things don’t stay the same, that time moves on, and that things can change for the better: the Jews invented revolution. But in the style of the rabbis do not read revolution but “R. Evolution.” We are the people who for millennia believe not in a static world, but a dynamic ever-improving one. We do not die as a people because we can change and adapt. Reform Judaism’s view of Torah today reflects that change, as written into the 1999 Statement of principles reads in part:
We affirm that Torah is the foundation of Jewish life.
We cherish the truths revealed in Torah, God's ongoing revelation to our people and the record of our people's ongoing relationship with God.
We affirm that Torah is a manifestation of (image placeholder)(ahavat olam), God's eternal love for the Jewish people and for all humanity.
We affirm the importance of studying Hebrew, the language of Torah and Jewish liturgy, that we may draw closer to our people's sacred texts.
We are called by Torah to lifelong study in the home, in the synagogue and in every place where Jews gather to learn and teach. Through Torah study we are called to (image placeholder)(mitzvot), the means by which we make our lives holy.
We are committed to the ongoing study of the whole array of (image placeholder)(mitzvot) and to the fulfillment of those that address us as individuals and as a community. Some of these (image placeholder)(mitzvot), sacred obligations, have long been observed by Reform Jews; others, both ancient and modern, demand renewed attention as the result of the unique context of our own times.
Reform, revolution evolution for me they are all the same. A recent quote from a non Jewish source, Graphic novelist David Mack in his work Kabuki: The Alchemy (#6) for me describes Judaism in its answer to a question about revolution:
There is no finish to revolution. That is why it is always revolving. (Because it is evolving) revolution is evolution. The idea continues to adapt to reality. And the implementation should continue to adapt and change. There is no having made it. Forget about that. You are always making it. That is the entire point. The making is where you always want to be. To make something & try to maintain the status quo is against nature. That is what I’m fighting against. The revolution is the action not subject. Once the revolution becomes the institution, you have to revolt and revolve, all over again. Stagnation is death. Status quo is death. Celebrity is death. Once a government or agency is setup to worship itself and make itself richer & forget the ideas it is founded on, it is no longer for the people or by the people or of the people, but is very separate from the people. Just using them as pawns for its own gain.
When that happens, that institution is on the wrong side of history. History shows that a society on that path will crumble in on itself. --- Unless corrections are made from the inside out.
Judaism has always been in flux -- changing and re-inventing itself and in the process evolving, making those corrections from the inside out sometimes from new ideas and sometimes embracing traditions from the past. We are the only faith to my knowledge that whose sacred literature has stories which tell of our ancestors telling God to shut up and but out, (Baba Metzia 59b) which God finds hysterically funny, laughing “My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me!” That is Judaism -- in Torah study, prayer and practice, or social action -- Our three pillars which the world stands on, Torah, Avodah, and Gemilut Hasidim continue the stand because they continue to change. The burnt cow, dove, goat, etc. of Leviticus is witness to how we don’t stay still, but do adapt, change and survive.
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