This week, we have three major parts of our portion; we continue the sacrifices started in last week’s portion. It is the eighth day of sacrifices, and everything goes so well God performs a wonder and fire from the Lord devours the sacrifices. But things then turn tragic. Two of Aaron's sons offer alien fire and are consumed by the fire of the Lord themselves. The rest of Leviticus 10 then gives the aftermath of this tragedy and a prohibition against priests making sacrifices while intoxicated. We end with the laws of prohibited and permitted animals for eating, the basis of the kosher laws. Those start in chapter 11 with
1. And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying to them, 2. Speak to the people of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which you shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.
While much of what we’ve read from the book of Leviticus has been mitzvot that has been rather impractical in post temple times, in the next few chapters of Leviticus many mitzvot will deal with public health. This all starts with the backbone of the kosher dietary rules in Leviticus 11.
Yet this is not the first time we have heard of the rules of kashrut. Two of its most significant rules were given earlier:
It shall be an everlasting statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that you eat neither fat nor blood.[Lev 4:17]
The first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.[ Ex 23 19]
As a public health and food safety professional I can appreciate those like Maimonides who see health issues in kashrut. But in my religious life I see things very differently. The way I deal with kosher as a Jew has a lot less to do with health and a lot more with the mitzvot. When we look at the mitzvot we can categorize them in many different ways, but one of the easiest is of course as the negative (i.e. don’t) and positive (do) mitzvot. Of course, we have both in this parsha. For example here is the positive mitzvah of eating red meat:
What ever parts the hoof, and is cloven footed, and chews the cud, among the beasts, that you will eat. [Lev 11:3]
Torah then tells us the negative mitzvot of eating red meat, with examples.
4. Nevertheless these shall you not eat of those that chew the cud, or of those that divide the hoof; the camel, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 5. And the coney, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 6. And the hare, because it chews the cud, but its hoof is not parted; it is unclean to you. 7. And the swine, though its hoof is parted, and is cloven footed, yet it chews not the cud; it is unclean to you. 8. Of their flesh shall you not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean to you.[Lev 11:1-8]
The examples in verses 4-7 are actually underlining the negative mitzvah. It makes sure we know that if only one of the conditions is true, it is still prohibited. Positive and negative mitzvot in the simplest sense tell us what is permitted and what is prohibited. Yet one might ask if this means I have to eat a steak at every meal. Not quite. There are really three states for a mitzvah instead of just positive and negative. We can split positive into two categories, permitted and obligatory. “Observe the Shabbat” is obligatory for example. Eating red meat is permitted, though only under the obligations of an animal with split hoof and chews its cud. While you have to observe the Sabbath you don’t have to eat red meat, you could eat chicken or tofu. Thus we have three categories of Mitzvot: obligatory, permitted, and prohibited. Much of Jewish law since Sinai has been trying to determine which of these categories any specific act happens to be.
We then take the mitzvot, and find the halakah, the ways we accomplish those mitzvot. And this leaves many schools of thought of how to find the halakah and whether each of the halakah are obligations, permissions or prohibitions.
The Jewish tradition has a way of finding the halakah, by deriving it from the biblical text, and from other halakot. But at its core, it isn’t the result of the mitzvah which is important but the deed, the act of doing it. As part of Jewish thinking we are searching for God, and as Heschel points out, God is in a search for us. When God asked Adam “where are you?” in the Garden of Eden, he was not asking Adam, he was asking Humanity. Like the protagonists of the Song of Songs, Jews and God are unrequited lovers searching and pining for each other. They might find each other for moment, then the moment is gone. It is like a princess who is kept hidden in a castle, except for a little crack in the castle wall. Her lover, who she can rarely see, tries to slip love notes through the crack in the wall, just saying “I love you” to let her know he is still there. But she might not be at the crack at that time so she only sees the love note on the ground in front of the hole. If he can slip enough love notes at one time the two lovers can know each other are there and peer at each other through the crack, a tiny glimpse of each other. So too we try to slip love notes to God. Those notes are the mitzvot. We do the mitzvot because they are like a list of the things that we know please our partner.
In orthodoxy, the halakah of those mitzvah are set, primarily in the codification by Joseph Caro and Moses Isserles. The rules are rigid and all must conform. Yet we all write love letters differently. Circumstance changes as do people. While it does create simplicity in following halakah, I do not agree with codification. Until the arrogance of Maimonides to codify the Talmud, there really was no codification. The rabbis declared that only in dire emergencies could a prophet declare a new mitzvah. Halakah was fluid, agreed on by a teacher and a community, which is why the Talmud wrote the minority opinion alongside the majority ones. Several places in the Talmud we are told to follow the custom of the local community, which then give the minority practice of eating chicken with milk of R. Yosi of the Gallilee, who reckoned that hens have no milk and are thus permitted [Shabbat 130a]. Yet later codification would take the majority view as immutable law, and Chicken with cheese was banned forever.
Fundamentalism often takes a stringent ossified view of the Law, while there may be a lenient fluid view of halakah as well. For me however, I think the halakah should remain fluid, but should be based on the works of the past. Our ancestors put a lot of thought effort and experience into their innovations of halakah, one I do not think should be ignored. While we may not come to the same conclusions, we must use the same methods.
As an example we can once again take the issue of eating red meat. I am not a vegetarian, nor do I have any social action or environmental agenda to my diet. I also never want one, because it would diminish what I am doing. I do not eat red meat purely as a love note to God. I did in essence prohibit it, but not from an ethical standpoint but a stringent use of the following negative mitzvah:
17. It shall be an everlasting statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that you eat neither fat nor blood.[Lev 4:17]
While the traditional Jew is slightly more lenient in their halakah, I am more stringent, prohibiting red meat on the basis I cannot remove fat and blood to the extent there would be none in the food and still keep it edible. So I simply skip red meat from my diet. It was with such a strict interpretation of the requirement for two witnesses in a capital punishment case that the rabbis pretty much minimized the death penalty to non-existence. On the other hand, I do eat poultry, and in accordance to R. Yosi’s lenient halakah will allow dairy with my chicken. In most of my love notes to God, my performance of the mitzvot, I have done the same kind of finding my own halakah. Even if I derive it from classical sources, what I end up with may not be anything near conventional.
Yet in some I do not derive my own. When I am in my prayer community I follow the communal halakah. My own halakah and traditions can be strongly unconventional. When praying alone, I pick the tunes and the liturgy. When praying together I use the communal liturgy and the communal halakah. There is stability and continuity to the communal setting, a very stable foundation for the rest of my practice, which may disagree in fundamental ways with the communal. The foundation may be used by more than me, and to build other personal halakot, yet tying all of us down to a place where it remains authentically Jewish.
I often wish that foundation, that religious community was also more of the meeting and study place to exchange ideas about halakah, but I’ve yet to find such a place. Some may have the knowledge but ossify the halakah, some are fluid with the halakah, but are either ignorant or reject the knowledge. I’ve never found somewhere with both.
I do not fully know what God intended with the mitzvot, how we really got them or even if they should all be followed. All I can do is follow as many as I can for no other reason than following a single mitzvah I try (but don’t always succeed) in reciting every morning: V’ahavta et Hashem b’kol l’vavcha…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your might. I do this because I love God and desire to be close to God, and know that a paradoxically transcendent but lonely God feels the same for me. The more Mitzvot I do means the more love notes I send. When I say the Shema, or decline a hot dog, I am really saying the same thing.
God, I love you.
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