What do the stories that we just heard from members of the SAJ have to do with the Torah?
The Torah is many things - including the telling of the story of the Jewish people. As with anyone’s life story it has a beginning, a growing up, facing crises, becoming independent, middle age, a growing older and ending in death. To use contemporary parlance it is a story of passages.
In the beginning, there is Adam and Eve, and a garden where they roam care-free, naked as innocent as new-born babes. But despite God’s command, a fruit awakens their desire and they see themselves for the first time; embarrassment, guilt and knowledge come into the world. Adam and Eve must leave the garden of infancy, real life begins-pain and travail, work and growth. They give birth to children and the future and to rivalry, jealousy, and love. It is a story of two’s, 2 brothers (Cain & Abel), two animals of each species, Sarah & Hagar, Isaac & Ishmael, Jacob & Esau, and Rachel & Leah. A book of beginnings--Genesis, passage 1.
Shemot-a book of leavings, of going out / Exodus, of fleeing and of breaking loose, on becoming independent, of negotiating & dealing with the parent (here known as Pharaoh) who knows you need to go but constantly hardens his heart and won't let go, of learning to live in the desert, of longing for the old security, of golden calves, of awesome revelations, of intense intimacy.
Ending with a sanctuary, a home, a place for intimate encounters with the Other of your life.
Then Va-Yikra-the mid-point
Va-Yikra- a setting out of rules, rules relating to the home, relating to the beloved Other. The rules are developed in intricate detail. Movement stops. No more wandering in the desert, no more journeying. Layer upon layer. Priestly directions, the priests-the bureaucrats of ancient Israelite religion.
The book of Leviticus has almost no narratives, a brief story of someone who blasphemes and a sparse account of Aaron’s two sons Nadav and Avihu who are killed by God when they offer a strange fire in the sanctuary. Small acts of rebellion are severely punished.
Are Nadav and Avihu guilty of youthful enthusiasm, using childish things that should have been put away? Are they acting with the irresponsibility of youth in middle age or is it more serious, do they think passion and intimacy wherever offered are fine, forgetting the rules and commitment of their relationship to the beloved other.
To everything there is a season. Leviticus is the season of consolidating, of settling down, of finding God in the details of a microscopic cell, in the tangle of relationships, in the living of everyday life rather than a "wow" moment.
It is not a place of firsts-first love, first car etc. are not part of the world of Leviticus. It is a world of second chances, of opportunities to build solidly, to really mold life, not just ride the crest of life’s wave. The horizon marking what is possible narrows, the impossible dreams are further away. But there is a sureness to our step. A knowing where we are and have been. A pride in the works of our hands, or in the bonds of our relationships or in giving birth to another generation.
Wait a minute you say, that sounds nice but isn't it really a paean to rigidity and dullness. Isn’t that what we get from all these rules? And perhaps no where is that truer than in the realm of halacha / Jewish law which is so laden with rules?!? After all we are talking about Leviticus and not some romantic life story!
Certainly that can be true. There is that danger of rigidity lurking in Leviticus. But I believe that Jewish ritual is meant to help us on our journey, to make us more conscious, more aware, shake us up. Hametz and matzah are associated with the holiday of Passover. For one week a year we are forbidden to eat bread / hametz and must eat matzah.
What is it about hametz - leavened bread? During 51 weeks a year, the eating of hametz is perfectly permissible. Hametz is not like pork, which by tradition is always forbidden. Eating hametz, this week is ok, in a few days-strictly forbidden. Why? After all the tradition could have told us to eat matzah the symbol of the redemption from Egypt without forbidding hametz! You could eat matzah along with the rest of the symbolic foods such as the bitter herbs during the seder and still eat bread with the meal. Why not? What is wrong with hametz, and if there is something wrong why is it forbidden only during Pesah and not all year? It all seems very arbitrary.
I would like to suggest that the answer is, in fact, that the prohibition of hametz is arbitrary. Passover tries to show us that there is little difference between the permitted and the prohibited, between hametz and matzah. The rabbis comment that the Hebrew words for hametz and matzah are made up of the same letters except for one. A small piece of line would transform the letter heh of matzah into the letter khet of hametz. This is symbolic of the minute difference between them.
Passover and the laws of hametz make us re-examine our sense of the world. It takes what is permissible and makes it forbidden and thereby forces us to look at something so basic as to be taken for granted-our food-and completely changes how we regard it and use it. It is not simply that the permitted becomes forbidden; we are not even allowed to own the forbidden hametz (this is unlike pork which you can own, you just can’t eat it, you violate the law of hametz even if your hametz is safely locked away for all of Passover, because the possessing of hametz is forbidden). This prohibition of hametz strikes at the very notion of slavery by attacking our notion of possession: To own people is in subtle ways to be owned by that owning. That we must remove slavery from our lives is exemplified by the removal of hametz. We must not be possessed by our possessions-even that most basic possession, our food. Hametz can not be hidden away during Passover; it must be removed, taken out of our lives.
We must be freed from all those things we think we possess, but which in fact possess us.
Passover and its laws, like the other aspects of the Jewish tradition, are not meant to be reassuring or rigid. Rather they are to awaken us to life and its complexities and call us to struggle with the difficult issues of slavery and freedom.
For the story does not end with Leviticus. Remember, we are only at the mid-point. Leviticus is only an interlude, we soon find ourselves once more wandering in a desert of uncertainty. All the old issues we thought were long ago settled in our Exodus days come back again. Once again we complain about the lack of food and water in the desert, we cry: nourish me O Holy One, be supportive, you who took me out of the Egypt-that is also called my parents' home where they fed me leeks and cucumbers and my family's own recipe of narishkeit and neuroses.
In the desert, we begin to doubt the vision of our lives. Our spies / our glimpses of the Holy Land / of our inner selves-cause us not to rejoice that the vision is in sight, but rather to doubt our capabilities, we fear we might actually get there, in the words of the spies about the inhabitants of the land of Israel, they are giants and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.
Such doubt and despair can lead to rebellion and earthquakes like Korah or just as bad, to zealotry and fanaticism like Pinhas as we try and anchor ourselves in the shifting sands of the desert surrounded by mirages everywhere.
But if we pass through, if we remember the past and yet are willing to grow, if we can learn not just from our mistakes but learn that what was right in the past is not necessarily correct now, then we can avoid the mistakes of even so great a leader and human being as Moses. Moses, faced for a second time with a complaining people, and a rock full of water, falls back on old habits and uses a response that was perfectly appropriate the first time, and so he hits the rock. But to this second rock he should have spoken. Locked in the past Moses loses his chance to reach the promised land.
To everything there is a season, a time to raise your fist and a time to raise your voice. If you have built your structure of rules and details, but made it a portable sanctuary then you are ready for the journey. The journey of life that will take place in a desert, but in a desert filled with many oases of blessings, of relationships. A desert that we can help bloom by living a life of ethics and caring infused with the wisdom and practices of Judaism. If we can build that ever changing vision of a sanctuary, and even be ready to change as new challenges arise then you will reach Devarim / Deuteronomy.
At last, in the wisdom of age, sight undimmed, you recapitulate in your own version all that has gone before. You look back to the future and forward into the past, you see the summary of your life stretched out before you leading off into the distance of tomorrow. Knowing that you will only see the promised land from over the next hill.
As we read in the coming weeks Va-Yikra and as we prepare for Passover, in many ways a Leviticus type holiday with all its rules, let us examine this story and our own stories to see where we need to build and where we need to break forth in liberation from the slaveries of Egypt.