Of pagans and sacrifices
We begin this week by reading the Book of Leviticus, a book with a terrible reputation. The opening of such a book, this week’s Torah portion, consists of instructions for the sacrifices. And we don’t like animal sacrifices. Later in the book, we find the to-do list for the Kohanim, the priests who worked in the Temple in Jerusalem. And we don’t like to talk about the Temple in Jerusalem. And then, there are chapters about ritual purity, menstruation, and nocturnal emissions. Very gross.
On the whole, Leviticus is hardly an inspiring reading. Especially for us Reform, emancipated Jews, who believe in modern science and see the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem as a fantasy with dangerous political implications.
I remember a particularly Liberal teacher who openly stated his support for the Romans’ prohibition of the public reading of Leviticus in front of us students. Like some radical American Reformers of two hundred years ago, he believed that those pages must be replaced by passages of Prophetic literature. Imagine that. On a Shabbat like today, no Torah reading, only Haftarah!
My purpose today is to demonstrate that this snobbery is misplaced. The description of sacrifices performed in the Temple in Jerusalem can be inspiring and morally elevating, even for those like me (better to say it clearly!) who do not pray for the rebuilding of the Temple nor aims to re-establish the practice of sacrifices (Here you go, I repeated it again and I hope now it is clear!)
To begin with, what is a sacrifice? In the Ancient Middle East, e.g. for the Babylonians, sacrifices were meant to feed the gods. [See J. Milgrom. Leviticus. A Continental Commentary, 2004; ch. 1–2] Those civilisations were polytheistic; they had many gods, each ruling over one city and one city only. The centre of many Babylonian cities was indeed the Temple. To keep the town’s welfare and maintain the ruling class in power, gods need to be periodically fed. A curtain was drawn before the table while the god “ate”. Usually, the king shared in these sacrificial meals.
But those divinities had no power beyond the boundaries of their city. The land between one town and another, the wilderness, or the desert, was -literally- no god’s land. No god ruled there.
The Jewish understanding of God is obviously, different. God is everywhere. This is why the desert is so important in the stories of our Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Because that family, for the first time in history, experienced a God that was everywhere, whose power was not restrained inside the boundaries of a city.
And Jewish sacrifices were utterly different from Babylonians. Our God does not need to be fed. For the Jewish religion, sacrifices were a means for human beings to express gratitude. We associate sacrifices with the expiation of sins, which is partly accurate. Some sacrifices were indeed offered to expiate transgressions (after the damage had been repaid!). Still, first and foremost, Jewish sacrifices were expressions of gratitude. They were offered to celebrate joyous moments such as after childbirth or to mark the end of a dispute and the restoration of peace, shalom, among human beings. Sacrifices were offered following the recovery from an illness and when debtors and slaves gained freedom.
Pesach is approaching, right? It’s the festival of our liberation, true! But please remember that a lamb’s sacrifice is part of the Pesach narrative of liberation.
And now I hear you saying, “Fine, Rabbi. Thank you for the history lesson. But still, I don’t get why I should read all these rules about sacrifices every year. What’s the point? I get that we are different from the pagans because of our relationship with God. But there are no pagans around anymore!”
And my answer is: Really? Are you entirely sure that in contemporary society, gratitude is a value? Do you think that everybody agrees with the Jewish moral teaching that the same law must be observed by all humanity, regardless of background or social class?
Because I see politicians who live as if they were entitled to a different lifestyle than ordinary citizens, with different values and more relaxed moral standards. I see paedophiles who brand themselves “Minor Attracted Persons” and market themselves as another minority who demand recognition and claim to be marginalised. A similar path is followed by the “polyamory” folks, for which monogamy is a moral standard that does not apply. I see on the media that attacks on Ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York are downplayed as ordinary crimes (if the criminal belongs to a Black or Latino gang) and are prosecuted as they should, only when the perpetrators are white supremacists and Nazis.
It seems to me that the Jewish value of universal morality, of the moral law to be observed everywhere by all human beings, is far from being universally acknowledged. It seems to me that we live again, or perhaps we are now back, in a sort of cultural paganism, and values such as morality, responsibility and gratitude are entirely out of fashion,
For this, I think it’s worth studying Leviticus as a way to familiarise ourselves with Jewish ethics, with the idea that there is a basic moral law to be observed by all human beings, regardless of provenience, background, social class, and identity,
I invite you to consider one detail in the text we have read, Lev 2:11: “No meal offering that you offer to the Eternal shall be made with leaven, for no leaven or honey may be offered to the Eternal”. What’s the problem with leaven and honey? Why were our ancestors forbidden to offer in sacrifice these two kinds of food? Did God care about the ingredients of the meal offering? Abarbenel [ad loc.] explains that both honey and leaven are a symbol of self-indulgence.
And we know it well. Let me repeat once again: Pesach is approaching. We now prepare ourselves to live for a week without the luxury of leavened food on our tables. In the ancient Middle East, leavened bread was the food of the wealthy, those who could afford the time to let their dough leaven and whose property rights were protected: they were not afraid that someone could steal their food while it was in preparation.
Honey has a similar meaning. It represents self-indulgence. Honey is in the food we eat for Rosh Hashana when we ask God to be lenient. It is where we dip the challah when for the first time, we visit the Land of Israel (not salt, not tears anymore).
Self-indulgence must not shape our relationship with God and the moral law. This is why these two kinds of foods are to be avoided, and instead, salt must be offered “with all your offerings you must offer salt” (v. 13). The salt represents the covenant with God. Because salt is eternal. Because salt preserves, because salt can’t be broken — there are many reasons why salt represents our relationship with God and the moral law, which our ancestors discovered, or received, first in the history of humankind. [Rashi, ad loc.]
The first chapters of Leviticus, this week’s Torah portion, with the guidelines for animal sacrifices and meal offerings, may be puzzling or worse (wait for the rest of the Book, the chapter about menstruation…). But the teachings about morality and gratitude that they convey, even through minor culinary details, are incredibly profound and have inspired the noblest pages of history, acknowledging that, just like God is one, basic morality is the same for every human being,
A very unpopular message those days. But we Jews should know that being popular is not a Divine commandment.