Plant Us Within our Borders

The last portion I commented on was Achrei Mot, “after the death,” and I wrote my next one after the death of an ambivalent hero of mine, the musician and recording engineer Steve Albini. He was champion of the most insultingly aggressive, and often the most interesting, music possible. But it took him a long time to notice that the style he chose had moral problems, despite the open cruelty it featured. Why did nobody “cool” point this out at the time? It looks like there were no grownups in that room. My old Chicago friend Martha Bayne picks out and amplifies a quote from him about why he took so long to realize what let him get away with the kind of musical jokes he made about racism, fascism or rape in a scene that aspired to be profane.

“We thought [the far right] was a historical anomaly, a joke for lonely losers. Even as the right wing became more openly fascist, we were still safe – and that’s where my sense of responsibility kicks in, like: ‘Oh yeah, I get it now. I was never going to be the one that they targeted.’”

I was never going to be the one that they targeted.

In the sharpest possible contrast last week’s Torah portion was called Kedoshim “Holy Ones” from its first commandment: “Address the whole community of Israel and tell them, ‘You should all be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” This view that holiness should be a thing in common, shared by all the people, appears for the first time here in the Torah. As we will see one of the extreme things about this holiness is its restraint.

The idea that divine qualities are not the private property of a priestly caste but something we search out, then work to grow into everyday life is a classic Hasidic concept. The late 19th century Polish Hasidic master Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, the Sfas Emes, reads this holiness as an admonition to change, not to stay the same:

Surely, “You shall be holy” is one of those commandments that has no fixed limit. The more you abstain, the greater the holiness you attain, and there is no end to this. That is why it says: “You shall be” [pointing to the future], for a person should always add holiness to holiness. A hint of this may be seen in the verse: “. . . sanctify them today and tomorrow” (Ex. 19:10), showing that there is no end point at which you can say: “I am already holy!” The proof of this is to be found in that generation [when Torah was given]. They really were
“the whole community, all of them holy,” and yet God said
to them: “You shall be holy.”

Even after witnessing the presence of God at Sinai, the generation of the Exodus still needed to work to become holy. Against the literal sense of the biblical text he sees holiness not as a fixed state but a thing you continue to become.

What is this holiness? The Sfas Emes’ understanding of it is also different from the secular everyday magic one might find in a Mary Oliver poem where sheer listening and seeing the world, being spontaneously open to the beauty around us, takes on an equivalent role to prayer.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

One way the Sfas Emes’ idea of holiness is distinctive to Judaism is it begins particularly, in mythically resonant ritual acts. But his Hasidic version of holiness contains a very particular principle of restraint, specifically in abstinence and asceticism, that is shared with mystical and devotional traditions in Islam and Christianity. These austere and rigorous old ideals have probably never been widespread.

Because in fact none of us are holy.

The great scholar of Hasidism and founding dean of Hebrew College, Arthur Green, is the one who brought us the teachings of the Sfas Emes by carefully selecting Hebrew texts from a challenging corpus and presenting them with lucid translations and commentary.

He also, like Albini, was blinded by where he sat to who his ideas could hurt, because he did not see who was on the other end of them. He comments on a stunning passage of the Sfas Emes tracing a mythic root in the command not to touch the fruit of the trees you plant for four years:

This means that the power of planting has been given to the
children of Israel. They are able to plant every thing, to join it
to its root, by the power of Torah. …This is the inner meaning of entering the Land of Israel; for this reason we pray: “. . . plant us within our borders.” (from the Shabbat Musaf prayer) First we have to plant our own souls within their root, because “man is the tree of the field” (Deut. 20:19).

The mythic root of this cultivation is not agriculture or tree husbandry but spiritual radicalism: to plant a thing is not to stick it in a plot of land but to discover and cultivate spiritual discipline.

But bizarrely, Green argues that the passage actually is about trees, but very spiritual trees because they’re in Israel. He writes that the physical trees planted by Jewish “colonies” led to spiritual rooting. This follows a historically inaccurate but highly political “empty land” narrative implying that people in Palestine didn’t really understand agriculture until European colonists came to do it:

This brief discussion of “spiritual husbandry” was offered
in 1878, four years before the first Jews went to establish the
BILU colonies in the Land of Israel and began real planting.
Some among the early agricultural pioneers, especially the
founders of the kibbutz movement, had a quasi-religious
sense of their work: they were “planting” a new Jewish people, rerooting an alienated folk both literally and figuratively
in the soil of their own national life. […The first chief Rabbi of Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook] knew well that Israel’s rerooting in
its soil was part of the return of all things to their root in God,
a view that may be a concretization, against the background
of Zionism, of ideas already found in the Sefat Emet.

This seemed like a rather literal, and even literally colonialist reading of the Sfas Emes’ words. Curious about whether Green’s personal position had shifted since the October 7 attacks and Israel’s Gaza genocide, I looked for more recent writings of his and the first thing I learned is that in 2023 he was banned from his own campus for sexual misconduct. As is often the case with people in positions of power and renown, he seemed almost dismissive of it:

“Green, too, weighed in on the allegations publicly last week, telling his personal email list of what he said was more than 1,000 recipients that he was living “in the midst of a firestorm” that has done “violence” to him.” [Meanwhile commenters] called attention to Green’s strenuous self-defense, saying that portraying himself as a victim was in their view among the most egregious elements of his behavior.

One of his students comments in the article that

“I went through a process of thinking through Art’s Torah and trying to sort out which pieces of it actually maybe were implicated and which pieces were separate from this and how I was going to think about the Torah I learned from him, now that I have this extra piece of the puzzle,”

I submit that in positions of institutional power within Judaism it can be hard to detach one’s teaching from the power, and profanity, of these institutions. There is a broad institutional ethos shared with funders and boards that can pervade people’s teachings. Thus at the beginning of 2023 he shares concerns about Israel’s dominant racism and fascism in light of “the imminent collapse of Israel’s democratic regime, I think of Poland’s pre-war nationalists who became Nazi collaborators.”

A week after October 7, he threaded a difficult needle stating that genocidal retaliation against the horrible attacks would be a human disaster for Palestinians and a moral disaster for Israel, but demands that Muslim and Arab leaders condemn Hamas. The focus on what Jews need from Arabs and Muslims is understandable but self-centered; nothing would have stopped Israeli mouthpieces from branding everything from college protestors to Joe Biden and the UN as “Hamas.”

This is why institutional Judaism struggles to retain moral authority and credibility. Comparatively, Green’s reaction was among the most humane of institutional Jewish leaders but in the end it may not matter how smart or spiritual you are, there are certain things you just do in such an institutional position

This may be why so many younger Jews and those truly dedicated to all of humanity, all made in the image of our Creator, are engaging in an Exodus from these institutions, even the ones we have learned from the most.

The great historical irony here is that as a mystical and non-literal exegete of Hebrew scripture, the Sfas Emes turns out to have been right about history. For historically there is no evidence that the Exodus happened literally. Rather, as the great Israeli historian Nadav Na’aman writes, it was was essentially an internal affair within ancient Palestine. For the Egyptian empire had not actually enslaved great numbers of Israelites in Egypt but conquered and colonized the whole land of Canaan in the middle of the second millennium BCE. The peoples of ancient Israel and Palestine became liberated because their colonizer collapsed and left them free around 1200 BCE.

The historical truth of Exodus thus actually parallels the Sfas Emes’ mystical claim: that it was an internal Exodus, and the reading that it could happen within every generation may also be the most literal and historical one. As the last part of the first chapter of our parsha reads,

Lev. 19:33    When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. 34 The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the LORD am your God….I the LORD am your God who freed you from the land of Egypt. You shall faithfully observe all My laws and all My rules: I am the LORD.

Knapsack Rebel: An Oral History of Pranking Steve Albini

The day after my friend, fellow religion scholar Emily Pothast‘s interview with Shellac dropped, their guitarist, Steve Albini dropped dead while working in his studio. The striking thing for me is how he found new ways to be meaningful to me across every different context of my adult life though I never met him. His email about not knowing how to say Emily’s last name gives a pretty good picture of his vibe:

I found his writing on a newsstand in 1990, the first day of my first year living away from home. It was in a fanzine called Forced Exposure and it was by far the most stark, arresting thing in a stark, arresting magazie the likes of which I had never seen. I seized on it as a new way to be: intense and uncompromising about art and ideas (in practice this meant imitating the wild abrasiveness of the music by being wildly abrasive about it).

His early music with Big Black was more dramatic than I had imagined possible, adapting the challenging British postpunk of Gang of Four, the Pop Group, and Rema Rema into a Midwestern futurist noir twisting drum machines and epics of conventional human nastiness with an outrageous treble edge.

Having even heard of this stuff was at this point itself like a password into the underworld. The more you thought about it the more you became part of underground music, a community circulating around self-published media. It felt like knowing who he was and having thoughts about him, or really having thoughts about his thoughts, made you a different person.

But this wasn’t all good. An ugly part of this hidden public involved being hip to a “mean boys” kind of fanzine bullying, homophobic attacks on a few scene underdogs that Albini and his friends found annoying. I’m still a friend and admirer of at least one of the targets, who has no reason to feel forgiving about it.

It took me years to become a more real person and realize it was worse than not OK. I mean “real” in the old colloquial sense of honest with people around me. What do my words mean to them? How do things look from where they stand? I had to ask myself, what was this scene about for everyone in it? Was our belonging built around shit like this, taking ironic jabs at vulnerable people, as much as any independent communal spirit?

I was not alone here; Steve became more real too over time. He had come to realize that dramatizing cruelty and passing on hateful shit ironically was a disgusting thing to do. He made a point of denouncing it as starkly and clearly as anything he ever said, without lying about his past stupidity in any attempt at cheap self-exoneration.

At the height of his underground cachet he turned his stark writing style to publishing “The Problem With Music” in the Baffler (which I then wrote for) what stands as the most clear-eyed analysis of rock music’s labor exploitation, the way bands are tricked into giving up control of their work. As a friend of mine from that era, the political commentator Ana Marie Cox writes,

“The Problem with Music” had as much impact on my life and politics as No Logo or The Monkey Wrench Gang or Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. I wouldn’t be who I am without Steve Albini. What I’m saying is that Steve Albini radicalized me. Also, yes, music. It’s not long or explicitly political and that’s just the point. At 20, I had read Marx but I hadn’t yet started thinking about the labor that created the music I loved and the culture I swam in. And that it mattered all the time.

I knew Steve only secondhand but that opened up new things for me by itself. I knew him as a friend of friends like David Grubbs, then a U of Chicago English PhD student, and part of a semi-legendary group of musicians in Louisville who had produced the churning hardcore group Squirrel Bait, which David played guitar for, and the weird, cinematic Slint. Grubbs was part of a neighborhood roommate/avant-garde group I thought of as ON-SHORE, a mnemonic for the apartment’s phone number. The shifting group of residents included people like Tortoise co-founder and fellow DJ Ken “Bundy” Brown.

Through Grubbs I entered a world of music unimaginably far from Squirrel Bait’s fine froth or Big Black’s metal edge via WHPK’s Radio Dada. This was writer and collector John Corbett’s show that felt like a parlor and seemed to create new genres by juxtaposition every week.

The concert flyer, featuring Albini’s distinctive architect-like script, from which Squirrel Bait took their band logo.

Albini too became best known for opening up space, but as a realist documentarian of sound at his Electrical Audio recording studio. He described his ideal recording as “sounding like a band in a room.” I was struck by how he described his engineering work as pluralist, helping enable anyone who went into his studio to make the record that they really wanted to make.

He engineered the sound on benchmarks in my life like Sunn’s “Life Metal,” my soundtrack for the universe vastly bigger than us, driving out through endless California forests and hills on my father’s death, and High on Fire’s glorious, sweeping “Blessed Black Wings“ recorded soon before my music teacher Jeff Matz joined (my kindergartner is learning to ape the title track on drums, which he retitled “Night of the Sabretooth, Death of the Gods”).

To conclude and in his spirit, I will point the finger at the two people who obviously killed him.

First, my WHPK friend Matt Gambino now (ironically!) a physician who, as an undergrad, upon the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995 went to a park to hand out Steve’s personal phone number to grieving deadheads with the label JERRY GRIEF HOTLINE. He said Steve, after changing his phone number, grudgingly admitted it was a pretty good one. I will be accusing Matt retroactively to the AMA.

UPDATE: my other WHPK friend James Black had already posted an oral history of pranking Steve Albini. that reminds me that this shit was actually even funnier, more friends at WHPK (first offenders in the new history of college radio “Live from the Underground“!) were complicit, and it was, hilariously, an even bigger pain in the ass to Steve than I remembered.

Second, my colleague Emily Pothast, an incredibly perceptive and incisive writer, whose questions to Steve in the new Shellac interview may have gone a little too hard. Don’t believe me? READ TO FIND OUT. With my love and gratitude,

God bless all you silly assholes

Folder of cassette Albini made for David Grubbs; “Knapsack Rebel” was his malapropism for Nadsat Rebel, possibly the first band other than his own that he recorded. The demo sounds like a bunch of 14 year olds covering “Ace of Spades” inside a washing machine.

. -30-

PS: Since his band Shellac’s first album in ten years is due for release on May 17, the record Emily interviewed them about, I’m told that “Nothing would send (his wife) Heather, his band mates, friends and family a clearer message of support than pre-ordering, which you can do now over at Bandcamp.” I’m especially eager to hear the concluding track, “I Don’t Fear Hell.”

Putting Satan Back in Yom Kippur: Kabbalah and Collective Politics in Leviticus 16

This week’s Torah portion contains the origins of Judaism’s holiest day of the year–including the scapegoat ritual, which has long been considered theologically suspicious. Did the pre-Jewish religion of ancient Judah involve an offering to a demonic power on the day of atonement? Did it, on the other hand, introduce a powerfully collective popular element into Israelite religion, which set it apart from the surrounding empires, and nations? And are these two possibilities connected?

Now, there is no hint of sketchy demonic offerings in our current Jewish Yom Kippur–it would violate Judaism’s core monotheistic principles. Yet major Rabbinic interpreters like Nachmanides, whose Kabbalistic leanings made him sensitive to mythic elements in scripture, thought the Torah had them. Were they hallucinating or–as another great Rabbinic interpreter, Ibn Ezra, suggests–is there a deeper mystery here?

Paul was Wrong: the Jews Weren’t Doomed

First and foremost this week’s Torah portion is about redemption: it gives us the original ritual of salvation from sin, Yom Kippur. In contrast to Saint Paul’s Christian ideal of an individual, once-and-for-all redemption–accepting Jesus into one’s heart to transform one’s soul–Yom Kippur is a distinctively group mode of salvation. Contrary to Paul’s famously slanted version of Jewish doom in Galatians, where he claims that our inability to follow every single one of God’s laws saddled us with an inescapable, fatal burden of sin, Yom Kippur is the collective ritual that washes away all the cosmically significant sins of the community.

Now, in Jewish tradition sins against other people can only be forgiven by the people themselves, by acting to make amends and beg forgiveness. But Yom Kippur handles the God part, fixing the cosmic order that our sins offend. This is why for Rabbinic Judaism the day of atonement was considered so holy that it is simply called Yoma’, “the day,” in the core works of Jewish law (the Mishnah and Talmud) devoted to it.*

The Torah’s creators made Yom Kippur central for a reason: its ceremony (Leviticus 16:2–28) gets the lengthiest and most detailed description of any ritual in the Bible. The editors also placed it at the literal center, in the middle of the middle book. In the Priestly calendar, it was assigned to the beginning of the year. Positioned at the center of Priestly text, time, and space, it redeems the center of the ritual universe. And this ritual not only redeems the entire people (16:17, 20–21) and purifies the very sources of purity—the sanctuary and priesthood (16:16–17)—it also causes God himself to appear.

But Where Does Yom Kippur Come From?

So why is the original Yom Kippur ritual so insanely strange? The Torah’s greatest ritual honor was granted to a text full of alien features. It uses terminology found nowhere else in Leviticus and places an otherwise unknown entity named Azazel on par with the Lord by presenting it with a sacrifice, offered in a way unknown elsewhere in the Torah. Its most distinctive public act, the scapegoat ritual, violates two fundamental patterns of Priestly ritual. For the Torah, sacrifice is typically bloody and always silent. By combining a bloodless animal sacrifice with a speech at its climax, the scapegoat ritual breaks both those patterns. Put together, these distinctive features convinced many scholars that this ritual was originally independent of the rest of the Torah. So what was it really for?

Interpreters have generally placed the scapegoat in an ahistorical and apolitical framework (as with Priestly ritual in general): in comparative religious categories, it is an expiation ritual, designed to remove pollution. But lots of people have expiation rituals–why is this one so central? Whatever system scholars have sought to find, the scapegoat has ended up escaping it*

In my first book I argued that if we see Yom Kippur historically and politically, we can see it clearly as a ritual of popular action, of a people’s collective redemption. And as we will see, it has a remarkable Canaanite predecessor which reveals the very process by which the people could become a fundamental ritual actor in the first place. But first, Satan (?)!

In Leviticus, the Day of Atonement ritual is framed as a command from the Lord to Moses about how the original Priest, Moses’ brother Aaron, is to enter the innermost chamber of the sanctuary without dying. This place, referred to here (and nowhere else in the Torah!) as haqqôdeš “the Holy,” is normally lethal to humans because of the divine presence within. The Lord reveals that he regularly becomes visible inside the sanctuary: “I appear in a cloud over the Atonement Place” (Lev. 16:2). Aaron is thus to risk death to enter the innermost chamber. First he dons priestly clothing and, as the representative of all Israel, takes animals to offer, provided by “the assembly of the Israelites,” including two goats, to divide between the Lord and another being:

He will take the two goats and he will stand them before the Lord at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. And Aaron will cast lots over the two goats: one lot for the Lord and one lot for Azazel. And Aaron will bring near the goat on which the lot for the Lord fell and make it a sin-offering. And the goat on which the lot for Azazel fell he will stand alive before the Lord, to atone through it, to send it to Azazel, into the desert. (Lev 16:7b–10)

This passage is nothing short of astonishing for the aggressively monotheistic book of Leviticus , which nowhere else seriously contemplates other divine powers. Here a divine being named Azazel receives offerings matching those for the Lord. Medieval Jewish interpreters were disturbed: How can Israelites atone by sacrificing to a being that is not God? Azazel’s divine power continues to demand explanation.

Some like Rashi tried to explain it away, but it was the Torah’s greatest Kabbalistic commentator Nachmanides (the 13th-century Italian sage Moses ben Nachman AKA RaMBaN) who drew the jaw-dropping logical conclusion: the goat is for a demonic entity named Azazel who is equivalent to Satan. After repeating the conventional explanation that “Azazel” means “a remote, sharp precipice” which the goat is to fall off of in a tragic, Warner Brothers-like death, he comes clean. He says the actual interpretation is alluded to, but concealed as a mystery by the great grammatical and linguistic commentator Ibn Ezra. Ramban starts out by quoting this dark hint:

‘I will reveal to you part of the secret by hint: when you are at thirty-three you will know it.’ Now of Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra it may be said that he of a faithful spirit conceals a matter, (Proverbs 11:13). and I will not be the tattler who reveals his secret, since our Rabbis of blessed memory have already revealed it in many places…

It is explained more clearly in (the Midrash collection) the Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer: “The reason why they would give Sammael [i.e., Satan] a conciliatory gift on the Day of Atonement, was so that he should not negate their offerings, as it is said, one lot for the Eternal, and the other lot for Azazel, the lot of the Holy One, blessed by He, to be a burnt-offering, and the lot of Azazel to be ‘the goat of sin,’ bearing upon it all the iniquities of Israel, as it is said, And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities.

The Midrash continues, claiming that the offering forestalls the objections of The Satan to the Israelites’ prayers. Who is this Satan that God would listen to him? Not the Devil of popular culture or even the Satan of early Christian theology, a kind of super-demon who opposes God. In the Hebrew Bible the original Satan is God’s own cantankerous District Attorney, called Ha-Sāṭān “the prosecutor” in Job 1 or Zechariah 3–the origin of our “Satan”)

When Sammael (=Sāṭān) saw that he could find no sin on the Day of Atonement amongst them [the children of Israel], he said to the Holy One, blessed by He: ‘Master of all worlds! You have one people on earth who are comparable to the ministering angels in the heavens. Just as the ministering angels are barefoot, so are the Israelites barefoot [i.e., do not wear leather shoes] on the Day of Atonement. Just as the ministering angels do not eat or drink, so is there no eating or drinking in Israel on the Day of Atonement….Just as the ministering angels are free from all sin, so are the Israelites free from all sin on the Day of Atonement.’ And the Holy One, blessed be He, hears the testimony concerning Israel from their prosecutor (i.e. Ha-Sāṭān), and He atones for the altar and for the Sanctuary, and for the priests and for all the people of the assembly.

But Ramban is not content with this happy picture of a domesticated demon, a kind of court Satan. Instead he digs down into the Israelites’ original polytheism and comes up with a more startling, and theologically challenging, reading:

Now this is the secret of the matter. They used to worship “other gods,” namely, the angels, bringing offerings of a sweet savor to them, similarly to that which it says, and you set My oil and My incense before (these other gods). My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you even set it before them for a sweet savor, and thus it was; says the Eternal God (Ezekiel 16:18-19). ..Now the Torah has absolutely forbidden to accept them as deities, or to worship them in any manner.

This all sounds fine and monotheistic. Why the offering to Azazel??

However, the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us that on the Day of Atonement we should let loose a goat in the wilderness, to that “prince” who rules over wastelands, and this [goat] is fitting for it because he is its master, and destruction and waste emanate from that power, which in turn is the cause of the stars of the sword, wars, quarrels, wounds, plagues, division and destruction. In short, it is the spirit of the sphere of Mars, and its portion among the nations is Esau (Jacob’s hairy, goat-like brother in Genesis, equated by the Rabbis with the violent Roman empire), the people that inherited the sword and the wars, and among animals [its portion consists of] the se’irim (hairy goat demons) and the goats.

Wait, so this is an offering for a hairy demon?

Now the intention in our sending away the goat to the desert was not that it should be an offering from us to it — Heaven forbid! Rather, our intention should be to fulfill the wish of our Creator, Who commanded us to do so.

Okayyy so we’re commanded to make an offering to a demon but it’s ok because God wants us to?? This is really heading off the rails. But Ramban pulls it back in with a wild mashal (parable), often used for the most bold and audacious claims in Midrash:

This may be compared to the case of someone who makes a feast for his master, and the master commands the person making the feast, “Give one portion to that servant of mine,” in which case the host gives nothing [of his own] to that servant, and it is not to show him honor that he acts in that way to him, but everything is given to the master and it is the master that gives a gift to his servant; the host only observes his command and does in honor of the master whatever he commanded him to do…

So it looks like an offering to a demon, but technically it’s not?/

If the priest were to dedicate the two goats merely by word of mouth [without casting the lots], saying, “one for the Eternal” and “one for Azazel,” that would be like worshipping [Azazel] …Rather, the priest set the two goats before the Eternal at the door of the Tent of Meeting, for both of them were a gift to God, and he gave to His servant that portion which came to him from God. It is he [i.e., the priest] who cast the lots on them, but it is His hand that apportioned them, something like that which it says, The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing of it is of the Eternal. Even after the casting of the lots, the priest placed the two goats before the Eternal, thus proclaiming that both are His and that by sending one away [to the desert] we intend merely to fulfill God’s wish,… That is the reason why we do not ourselves do any act of slaughtering [of that goat, as this would imply that it is a proper offering which requires slaughtering].

With a keen eye for the otherworldly, Ramban has sensed the pre-biblical myth behind the monotheistic scenery here. Historically, the most plausible explanation is that this ritual was like the radioactive core of a religious nuclear reactor: too hot to handle let alone remove. The Priestly writers had inherited a previous Hebrew tradition that was already ancient and mysterious to them, and considered it too sacred to remove and too dangerous to leave out: Judeans believed it worked. There is a substantial scholarly consensus that the scapegoat was already old and prestigious in the Priestly writers’ time.**

And [Aaron, the high priest] will atone for the Holy Place from the pollution of the Israelites and from their transgressions {pešaˁîm, used as a technical term here and nowhere else in the Priestly source}, all their sins, and he will do thus for the Tent of Meeting {used only here to refer to the sanctuary as a whole}, which resides with them in the midst of their pollution.. . . . and he will atone on his behalf and on behalf of the whole congregation of Israel. (vv. 16–17)

The ritual atones for Aaron, the Temple, and the congregation at once, tying priest, sacred center, and people together as protagonists of a single ritual action. Next Aaron brings the live goat to the altar.

And Aaron will put his two hands on the head of the living goat and he will confess over it all the misdeeds of the Israelites and all their transgressions and all their sins and he will put them on the head of the goat and send it into the desert, at the hands of a man who is prepared for the occasion. And the goat will bear on it all their misdeeds to the cut-off land, when he sends the goat into the desert. . . . And he will go out and make the burnt offering for him and the burnt offering for the people and atone on his behalf and on behalf of the people. (vv. 21–22, 24)

Here a whole people acts as a single ritual agent, as nowhere else in the ancient Near East–well, almost nowhere. There are of course many individual rituals for sick people, cursed people, and kings. But this one makes a whole group’s responsibility collective and concrete, fused together into one utterance and then located in an animal. What makes the ritual so special, then, is not the mechanism of expiation but the people on whose behalf (ba’ad in 16:24) it acts. As Jacob Milgrom, author of the most detailed scholarly commentary ever written on Leviticus comments, “there are no group transfer rites in Mesopotamia; the biblical scapegoat, in contrast, removes the sins of the entire nation” (1991:1079).

The difference from the cuneiform empires is decisive. From Babylon to the Hittite realm, rituals never involve the people as a collective agent—the protagonists of the Babylonian and Hittite rituals are the king, his army, or his territory. This is a stage inhabited by an old and limited cast of characters, dating at least as far back as the third millennium in which old Near Eastern principles of sacred kingship are rooted. It is the king’s actions, not the people’s, that matter most to the gods.

But there is one other ancient Near Eastern expiation ritual with collective subjects: the Ugaritic ritual for collective atonement. This ritual, KTU 1.40 was the most widely used ritual known from the Late Bronze Age Canaanite city-state of Ugarit. Unlike its more famous relatives like the epic of Baal, present in just one manuscript of uncertain function, we know this ritual was used repeatedly because it is not just present in multiple copies but in multiple versions. The ritual involved a confession of sins and the slaughter of sacrificial animals for the purposes of atonement. Since its publication, scholars have noted that its ritual mechanisms parallel those of the biblical Day of Atonement, described in Leviticus 16.

What has not been emphasized is that both these West Semitic rituals revolve around a new type of participant. Both Leviticus 16 and KTU 1.40 are done on behalf of a community, not just an individual or a leader. Within Ugaritic ritual KTU 1.40 is marked by a uniquely broad sweep and high level of repetition, addressing male and female inhabitants of the city, and, again uniquely, including both foreigners and natives, ruler and citizens. It is composed of a set of three paired invocations and expiations, the first of each addressing men, the second women. And it names a spectrum of ethnic and social groups within the city, against whom sins are confessed.

The Ugaritic text and the core of the Leviticus passage share a common pattern: they represent West Semitic group salvation rituals, and each held a central place in their own new local form of the alphabet, Ugaritic and Hebrew. Both writing systems were created to represent the language that the people spoke, in sharp contrast to the older writing system of Babylonian cuneiform, which was–like Medieval Latin–a system for priests and scholars, not normal people. The similarities of the Hebrew and Ugaritic texts as unifying and atoning rituals in new local languages and polities is not an accident. Both address and assume a new kind of participant. In both the Canaanite and Biblical texts, the rituals conjure up “the people;” those who recognized themselves in it were invited to be characters in a new story, of being redeemed together.

Ramban’s sensitivity to Sammael, if not Satan, has thus led us to a similar place as our historical analysis of Canaanite and biblical ritual. In the archaic elements of Yom Kippur we witness the rise of a new kind of politics and a new religious way of being in the world: the collective atonement and redemption of a people, not a state or king.

*While its features seemed pagan and magical to writers like Yehezkel Kaufman and Israel Knohl in search of coherent forms of Israelite religion, they seemed equally far from primitive Semitic sacrifice to William Robertson Smith in his portrait of the archaic “religion of the Semites.” Most entertainingly, two of the twentieth century’s biggest theorists of sacrifice, James G. Frazier and Rene Girard, each wrote books called The Scapegoat that both avoided this inconvenient passage, despite it being the place that the term ‘scapegoat’ actually comes from (via the Greek translation).

**For example, Erhard Gerstenberger exclaims that it is “simply inconceivable” that the Priestly theologians, “loyal to YHWH as they were, could have allowed this kind of ‘polytheistic’ idea to pass through. The wilderness demon Azazel must also be appeased, and not only YHWH, the only lord of the world!”