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!”

Don’t Make It Weird

The church fathers had a principle that scripture must always make sense, so it should be taken literally until it starts sounding strange. At that point, you’d probably better treat it metaphorically. This is a good rule of thumb for preventing scripture from ever looking too weird. But what if it actually is weird?

The purified man and the plague in the walls

This week’s Torah portion concerns a set of phenomena that do not exist in our world in any remotely plausible sense. While our Parsha is a bit extreme, it’s a good example for helping understand why most Jews either 1) basically just ignore the Torah 2) listen to it chanted in a language they don’t quite understand or 3) have someone explain that it’s actually a metaphor.

The title of this week’s portion, Meṣoraˁ, prescribes how to ceremonially purify someone from something called ṣaraˁat. It is an illness we cannot even really name let alone understand. Whatever it is, this affliction, classically translated “leprosy” in the King James Version, is definitely not leprosy. Look how it works:

When you enter the land of Canaan that I give you as a possession, and I inflict a plague of “leprosy” (ṣaraˁat) upon a house in the land you possess, the owner shall come and tell the priest, saying, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.” … If, when he examines the plague, the plague in the walls of the house is found to consist of greenish or reddish streaks that appear to go deep into the wall, the priest shall come out of the house to the entrance, and close up the house for seven days.

Leviticus 14:34-38

The house–like a human body affected with the illness–has to rest for a week, the length of time it took God to create the world in Genesis 1 and so the cosmic measure of a cycle of purification. After this, the stones infected with this illness are to be surgically removed and taken to an “unclean place” so it does not spread. Yet also like a body, the house can be reinfected:

Lev. 14:43    If the plague again breaks out in the house, after the stones have been pulled out and after the house has been scraped and replastered, the priest shall come to examine: if the plague has spread in the house, it is a malignant “leprosy” in the house; it is unclean

The final chapter describes how parallel impurities can saturate the male body. Having moved on from a cosmic illness we learn just how vulnerable men are to ordinary ritual contamination. A discharge from the male member, surely quite common in a period with no mechanisms for public hygiene or antibiotics, is so incredibly contagious that everything he touches becomes almost radioactive:

Any bedding on which the one with the discharge lies shall be unclean, and every object on which he sits shall be unclean. Anyone who touches his bedding shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. Whoever sits on an object on which the one with the discharge has sat shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. Whoever touches the body of the one with the discharge shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. … If one with a discharge, without having rinsed his hands in water, touches another person, that person shall wash his clothes, bathe in water, and remain unclean until evening. An earthen vessel that one with a discharge touches shall be broken; and any wooden implement shall be rinsed with water.

Leviticus 15:4-12

Now, there is much in Rabbinic literature about the holiness of the land of Israel, but the radioactive discharge of male members and malignant wall plague are mostly forgotten in the conversation for non-Orthodox readers. Yet the Torah itself envisions both dwellings and bodies in the Holy Land as exceedingly porous and contagious, a physical world virtually blooming with impurity and repurification.

As we saw last week, the male creators of the Rabbinic purity system shifted the Torah’s concerns, imposing a presumed status of impurity on women while giving men (and houses!) the benefit of the doubt.

Yet the Torah itself, from God’s creation by word to His coming to physically dwell and eat among us in the Tabernacle to commanding the violent conquest of the land of Israel and expulsion of its natives, often starts sounding weird, or alien, or unjust.

Should we ignore the Torah and just let the obscure language go in one ear and out the other? The great Polish Hasidic commentator Yehudah Leib Alter, known as the Sfat Emet (“Language of Truth”) was not content to do this. Addressing the plague in the walls he wrote:

What sort of strange announcement is this? (The great French commentator Rashi explains this in terms of violent conquest:) that the Canaanites [had been hiding gold treasures inside the walls of their houses, which the Israelites would find upon destroying the houses]. Now really! Did the Creator of the universe need to resort to such contortions? Why would He have given the Canaanites the idea of hiding [things in the walls] so that Israel would have to knock down the houses!

Instead, he writes, the point is the enchantment of the world:

The real meaning of these afflictions of houses is in fact
quite wondrous, a demonstration that Israel’s holiness is so
great that they can also draw sanctity and purity into their
dwelling-places. Scripture tells us: “A stone shall cry out from
the wall and a wooden beam shall answer it” (Hab. 2:11), regarding a person’s sin, to which the walls of his house bear witness. How much more fully does the righteous person have to bring a feeling of holiness into all that belongs to them, including both plants and ordinary physical objects!

Is he saying this is just a metaphor? Notice that his criterion for plausibility is justice. Did the Creator of the universe need to resort to such contortions? It may be a metaphor, but one that is also real and literal, played out in one’s actual physical place.

A distinctive feature of Judaism is that if we want to enter into the covenant, we can only do it deliberately with our bodies and blood. In the Sfat Emet’s spirit one could tie this together with the incantation-like theory of the poet Robert Duncan, where the material world of bodies and objects we see is fraught with potential divine enchantment, ones that reveal to him the originary mythic place:

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place,

that it is mine….created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

…Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.

“When She Bears Seed” (Leviticus 12:2)

Made With Bodies and Blood

When the chips are down we see things physically. We exist as bodies, and we only enter this world by being born–we are bodies that come from bodies, like plants are born from seeds. We are born in blood, bleed when cut, and if we die by violence we die bleeding.

Though the truth of bodies and blood bears with it an illusion: that we are nothing but them. But they alone do not decide or explain us, and nowhere is this more true than in the Torah and Jewish tradition, which are constituted by the covenant, a covenant that is deliberately made with bodies and blood. Yet in this world we are also inseparable from bodies, blood, and the biological seeds we consume, grow from, or bear. In the poetry of the seven Jewish wedding blessings, God “prepared for humanity, from Himself an eternal construct”–a mortal kind of immortality. * We need our bodies, blood, and seeds not just to see but to think and feel with, to live onward.

The name of this week’s Torah portion is Tazriaˁ, literally “when she bears seed:” When a woman bears seed and gives birth to a male, she shall be ceremonially impure for seven days…” The link it makes between human and plant would have carried almost as much biological weirdness in ancient Hebrew as it does in today’s English. While the verbal root for “seed” (ZRˁ) is frequent with the plain meaning of what a plant bears, and also often refers to “a man’s semen or offspring,” only once does it refer to the life a human woman bears. Indeed in this causative form meaning “seed-bearing” it appears in only one other place, at the beginning:

“And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants that are seed-bearing (mazriaˁ), fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so.” (Gen 1:11)

What larger conception does a mother “bearing seed” reflect? An illuminating analysis by Marianne Grohmann explains how until the end of the 19th century, the great minds of Western Civilization held a variety of flaky-sounding ideas about where babies came from including 1) a “one seed” idea shared by Aristotle, Mesopotamian, and some biblical writers that babies came from fathers alone, with the mother just serving as incubator 2) an alternative ancient idea “two seeds” idea that both male and female “sperm” combined to form a baby or 3) a later European idea the baby’s form came from whatever the mother was looking at or thinking about at the moment of conception.

The idea of us as seed confronts us with our nature in the crudest, most embarrassing way. Just the sheer fact that we are nature, and also that as nature our ruptures can be the subject of thought and ritual, that instead of working to keep our involvement in birth, death, and fertility tidy and out of the way, we can shine light on them, study these workings like natural phenomena, or decide them like law. As Charlotte Fonrobert, the great scholar of Rabbinic purity law, writes of the tradition around these laws:

Like few other cultures, rabbinic Judaism in this tractate transforms blood and bodies into language, analyzes the nature of blood and pads, of births and abortions or miscarriages. One detects no sense of embarrassment, shame, or disgust in those pages of the Talmud, feelings familiar to those of us who have grown up in the cultural context of the West, which allows mostly only euphemistic, hidden references to bodies and their messiness. The texts in Tractate Niddah might just as well be about zoology, astronomy, physics, or mathematics, judging by their tone.

Fonrobert, Menstrual purity : Rabbinic and Christian reconstructions of Biblical gender (Stanford UP, 2000)

But, as the joke has the white Lone Ranger’s companion Tonto reply to him when outnumbered by native warriors, “who do you mean ‘we’?”

For as Fonrobert’s study shows, ancient Hebrew ritual purity is in essence a men’s science. Priestly and Rabbinic laws around childbirth and menstruation are not just some general human thinking about human nature. They are a male expert tradition of scrutinizing and theorizing the workings of women’s bodies as cosmic mechanisms inadequately translated as “pure” and “impure.”

The Torah’s idea of ceremonial purity is simply not our ideas of “clean.” Being tahor “ceremonially pure” is in fact so far from modern cleanliness–or even basic hygiene–that it faces puke, piss, and shit undisturbed; one can be crusted in snot or caked in manure and completely tahor. And consider the term ṭame’, which applies to a new mother and which I translated “ceremonially impure.” Far from a mere physical condition, this purity and impurity is a cosmological term unaffected by things like hot showers.

Like a Crashed UFO

In an early argument for the religious and moral value of this system of ceremonial purity, Rabbi Rachel Adler argued that it would illuminate how all members of a society undergo bodily conditions of purity and impurity in shared ways. Her “Tumah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings,” (The Jewish Catalog, 1973) argued that bodily cycles of purity put us all on a level playing field. But as Gail Labovitz writes, Adler later realized that

this is no longer helpful for understanding tum’ah in the post-biblical and particularly rabbinic Judaisms that followed. Post-rabbinic tum’ah is gendered particularly female, such that all females are (treated as) suspect of being in the process of menstruating and hence impure, while men, who certainly must have come into contact with sources of impurity such as seminal emissions and proximity to a corpse, nonetheless experience themselves as pure at all times.

Labovitz, commentary on Adler in Kurtzer, ed. The New Jewish Canon

In other words, the cosmology was itself inseparable from its interpreters’ own bodies and what they meant in their own society, their identities as male experts in the system they ruled.

On reflection, after a mighty good-faith effort to uphold this worldview, Adler decided the whole system of purity was worthy of rejection.

I tried to make a theology to uphold this truth, and as hard as I tried to make it truthful, it unfolded itself to me as a theology of lies.

I do not believe the laws of purity will ever be reinstated, nor should they be. The worlds reflected in such rules are not worlds we inhabit. Neither should we seek to replicate such worlds. They are unjust.

Adler “In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theological Purity,” Tikkun 8 (1993)

I will not try to salvage or recuperate such a cosmology of the body here, only reflect on its familiarity and alienness. For the second chapter of our Parshah, Leviticus 13, hinges equally around an untranslatable term, ṣaraˁat. Classically rendered “leprosy” and carrying with it similar marks of rejection and isolation, it is actually one of those rare words that should probably not be translated at all.

For the Torah’s ṣaraˁat fits modern categories about as well as a crashed UFO. Leviticus 13:47-51 go on to explain what to do “when ṣaraˁat occurs in a cloth of wool or linen fabric, in the warp or in the woof of the linen or the wool, or in a skin or in anything made of skin.” Unlike any known human illness, it can spread to furniture, which is described as ceremonially impure and even “malignant, painful” (13:52).

Ṣaraˁat is a vision of the vulnerability of all organic matter, and like the Tabernacle it is a mythic vision. It is not an object we would ever directly encounter in this world. We only encounter it via the sacred text itself.

But I think what Fonrobert really shows is that this is true of women–and maybe men–in the Torah too. As in the title of the great Sanskritist Wendy Doniger’s book Women, Androgynes, and other Mythical Beasts, they are treated as mythical: cosmic icons in a ceremonial system, icons only mapped onto human individuals. Bodies and blood are icons that Priests and Rabbis thought with.

How would people in different bodies and lives think with them? One promise of a new understanding and enactment of this might come from feminist reuse of the rituals. As Labovitz writes,

For Adler, it was in fact seeing women create new rituals involving the mikveh that brought her to an insight of this very sort in “In Your Blood, Live”: “When Jewish women who were not Orthodox appropriated my reframing of immersion … to mark occurrences for which no ritual expression had existed, they taught me an important lesson about the possibility of salvage … for the feminist Jew, impurity seems to mean the violation of physical or sexual integrity, death by invasion” (41). She now holds that a truly new theological understanding must go hand in hand in hand with an actual feminist and female positive ritual expression.

If we want to enter into the covenant, we can only do it deliberately with our bodies and blood. But here the “deliberately” and the “our” are the most important parts.

*My translation of Sheva Brachot #4, וְהִתְקִין לוֹ מִמֶּנּוּ בִּנְיַן עֲדֵי עַד

On the Eighth Day

How The Torah Presents Itself as Myth

The iconic Rabbinic commentator Rashi’s first comment on the first word of Genesis is to correct it: the Torah shouldn’t have begun with creation at all. Instead it should have begun with the first commandment, because the point of the Torah is not to teach history or astrophysics but to give us a legacy of commandments to perform.

The Torah did not need to begin here, but rather should have started with “This month will be the beginning of the months for you” (Exodus 12:2) which is the first commandment given to Israel.

Rashi on Genesis 1:1

By this token the Torah could just as well have begun with this week’s reading, Leviticus 9-11. For it is here that regular human observance– being a Jew in what is probably the most original sense–first becomes possible. It depicts a new eighth day of creation.

Every year in the traditional Jewish reading cycle year we again recite this portion called Shemini, “(On the Eighth (Day).” It is the first day after the seven-day process required to intiate the priesthood (Cohanim), a small-scale creation which echoes God’s large-scale-creation of the world,. After priesthood is possible, God can physically dwell in the world. The priests share our acts of atonement and communion with Him, allowing Him to reside and take meals at His physical home address, the Temple, which one can walk right up to (though not enter!)

Leviticus 9 narrates what the Torah itself presents as a myth–a divine act located in a foundational time that is now lost–about the presence of God’s body (the Kavod or “glory”) and His first meal on earth. It lays out the rituals by which humans once became empowered to participate like God Himself in the creation of their universe, and to eat like Him. In this far-off ancient vision of the Temple the human-built universe happens through acts like sacrifice–sharing a meal in person with God Himself.

Via food, it portrays a lost miraculous past and a continuing mundane reality as both equally sacred. The lost miracle is when God, having physically arrived in our world to inhabit the sanctuary the Israelites just built for Him, eats His first meal. Leviticus 9 describes the astonishing event of God’s direct physical presence in which He Himself first appears to devour sacrifices with fire.

When [Moses and Aaron emerged from meeting the Lord], they blessed the people; and the Presence of the Lord appeared to all the people. Fire came forth from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fat parts on the altar. And all the people saw, and shouted, and fell on their faces.

Leviticus 9:23-24

In Hebrew, fire consumes (אכל, a word that means both “eat” and “burn up”). God’s first ritual meal is followed by a cautionary tale about this consuming fire: it is God’s alone (Leviticus 10). The two Priests who dare to offer their own fire are themselves consumed by God, because humans can no more replicate His devouring ritual presence than they can copy His voice. What is given to us is something different: the revelation of human ritual meals: Kosher law (Leviticus 11), which is what we ourselves have of this miracle.

For while the Torah does not tell us this, later Scripture reveals that the mythic world where God eats right in front of us was ended by God himself. We now live in the time after God’s direct physical presence, for as texts like 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Psalm 74 later narrate, the rules forever changed when God had the Temple destroyed. The old, weird physical intimacy with the divine is no longer possible. But the myth lives on, for this is also the Torah portion that defines what is left to us: the current, nearby counterpart of Temple ritual that is eating Kosher food.

As my Rabbi Tamar Manasseh says, Judaism is something you do here and now, not just something you are. Historical evidence verifies this: action, not identity, is the most concrete measure of Judaism. Commandments like keeping Kosher and observing the Sabbath are the oldest and most consistent aspect of being Jewish. Beyond the rich but squishy act of self-definition, the Mizvot most clearly define what it means to be part of Israel.

But according to the Bible’s text–which is, after all, the very thing that transmits the commandments–the Torah’s ritual actions are unable to explain or justify themselves. Most obviously, the Torah says nothing about why the Tabernacle no longer exists or about why so many of its Mizvot are no longer even physically possible in any simple, non-mystical or non-Midrashic sense.

This is because the Torah’s self-presentation is mythic. The commandments of Leviticus take place in a historical and moral vacuum, depicting a Tabernacle that nobody, even in the ancient Israel of David or Bathsheba, Isaiah or Huldah, had ever seen. Its text and commandments come from such a long time ago, such a galaxy far, far away that even Josiah, the most pious of Judahite kings, explicitly states he had never heard of them. Sripture depicts the commandments without context or motivation, without history and prophecy, as hollow and inadequate.

“If One Has No Shame, Their Ancestors Never Stood at Mount Sinai”

The Sfat Emet cites Rashi saying that when Moses told Aaron to approach the altar (Lev. 9:7), “Aaron was ashamed to draw near, but Moses said to him: “Why are you ashamed? For this you were chosen!”

Now, the commentators say that it was because of this shame he had that he was chosen. But it could also be read otherwise: that the goal of being chosen was to reach this state of shame. Thus Scripture itself says about the giving of the Torah: “so that His fear be upon your faces in order that you not sin” (Ex. 20:20). The rabbis said that this refers to shame and that “if one has no shame, it is known that his ancestors never stood at Mount Sinai.” So the purpose of Israel’s coming near to Mount Sinai was to merit shame.

For the Sfat Emet, having a sense of restraint and humility is what made Aaron deserve the divine presence. It was Aaron’s fear of heaven that enabled him to draw others near to Judaism, for

by means of shame you can really come close to each
of the commandments. Take true shame to heart, [thinking:]
“How can a clod of earth do the will of the Creator?” In this
way you will be able to fulfill the Mitzvot.

His translator and interpreter Arthur Green writes that it is this fear of heaven that allowed Aaron to encounter the very Glory of God.

This resonates with an absolutely jaw-dropping line in the Tamud:

Come and see how great is the power of shame: look, the Holy One Blessed be He, took the side [of someone shamed by a prominent Jerusalemite so vehemently that] He destroyed His Temple and burned His Sanctuary.

Babylonian Talmud Gittin 57a.5

This is a wild and audacious line, but in keeping with Jewish tradition’s often wild and audacious approach to the incomparable value of human dignity. The Kosher laws, this ritual discipline of preparing and eating food (not coincidentally again only the types of food that God Himself can consume), are a mundane embodiment of this radical sense of humility, that constitutes the fear of heaven. The Sfat Emet cites the Talmud’s commentary

“Had I brought Israel forth only so that they not defile themselves with creeping things, it would have been sufficient.” The One “who brought you forth” has to be greater than the Exodus itself. Thus we say: “who brought us forth from the Land of Egypt and redeemed us from the house of slaves.” There is a redemption from the
narrow straits (a Hebrew pun on Egypt as constraint: Miṣrayim/meṣar), but there is a still higher rung, one above all places of constriction, an “inheritance without constraints.”

How does he think such apparently empty and meaningless formal details like avoiding a pig but not a goat confer cosmic freedom?

Every year I teach a class on “Ritual, Myth, and Music” and this year a number of students chose meditation as their practice-based research project. The goal is to choose a constructive and positive ritual practice and they have chosen everything from musical “deep listening” to boxing or fencing to the Russian Orthodox “prayer of the heart” to Hindu “deity Yoga” depending on their own religious traditions and personal interests.

This year, meditation was both the most popular and the most challenging, and the biggest problem was sheer form. Students struggled with distracting thoughts, anxiety about achieving results, and the concern that what they were doing wasn’t enough. These projects too were the source of learning as they observed and confronted possible roadblocks. But the projects that got the most results ironically focused on the process itself, the simple form of the act of meditation.

A surprising emblem of the students’ focus on form was the Mudra, a traditional Buddhist way of holding the hands to make a cosmic shape. What is surprising about the Mudra is that it seems to do nothing–unlike controlled breathing or posture, which have been demonstrated to have profound physiological and cognitive effects, the Mudra seems purely “religious,” one is making the shape of the cosmos as if holding it in one’s hand. Yet students who took Zen sage Shunryu Suzuki’s advice to form a Mudra found it was an essential part of making their meditation click.

The wisdom that the Sfat Emet unlocks from the Talmud and Torah here lies in the nonrational sheer form of the Commandment, but one that cannot explain itself. Pure form cannot be mindlessly accepted; without the Sfat Emet’s form of shame, AKA “fear of heaven,” a devotion to sincere self-critique and wrestling with the Bible, it will remain empty. I feel that this radical excavation is what we now need to gain from our tradition.

Towards a Counterhistory of the Western Canon

The “Original Fragments” of the Bible and Homer:

Friday and Saturday February 16 and 17 at UC Davis

Paper titles, presenters, and abstracts

Curious readers have long wondered how the traditions of early Greek and Hebrew literature were transformed, reinvented, and even falsified by the people who transmitted them to us. Historically informed reading between the lines and against the grain suggests that our classics had a very different past than the ones they themselves present. This emerges if you just count the number of tribes of Israel (Judah, later the most famous one, doesn’t even appear in what is probably the oldest list, Judges 5). It becomes even clearer if you look at their religious loyalties, which are complex, shifting, and polytheistic–hardly a monolith. Similar patterns appear in the diverse cultures behind the mythic narrators of the most famous Greek poetry, “Homer” and “Hesiod,” who never quite considered themselves Greek. But what can we plausibly know about the “pre-Classical” nature and origins of these Western Classics, and what can they teach us?

After immersion in Pentateuchal scholarship and the histories of ancient Near Eastern literary formation, reading Joel Christensen’s incisive overview of some analogous issues in Classics, “99 Homeric Problems,” I was intrigued and, frankly, encouraged by the realization that Homer and the Bible have raised provocatively parallel questions for scholars themselves: researchers in these two fields have long been intrigued by very similar problems. The famous “Homeric Question” corresponded to a parallel biblical “Mosaic Question” about the nature and origins of Hebrew literature.

Without artificially homogenizing two sets of ancient literature with sharply distinct literary forms (in Greek, poetic epics vs. in Hebrew a heterogenous library including narrative prose, law, and poetry) and contexts of production (a local festival at Athens vs. a spectrum of sites in the Levant including royal courts and temples and later scholarly production) I see the questions as today raising four shared issues: 1) they are inherently multicultural works, in their nature, “not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.” 2) They are inherently multi-local works, with a range of contexts and audiences being forged (in both the generic and pointed senses) into one. What puts an edge on these questions is a problem that scholarship can neither resolve nor responsibly let go of: the facts that: 3) they are both rooted in a pre-Classical period of formation that spans between about 800-300 BCE but is only available to us in glimpses and fragments and 4) in their very linguistic form they represent vernaculars being monumentalized and standardized in order to shape the cultural, spatial, and chronological diversity into a desired unity.

While both the Homeric and Mosaic or biblical questions were shaped by their environment in scholarly exchange between the 18th and 19th centuries, they originate in a profound shared problem, the fact that both come to us as Classics, things certain types of people are supposed to know. Yet the texts themselves were formed in an unevenly documented pre-Classical context, intended to speak to a type of audience that is now lost. Their monumentalization had a shaping effect on Western European self-concepts via the paradigmatic opposition between “Athens” and “Jerusalem.”

This workshop is a way to brainstorm about what sorts of things we can take from the pre-Classical phases and conceptualize in order to move forward. Are there more illuminating ways to compare and conceptualize these literatures’ stages and periodizations? What are productive new ways to think about what we can say and what we should be asking?

Parallel Homeric and Mosaic Questions:

1. Multicultural works
   Scholars agree on the internal diversity of early Greek and Hebrew literature, indicating a variety of locales and variant versions. There is agreement on the diversity of contents in these traditions including early Iron Age and even Late Bronze Age cultural material, culturally ‘impure’ in the sense that these traditions first appear in geographically and culturally distant forms: “The Homeric epics we have are products of different cultures, different audiences, and often competing linguistic, political, and class ideologies over time. They are not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.”
2. Multilocal works
   Both early Hebrew and Greek literature have local allusions being forged (in both bland and pointed sense) into unity, as in the constantly shifting tribes of Israel (with the earliest list in Judges not even including the later dominant Judah), the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah retroactively reimagined as one “Israel,” or multiple Greek sites that are later assimilated under a panhellenic “Athens.”
3. A Mostly Undocumented Formation, the period of which spans from the early to late first millennium BCE Mediterranean.
   Both within a rough 800-300 year timeframe of undocumented preclassical/precanonical (where the Judean exile and the Peisistratid period represent an early cutoff for many though not all scholars)
4. The Problem of Monumentalization and Nationalization.
   Was the Peisistratean Recension a charter myth or a historical event? By contrast what is the legacy of the once dominant, then lost and exiled kingdom of Israel in Judah’s bible, which narrates the story of a primordial people of Israel retroactively, in a language variety we know they never spoke? If the texts are inherently multicultural in origin, why do they exert such a gravitational pull after their canonization (or through it) towards homogeneity? Named after two of the prime sites of their homogenization, the contrast between ‘Athens’ vs ‘Jerusalem’ has become a rigid philosophical or theological paradigm, opposing reason to revelation and critical inquiry to religious inspiration. Can we turn this fixed paradigmatic opposition back into an open historical question?