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.

“Does this Place Really Have a Hashgacha?” Performative Judaism and the Quest for Jewish Essence

The other day I think I began to understand what people now call “performative” identity, via the most jaw-droppingly performative act of Judaism I’ve ever seen. The place I was sitting in didn’t exactly feel like a Jewish fishbowl: an old time diner in South Lake Tahoe specializing in delicacies like biscuits and gravy with a side of Jalapeǹo bacon, deep in conversation with a stellar grad student. The staff seemed a mix of Latino and Arabic-speaking, the clientele had the same kind of vaguely redneck look that I do, and I was wearing a lovely watermelon-logo Palestine tee from Wearthepeace casually wondering if that mattered to anybody.

At that point I noticed a schlubby-looking white guy at the other end of the restaurant suddenly clock my shirt, and with a half-smile that I read as a smirk dig a tiny Kippah out of his pocket and balance it on his head. Now, I’m familiar with such acts of public flag-waving when people wish to address an audience “as a Jew,” but this was the first time I had ever seen someone literally perform an act of identification, in a turbo-Trayf diner no less, for an audience of one (me). What struck me as so batshit crazy about it is that wearing such a Kippah in daily life is typically the mark of an observant Jew, and with its panoply of pork this is no place an observant Jew would normally be caught dead eating in. In fact, many conventionally observant Jews would avoid even sitting in such a place because of the Orthodox principle of Mar’it Ha-Ayin (מַרְאִית הָעַיִן) avoiding even the appearance of transgression for fear it might mislead other observant people into making an authentic mistake.

I was tempted to walk up to him–sheepishly, of course, so as to avoid making more of a scene than I needed to–and asking, “does this place really have a Hashgacha??” The sad thing was I would have laid even odds he’d have no idea what the word (here, “legitimate Kosher supervision”) meant. How did we come to this pass, where so many define “Jewish” as “anti-Palestinian?”

Walter Sobchak’s famous rant from the Big Lebowski is a spiritual gemstone here: what is so disarming is that he’s angrily yelling about how Jews are a people whose life goes far deeper than current bullshit, able to inhabit everything and everywhere of Jewish history all at once: “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax--YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT I’M LIVING IN THE FUCKING PAST!” So beyond 21st century politics and the obvious machinations of US support for its biggest client state, why does so many people’s Judaism today sometimes seem little deeper than picking one side in what most of the world recognizes as a genocide? What has been forgotten?

My hunch is in the broad population, few of us today have much of a connection to the Judaism of our ancestors beyond some not-exactly-coherent catchphrases (“Never Again!” “Am Yisrael Chai!” “indigenous,” “What the hell is a ‘scooped bagel?‘”). We probably don’t know what Rambam’s 13 Middot are (what Maimonides, arguably the most influential Jewish religious thinker of all time, considered essential to Judaism). Do we really officially believe in the resurrection of the dead? What about the Messiah–do we have one like the Christians do (or did they actually borrow it from us in the first place?). How important is this Messianic idea, including the principle that only God Himself could return Jewish sovereignty to the Levant at the hands of a descendant of King David?

Some would just throw up their hands and say, hey, I was born Jewish, I’m Jewish! Or…are you actually just white, with a side of lox and capers? The idea that Jewish identity is something obvious that defaults to Ashkenazic or Israeli identity is, as my colleagues Andrew Tobolowsky and Tamar Manasseh have show, on shaky ground both historically and spiritually.

And shockingly, it turns out that the real performative Judaism–the performance of commandments like keeping Kosher–is actually a lot older than Jewish “blood,” because the definition of Jewish ethnicity has famously flip-flopped over time. In biblical times Jewish descent meant having a Jewish father (all the descendants of Abraham and Jacob were his, no matter the mother) but in Rabbinic times it shifted to exclusively having a Jewish mother. While these two definitions can converge, each can also totally exclude the other, meaning that a clear, consistent historical “essence” to Jewish ethnic identity is pretty hard to find. More essential to Jewish continuity across time is what the Torah and Rabbinic thought continued to share: following the commandments. The Mizvot may be the best bet for what has always defined what it means to be part of Israel.

A second, equally time-honored essence of Judaism is described by the political theorist and professor of urban studies Marshall Berman:

I have been a scholar for most of my life…But I am also a Jew, grown up with the feeling that the Bible was “my” book, that it was my job to wrestle with it, and this wrestling would be my way to be part of Israel.

Berman, “The Bible and Public Space,” in Modernism in the Streets (Verso, 2017) 350.

Today many Jews–including me–feel alienated from both of these original and long-lasting senses of Judaism. But we don’t have to be. I want to know what they offered the Jews of the past as well as those who learned from them. I think it’s still all there. I hope.

In this series I’ll try to briefly explore and unite these two oldest standbys, Torah and Commandments, divine teaching and human ritual, with the help of the radical Hasidic thinker known as the Sfat Emet–-the “language of truth.” My guide will be another time-honored habit, the weekly Torah portion or Parshat Ha-Shevua, starting this week with Shemini, “(On the) Eighth (Day).” Hit the subscribe thing ↓ if you want to join me!