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As we get ready for our Pesah S’darim, our Passover Seders, I’m writing to share the D’var Torah I delivered last week on the range of different ways that Torah conceives of God.
In the meantime, I wish you a Hag Pesah Same’ah: May you experience the reminder that we have been in profound narrow straits before, and, as a people, broken free to an experience of redemption. As the Passover Haggadah teaches, in each and every generation we are obligated to see ourselves as though we participated in the Exodus from Egypt directly. We go on the whole journey: from restriction to expansiveness; from being bound up to breaking free; inhaling to exhaling, reminding ourselves that we have the capacity to navigate our way out of places of collective hardship. We’ve done so time and again.
Next year in Jerusalem; next year in a place of redemption and peace for all. Hag Same’ah.
If you’re someone who has trouble with anthropomorphic, anthropopathic God language, a God articulated through human-like descriptions and emotions, a jealous God, an angry God, a compassionate God, then sefer Vayikra, the book of Leviticus, the Book of Torah that we start this week as part of Aaron Wolson’s Bar Mitzvah celebration, may be the book for you.
The theology of sefer Vayikra is very different from much of sifrei Bereshit and Sh’mot, the Books of Genesis and Exodus, which precede it. Whereas in Bereshit and Sh’mot we experience a God who experiences regret and sadness, after God sends the flood in the story of Noah, or anger and jealousy, around the golden calf, in Vayikra (Leviticus), we essentially experience a God draped in mystery.
The focus of the Vayikra is really k’dushah, holiness.
You shall be holy, for I, your God Adonai, am holy.
K’doshim tiheyu ki kadosh ani Adonai Eloheykhem
קְדֹשִׁים תִהְיוּ כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אֲנִי יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם׃
Much of the book builds to and from that central theme: how do we facilitate holiness in the world, and more specifically, how do we protect and cherish the holiness at the center of our communities.
Much of Vayikra, which some scholars see as something like a priestly manual, is about how to keep the sanctuary at the center of the Israelite encampment, the Israelite community, a sacred center that can facilitate a relationship to God’s presence.
This is an incredibly delicate task, and the balance at that center can be easily upset. This is evident in one of the only narrative moments in the whole of Vayikra, when the sons of Aaron, the high priest, bring as an offering an alien fire, which had not been enjoined upon them.
When they bring that alien fire
Fire came forth from Adonai and consumed them.
Esh zarah asher lo tzivah otam:
vatetze esh milifnei Adonai vatokhal otam
אֵשׁ זָרָה אֲשֶׁר לֹא צִוָה אֹתָם׃
וַתֵצֵא אֵשׁ מִלִפְנֵי יי וַתֹאכַל אוֹתָם
They brought an alien fire that was not a mitzvah, not enjoined upon them, and the sacred center combusted.
Extreme piety, one might say, trying to take religion above and beyond the mitzvot, the sacred callings from God, upset the sacred balance at the center of community. So too would a disregard for the sacred callings of the people, ritual and moral and nature, all blended into one in this book, being called upon to love our neighbor and leave the corners of our fields for those in need, right alongside the the call to cultivate rhythms of sacred time — disregard for these callings, the book says, would generate what is known as tameh, impurity, misalignment, with that sacred center, misalignment which requires a conscientiously-brought offering to remedy.
The descriptions of God in this book have been analogized less to God as king, God as sovereign, with which we’re familiar, and more, if you’ll bear with for me for a moment, to God as nuclear energy.
Imagine a nuclear power plant at the center of our community powering everything we do; the lights in our homes, the sparks of our wifi connections, all the gigabytes traveling around the world — everything dependent on that energy source: dangerous, delicate, and yet empowering. Imagine that, taught my teacher Elsie Stern, and you have a closer approximation to the God of Vayikra than your standard God as king, God as sovereign metaphor. The priests, in this imagining, are the power plant workers— I’m picturing Homer at the beginning of each Simpsons episode — with whom we have a symbiotic relationship; they rely on our contributions to sustain their work; they rely on us treating that energy responsibly and sustainably and with great reverence, and we rely on them to brave the dangerous precincts that cultivate our collective relationship to that central source of energy and life.
To the extent we experience God as inexplicable and mysterious, the God of Leviticus is the expression in Torah that gives voice to this — it’s the book that says something like we sense a power, we sense an energy; we wouldn’t necessarily describe it in anthropomorphic terms, and yet at the center of our collective identity, we hold space to form a relationship to it.
Many teachers understand the mikdash, the sanctuary, to be something that holds space for God at the center of our communities, and also at the center of each of us. When God tells Moses to have the people construct a mikdash, God says:
And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell in them
V’asu li mikdash v’shakhanti betokham
וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִי בְּתוֹכָם׃
In them. Not in it, not in the sanctuary itself, but within the people. Some understand that to mean within each of us. Just as we need to take care to ensure that we are acting with holiness so that we have created a hospitable center of our community, so too do we need to take care that we have tended to the sacred center within ourselves.
How are we acting, how are we conducting ourselves in such a way that the sanctuary within us, ourselves, is tended to, that we’ve made ourselves into sanctuaries that can channel this almighty Divine energy.
Now, lest this metaphor be one that does not resonate for you; perhaps for you the anthropomorphism like when God speaks, or anthropopathism like when God feels, actually opens up pathways and connections to God for you, know that sefer Vayikra, the book of Leviticus, does not stand on its own — it very much works hand in hand with hamishah humshei Torah, the five books of Torah:
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The creating God of Genesis, the one who forms a covenant, an eternally binding relationship to each of our ancestors, and by implication each of us;
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The redemptive and revelatory God of the Exodus, who inspires us to break free from our narrowness and constriction; who reveals to us mitzvot, callings toward justice in the world;
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The sheltering God of Bamidbar, Numbers; who wanders with us in the wilderness, just like God is present with us in Exile;
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The teaching God of D’varim, Deuteronomy, who accompanies Moses, as Moses instructs the Israelites before they move on without him on their way to the promised land;
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And the God of hesed shel emet, of everlasting love, who accompanies Moses to Moses’ final resting place ba’olam hazeh, in this world.
The Jewish God is not bound in by any one conception, but rather embraces the full diversity of our story.
This is in many ways the insight of the Kabbalists, the mystics whose central task is to hold that God is one, alongside the recognition of all the world’s diversity channeling that singularity. That the world appears to us as incredibly diverse and fragmented, while ultimately all held together by, and bound up in, the same source.
Jewish mysticism articulates this insight through the s’firot, the Divine vessels of our facets: on the one hand there is the ein sof, that which has no end, the recognition that God is beyond what any of us can conceive or grasp on to; all the way to the sh’hinah, malkut, a God of care and love and majesty and sovereignty all in one — a harmonization we experience with each Kabbalat Shabbat; each time we welcome in Shabbat, we are effecting harmony in all the facets of the Divine and facets within ourselves.
We all encounter the diversity of the mystery of God throughout the books of Torah, just as we do throughout the chapters of our lives — all of it rooted in oneness, in holiness. That’s the purpose of Vayikra.
Wishing you a Shabbat of holiness, Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi K.
