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Earlier this week, my friend texted me a question: “Do you think of Tanakh (the canon of Torah, Prophets, and Writings) as Jewish mythology? Akin to Greek or Norse mythology, but with more staying power?”
“Hmm,” I answered, “in terms of the stories, yes. But Tanakh is not only theology and mythic history; large chunks of it are civic instruction.”
The texts in the Tanakh not only imagine where we came from; they instruct us how to live our lives, as a community, in our own era.
“Ah, right,” my friend answered, and I felt proud of myself for coming out with that answer so quickly. But my self-satisfaction didn’t last long, because I then pulled up the Torah portion for this week: Tzav. It is, from soup to nuts, a primer on ritual animal sacrifice. Not exactly “how to live right now” material.
But, as we know, the job of a writer, scholar, or thinker, particularly in the Jewish tradition — let’s face it: the job of any Jew, really — is to connect the seemingly unconnectable. As our Rabbi Emeritus, Avi Winokur, likes to say, “The Torah is absolutely not true. And, I absolutely believe it.” So let’s see if, by the same logic, an obsolete ritual that would be absolutely abhorrent to us today can nonetheless offer us some instruction for how to live with integrity in our own time. Here goes.
Set in the part of the story where the Hebrews are wandering in the desert, Tzav instructs, in minute detail, how the priestly family — Aaron and his sons — are to conduct worship (read: sacrifices) at the mobile Tent of Meeting. The text is set in the desert but believed to have actually been written later, during Temple times, as Hebrew worship was becoming formalized. Projecting these instructions backwards in time onto Aaron and his sons gave the Temple-era priests needed guidance in how to carry out their Temple duties and bestowed upon them the historical authority to do so.
One verse from this portion still directly informs our practice today: the instruction (Leviticus 6:3), that “a perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, not to go out.” If you look at the top of our Torah ark, you see the legacy of this: The Ner Tamid, the Eternal Light that sits atop most arks and is kept burning at all times. Now, we have electricity to keep it lit; before that was available, a community would employ a Shamash, a light-lighter (like on Hannukah), who served generally as a holy schlepper for the synagogue, but whose name derived from one of his central tasks: to keep the Ner Tamid (the candle on top of the ark) burning at all times.
So over the millennia, we have maintained this idea of keeping an eternal light burning in our gathering spaces — a light once maintained by the priests, later by a holy caretaker, and now mostly by electricity, under the supervision of our holy synagogue staff.
But what I find especially interesting in this portion is the description of how the priests, Aaron’s sons, live in a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the community: instead of tending to flocks of their own, they tend to the Tent of Meeting, and they depend on goodwill donations of the community to sustain them. The priests’ primary duty, in exchange, is to facilitate the proper sacrifice of the people’s offerings to God of animals and grain.
Even more interestingly, the priests are commanded to eat part of the people’s ritual offerings to God. This is not their primary source of sustenance, so this act is mostly about ritual impact; eating a percentage of the sacrifice is considered central to the power of the offering.
The priests also sacrifice offerings of food to God on their own behalf. But conversely, they are not allowed to eat from their own offerings; the entirety of what they offer on their own behalf must be consumed by fire.
So the priests absolutely must eat from the people’s offerings, but they must not eat from their own offerings. The priests’ own offerings must go completely to God, while the people’s offerings are not ritually complete unless the priests have consumed a percentage of the offerings themselves.
This reminds me of the minhag (custom) in Jewish tradition that you don’t say “Amen” to your own blessing. You offer a blessing — over your food, over the Torah, etc. — and someone else seals the blessing with “Amen.” Likewise, several times in a service, a prayer leader says a blessing, and then invites the kahal (assembly) to respond with, “Amen.”
“Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol Yisrael v’al kol yoshvei tevel, v’imru… AMEN.”
“Amen,” meaning, “I believe.” From the word “emunah,” belief. There’s Rabbi Avi’s word again.
In antiquity, when priests partake of the food they are offering to God on behalf of the people, it is akin to saying, “Amen” — what better way for the priests to show God that the offering is kosher, that they believe in it — than to eat some of it?
Again, in the ancient imagination, this eating, this physical “Amen,” is crucial; it seals the spiritual act. The social contract between people — saying or enacting “Amen” — is an inextricable part of how the people are instructed to fulfill their contract with God.
In our time, we ordain rabbis and hazzanimot — teachers and visioners — but not priests. In our time, ordained clergy are trained to lead worship, but we are emphatically not the only people qualified to do so; any adult Jew who knows the prayers is qualified to lead the community in saying them, and to offer prayers to God on the community’s behalf. So in our time, we’ve let go of the idea that only certain priestly families are ordained by God to represent us in prayer.
However: The inter-human contract — the “Amen” — is still an integral part of the Jewish act of worshipping God. Any time another person expresses a wish or a prayer, it is a Jewish cultural and religious habit to respond with “Amen.”
Why is it so important that one’s offering to God be sealed by the physical or verbal “Amen” of another person?
It points to our social contract — our understanding of our own interdependence, and the inextricability of that from our dependence on God.
And this contract doesn’t end with death: when someone dies, rabbinic Judaism instructs that someone living continue to say Kaddish for the deceased person — to pray for their soul’s ascent, to say “Amen” to their life. Not only that, but in order to say Kaddish, the living person must be surrounded by at least nine other Jewish adults, all of whom are instructed to punctuate that person’s prayer repeatedly with their own “Amens.”
So, imagine circles around circles of human beings saying “Amen” for each other, not only as we bless what sustains us in life, but as we continue our journey in the Realm Beyond.
For Jews, crucial to offering something to God is the statement of another person’s belief — belief not even in God per se, but in the offering, and in the offerer. Like Young Sheldon, who says on his way to church with his mother, “I don’t believe in God. But I believe in Mom.”
Tzav models how we can continually proclaim belief in each other’s offerings; it outlines a social and spiritual system that recognizes how truly interdependent we are — on our Source, and on each other’s “Amens.”
Belief in this interdependence is expressed through public policy. In our time, this includes Social Security nets, medical access, public transportation, institutions that support art, good governance, constructive innovation, learning. Rule of law that, as our Bar Mitzvah mentioned last week, strives for a balance of justice and mercy. Organizations that care for the poor and for the planet. None of these institutions have been perfect, but the continual striving toward a better version of them is a public good. How can we protect and fortify them? How can we remold our era into one where, rather than valuing bottomless freedom from the human collective, we heed the model of Parshat Tzav and pay loving attention to our interconnectedness, our interdependence?
I don’t know all the answers. But I think these ancient texts contain valuable conceptual blueprints for us. The systems and structures they present must necessarily take a different form in our age, but with them, we are not adrift; we have guidance.
May we collectively see how to move forward toward an age of loving interdependence, using all the tools, ancient and modern, at our disposal.
I wish you all a sweet end of Pesah, an invigorating three months, and I’ll see you in late July!
Hazzan Jessi Roemer
