March 23, 2023
This week's Torah portion is parasha Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26). I must confess that Vayikra is not my favorite portion of the Torah. When I read these passages, I'm left with the sense that the sacrificial service of the Temple has little relevance for our own personal lives today.
This week's parasha opens with one of the requirements for a lot of the sacrifices throughout the book of Leviticus:
And He called to Moses and Hashem spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying, "Speak to the Israelites and say to them, 'Should any person from you bring forward to Hashem an offering, of beasts from herd and from flock you shall bring forward your offering. If his offering is a burnt offering, an unblemished male [tamim zachar] from the herd he shall bring it forward, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, to be accepted for him before Hashem. (Leviticus 1:1-3)
Why an unblemished male? What is an unblemished male? The text provides no answer to these questions. Therefore, as is often the case, we must turn to the rabbis (just stay clear of Philo of Alexandria lest you face the allegorization of Torah to force it to match Greek philosophy!)
According to my late friend, teacher, and mentor, Rabbi Jacob Milgrom, the term tamim derives from the verb tamam, "to be complete," thus a better translation of tamim might be "complete." We also studied how the rabbis imagine potentially blemished male genitalia. I'll spare you that text (if you are curious look up Mishnah Bekhorot 6:6).
A bit later in the book, Leviticus lists twelve physical blemishes that invalidate an animal from being sacrificed, just after the twelve physical blemishes that invalidate a priest from sacrificing. A priest. Is the Torah comparing priests to animals?
The rabbis turn the twelve blemishes listed in Leviticus into one hundred and forty-two blemishes that disqualify a priest from performing the Temple service. This is a small segment of the long list:
One whose head is pointed, and one whose head is turnip-like, and one whose head is hammer-like, and one whose head has an indentation; and one wherein the back of his head protrudes... (Mishnah Bekhorot 7:1).
The Mishnah's enormous catalogue of bodily imperfections almost reads like parody. The list becomes so detailed, so obsessive, that one begins to suspect that the point is not actually to identify the perfect priest, but to show how impossible such perfection really is. As Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert explains:
As much as the Mishnah seeks to project an ideal embodiment of animal and priest, the overabundance of blemishes in its catalogues suggests that the idealized and perhaps even utopian unblemished body on the sacrificial stage is, perhaps, an impossibility and can always only be approximated ("Bodily Perfection in the Sanctuary").
Were the rabbis trying to convey that we are all blemished? or that no one could ever perform the Temple service today? or both? It is clear to me that the rabbis of the Mishnah had no interest in returning to a sacrificial system. Some at JeLiThIn's Reading Groups even suggested that the rabbis are making fun of the requirement to find the perfect priest!
March 24, 2026
This week's Torah portion (Parashat Tzav: Leviticus 6:1−8:36) reports instructions given by God to Moses concerning Aaron and his priestly descendants.
This week is also the Shabbat just prior to Passover, which is known as the Great Sabbath.
Shabbat ha-Gadol was created because of the two-week gap between Shabbat ha-Hodesh and Passover. Its name derives from the chosen haftarah for the day.
According to Malachi, the return of Elijah will both foretell the impending doom as well as provide salvation from it:
Look, I am about to send to you
Elijah the prophet
before the coming of the day of the LORD,
great (gadol) and fearsome.
(Malachi 3:23)
Normally, it is the first important word of a haftarah that names a special Shabbat (like Shabbat Shuvah before Yom Kippur or Shabbat Hazon before Tisha be-Av). But Shabbat ha-Gadol is different.
The connection between Passover and the end of days makes sense only if we recall the belief of R. Yehoshua ben Hananyah:
Rabbi Yehoshua says: In Nisan the world was created; in Nisan the Patriarchs were born; in Nisan the Patriarchs died; on Passover Isaac was born; on Rosh HaShana Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah were remembered by God and conceived sons; on Rosh HaShana Joseph came out from prison; on Rosh HaShana our forefathers' slavery in Egypt ceased; in Nisan the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt; and in Nisan in the future the Jewish people will be redeemed in the final redemption (B.T. Rosh Hashanah 11a).
The choice of the haftarah for Shabbat ha-Gadol reinforced this messianic connotation for the celebration of Passover, with the name ha-Gadol deriving from it.
After the recitation of the grace after meals, we send a child to open the front door, hoping that this year Elijah will finally come.
According to Malachi, when Elijah appears,
... he shall bring fathers' hearts back to sons
and the sons' hearts to their fathers—
lest I come and strike the land with utter destruction.
(Malachi 3:24)
The onset of the messianic era begins at home with familial reconciliation.
Each year, the Seder ritual gathers us around the table and asks us to see ourselves as part of a story much larger than our own.
As many of us gather with born or chosen family this year, you might find it helpful to read Esther Farmer's supportive tips about navigating difficult conversations about Palestine at the Seder table.
And if you prefer to listen, you can also tune in to JVP's conversations with Chani Nicholas and others on how to stay in relationship while holding firm commitments in this moment:
March 22, 2022
Today you are getting two missives in one: one about this week's Torah portion and one about today's celebration, Purim, and the liturgy associated with Shabbat Zachor.
Let's start with this week's Torah portion, Parashat Tzav (Leviticus 6:1-8:36). As many of you know, during the Shabbat service at the synagogue, after the ritual chanting of the parasha, the haftarah is read. This week's haftarah is Jeremiah 7:21-8:3, 9:22-23.
The parasha describes the five sacrifices that the priests are to perform (Leviticus 6:1-7:38). Yet the haftarah downplays the centrality of the sacrifices during the Temple period. Instead, the haftarah brings out Jeremiah's attempt to expose the falsehood of the belief that the Temple sacrifices will save the city and that God will never vacate "the Temple of the Lord" (Jeremiah 7:4).
The haftarah opens with Jeremiah's declaration that the sacrifices played a minor role in God's revelation to Israel in the wilderness:
Thus said the LORD of Armies, God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and, eat meat. For I did not speak to your fathers nor did I charge them when I brought them out from the land of Egypt about matters of burnt offering and sacrifice. With this word did I charge them saying, Heed my voice and I will be your God and you shall be a people for Me and go in all the way that I charged you, so that it be well with you. But they did not heed and they did not bend their ear, and they went by their own counsels, in the willfulness of their evil heart, and they went backward and not forward, from the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day (Jeremiah 7:21-25).
Jeremiah's dismissal of the burnt offerings and sacrifices is astounding. For more than a month now, we have read some six parshiyot, with more to come, that deal with the building of the Tabernacle, its sacrificial cult, and the consecration of its priestly attendants, and Jeremiah dares to tell us that God had little to say about sacrifices at Sinai and after? Why does Jeremiah distort the words of the Torah?
Perhaps Jeremiah seeks to restore ethics into ritual. Maybe what Jeremiah is trying to tell us is that the Torah is far more than a handbook for priests, that it is a vision of a society built on the principles of equality, justice, and compassion.
Why did the rabbis select this haftarah precisely for this Torah portion? Did the rabbis select the haftarah to repudiate the sacrificial cult?
Last week's haftarah of Shabbat Zakhor gave us another classic example in Samuel's rebuke of Saul, who had saved the best of Amalek's livestock for sacrifice, against God's explicit instructions:
Does the LORD take delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as in heeding the voice of the LORD?
For heeding is better than sacrifice,
hearkening, than the fat of rams.
(I Samuel 15:22).
Did the rabbis side with the prophets on this issue? After all, the Rabbis replaced the Temple with the synagogue and sacrifices with verbal prayer, creating a totally new religious institution in the process, even if they went out of their way to acknowledge Temple precedents. The rabbis knew that the synagogue represented a great religious advance over the Temple, yet strove to retain the enduring values of that transcendent form of worship.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of synagogues today enforce misplaced ethnic loyalty more than the ethical and prophetic values of our tradition. Support for the state of Israel, regardless of its immoral actions, now takes precedence over those values. This is why many of us are unable to participate in religious institutions that remain silent when the state of Israel subjugates an entire population and strips them of their land, their homes, their human rights, and even their very lives. We cannot take part in a community that willfully blinds itself. We cannot celebrate the Divine Presence among others who, by their silence, deny the divine image in our fellow human beings. Their silence as Jews in the face of extreme ongoing Israeli violence and oppression of the people of Palestine is intolerable and inexcusable. Jewish people everywhere must condemn those institutions' silence and complicity.
This is a quick and easy action you can take to urge the Sierra Club to stand strong against the onslaught of organized pressure from the Israeli Lobby:
Today is Purim on this side of the Atlantic, so, in the spirit of asking what our holy days mean to those who we oppress, I am including Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb's thoughts on Purim and Shabbat Zachor's liturgy here:
There is a tradition to read an additional part of Torah on a Sabbath near Purim. The passage contains a divine directive to wipe out the name of Amalek from generation to generation. The reason given for the divine directive to commit genocide is attributed to an Amalekite war tactic used against the Israelites. The Amalakites in this mythic, fictional story, attacked the rear, where the slowest members of the Israelites could be found. Since the fictional Haman of the Purim tale is said to be a descendant of Amalek, people read this passage. In fact, the custom of booing Haman comes from the commandment to wipe out the name, (even saying the name) of the villain. Mostly, this story is told in the context of radical and silly fun. However, that is not always the case. As my colleague Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom mentioned, he cannot read this portion in synagogue or in the context of religious prayers.
I can relate. No amount of Hasidic commentary (transforming the commandment to erase Amalek to mean erasing the Amalek in our own hearts) can remove the stain of an experience I had in the late 90's a few years after the massacre of 29 Muslim men in prayer at the Tomb of Abraham on Purim by Dr. Baruch Goldstein, I was leading a FOR delegation of Interfaith Peace Builders which I co-founded with Doug Hostetter (IFPB is now Eye Witness Palestine). We visited some of the surviving relatives of the families Goldstein slaughtered because he was trying to fulfill the mitzvah to wipe out Amalek. Israel demolished the homes of the surviving Palestinian families in response to Goldstein's mass murder. We sat among the ruins and drank tea while the families spoke about the impact. Palestinians are often spoken about as the living embodiment of Amalek by Israelis. So yes, I too cannot read this portion in the context of a religious service. Zachor has the meaning of not just remembrance, but also taking action as the result of remembrance. We can no longer find ways of integrating or using apologetics to accustom us to accepting a genocidal mitzvah. Because at some point in living history, people will use it to carry out foul deeds - just as Goldstein did - just as the ongoing reading of the Torah as a real estate map continues to justify massive human suffering at the hands of the Occupation that we witness (mostly from afar) on a daily basis. Intervening to stop Occupation was originally the reason Rabbis for Human Rights came into existence. It hasn't been a very successful run from that point of view. We have not managed to bring a meaningful conversation about Occupation to our communities - as we have just witnessed around the report by three human rights orgs, including B'Tselem, that Israel's policies are apartheid. It took less than 24 hours to trash the report by the Jewish community. For me personally, as someone who has witnessed the Occupation at work uprooting trees, carrying out night raids, home demolitions & curfews, building of the Wall, tear gassing folks and the massive ongoing displacement - and listening to hundreds of eyewitness testimonies by Palestinians in their homes and community centers - the idea that we have to examine the Amalek in our own hearts and defeat the 'othering' impulse is a powerful teaching which flips the script on the Torah. But reading Amalek at shul given the current reality doesn't seem right.
March 24, 2022
This week's Torah portion is Parashat Shemini (Leviticus 9), where Aaron witnesses the death of two of his sons by means of a Divine fire:
And the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, took each of them his fire-pan and put fire in it and placed incense upon it and brought forward alien fire before Hashem, which He had not charged them. And fire came out from before Hashem and consumed them, and they died before Hashem. And Moses said to Aaron, "This is just what Hashem spoke, saying, 'Through those close to Me shall I be hallowed and in all the people's presence shall I be honored.'" And Aaron was silent (Leviticus 10:1–3).
Aaron was silent. What thoughts ran through his mind? In truth, only one who has suffered the loss of a child can fathom what Aaron thought and felt. The midrash ventures deep into the back story of the incident in order to explain Aaron's silence:
... Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman said: This is what was spoken to Moses at Sinai, and he didn't understand it until this incident occurred. Moses said to Aaron: My brother, it was told to me at Sinai that sometime in the future I would have to [over see] the sanctification of this house, and it would have to be a person holier than I. I thought that it would be me or you to sanctify this house. Now, your two sons are greater than me and you. When Aaron heard [and understood] that his sons were true fearers of God, he fell silent and was rewarded for his silence (Vayikra Rabbah 12:2).
Last year during the second round of JeLiThIn's Online Community Groups, we studied these passages, as well as a mother's take on the loss of her son:
Mourning my son has similarities to labor. The contractions of pain rush through my body like a knot that is tied tighter and tighter so that I am unable to breathe, dead along with my son. My womb becomes a grave. I feel the pain of him in my belly, a pressure bearing down on me. It will always be inside of me. And though I hope and pray that one day I will not be as great with pain as I am now, the pain will never leave me (from "Contractions of Death" by Sherri Mandell)
I've never lost a child. But I did lose a potential child. During JeLiThIn's Online Community Groups I am part of the group and I do my homework together with the group. Last year one of the writing prompts read: "Why was Aaron silent? And/Or: Have you ever been silent after a loss?" This is what I wrote:
Of course Aaron was silent.
What do you expect?
What would you do if you saw your eldest two sons being killed by something you can't explain?I've never lost a child.
But I did lose a potential child.I'll never forget that afternoon, trying to believe, harnessing all the faith I could, just to find out that everything was lost.
"There is no heartbeat and no growth."
The way she said it sounded like a medical issue.
Sure, she was a doctor.
"I'll refer you to someone who can explain to you your options."Both my partner and I were silent.
We were shocked.
We had waited for this baby so long.We had tried medical intervention so many times.
We thought this was going to be the good one.Each one of them we named Victoria.
It was always Victoria.
I guess it would have been a victory.But the baby died.
Just like that.
One week we heard her heartbeat, and the next week she was gone.We couldn't think.
We couldn't feel.
We couldn't speak.We probably needed to assimilate what had happened.
We probably didn't really believe it.Who knows.
It's all a blur now.All I know is:
We were both silent.
And for a really long time...
Content coming soon.
Content coming soon.
May 6, 2025
This week's parasha is a double one: Parashat Acharei Mot - Kedoshim (Leviticus 16:1–20:27), and it contains the most famous and important commandment in the Torah:
Rabbi Akiba famously calls this commandment "the central principle of the Torah" (Sifra, Kedoshim, Chapter 4 12). It is the proverbial Golden Rule that we find in all great moral and spiritual traditions around the world. However, the rabbis try to limit the scope of this commandment. For example, Rashbam, Rashi's grandson, comments:
And you shall love your fellow human being as yourself if he is truly your colleague, friend; however, if he is wicked you need not love him, as even G'd hates him as we know from Proverbs 8,13, "to fear the Lord is to hate evil" (Rashbam on Leviticus 19:18).
Rashbam gives us a way out: you should only love those who are good to you. But those who are bad, you don't have to love them, in fact, you should hate them! Ramban (Nahmanides) explains that it can't really be that the Torah's intent is that you should love your neighbor as yourself:
This is an expression by way of overstatement, for a human heart is not able to accept a command to love one's neighbor as oneself. Moreover, Rabbi Akiba has already come and taught, "Your life takes precedence over the life of your fellow human being." Rather, the commandment of the Torah means that one is to love one's fellow human being in all matters, as one loves all good for oneself. ... For sometimes a person will love his neighbor in certain matters, such as doing good to him in material wealth but not with wisdom and similar matters. But if he loves him completely, he will want his beloved friend to gain riches, properties, honor, knowledge and wisdom. However [because of human nature] he will still not want him to be his equal, for there will always be a desire in his heart that he should have more of these good things than his neighbor. Therefore Scripture commanded that this degrading jealousy should not exist in his heart, but instead a person should love to do abundance of good for his fellow human being as he does for himself, and he should place no limitations upon his love for him (Ramban on Leviticus 19:18:1).
Of course the Torah is exaggerating (according to Ramban). In reality, all the Torah wants us to do is to wish our fellow human beings well. It doesn't really mean "love." And I am leaving out those who argue nowadays that the intent of the verse is to love only our fellow Jews!
The rabbis can be quite difficult to swallow, however, we can often find within the rabbis a glimmer of hope. Today my hope comes from another part of Leviticus that deals with dietary laws: Leviticus 11:19. One of the fowl deemed nonkosher by Leviticus is a bird called the hasidah (the stork). According to Rashi,
Hasidah — This is the white stork, cigogne in old French And why is it called hasidah? Because it deals kindly (hesed) with its fellows in feeding them (Rashi on Leviticus 11:19).
Rashi's explanation is based on the Talmud. Many years later, the Kotzker Rebbe asked, "If the hasidah is kind toward its kin, why is it unkosher?" His answer: "To be kosher, you have to be kind not only to your own kin but to all."
So let me ask you. What does Leviticus 19:18, "And you shall love your fellow human being as yourself," mean to you today?
The truth is that we all prefer to hang out with our friends. But what about those who are not our friends? What about those who we don't even like? Are we commanded to love even people we don't like? The Torah teaches that all human beings are made in the Divine image (Genesis 1:26–27). Even those we don't particularly like. We are all fundamentally deserving of being treated with dignity, care, and respect.
It's one thing to love your neighbor, the one with whom you have so much in common, as yourself. It is a harder task to look at people of a different color, class, language, culture, gender, or worldview, and regard them as equally in need of respect and compassion as your neighbor.
Loving our fellow human beings as ourselves is the only way to repair the terrible rifts in our society today. This means opening our hearts and minds to hear one another.
I will end with the words of JeLiThIn's OWNN the Text Groups participant, Jenna Payne, about this week's Haftrarah for Ashkenazim, Amos 9:7-15:
You have become many, and look how divided you are! Through the sieve of morality, ethics, justice and tolerance you have fallen. You punish yourselves, Hashem has no need to exert any force upon you. You have fallen. Somehow, in spite of your liberation, in spite of the gift of mobility and choice, you return to the Narrow Place. Always circling back. What is it about liberation that you cannot tolerate? You destroy yourselves as you think you destroy this made up enemy. You destroy the World, didn't Hashem give you the World?
What is there to say, what need for prophets does this modern world have? Is it not laid bare how this never-ending will end?
Look. The world is on fire, the melting and dripping wine of the mountains never came to be. The hole of suffering is dug deeper, the relief, the beauty, the garden, what we dream about "Next Year In Jerusalem", a thought for later, right? Later's come too late. Your best bet is to keep yourselves close to the Earth, close to each other and create the heaven of Earth that you know is possible. Try not to wait until later.
April 8, 2022
This week's parasha is Parashat Aharei Mot (Leviticus 16:1-18:30) and it contains all sorts of terrible stuff, as you can expect from Leviticus. It also has a description of a ritual on the Day of Atonement that includes two goats:
And he shall take the two goats and set them before the LORD at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. And he shall put lots on the two goats, one for the LORD and one for Azazel. And Aaron shall bring forward the goat for which the lot for the LORD comes up, and he shall make it an offense offering. And the goat for which the lot for Azazel comes up shall be set live before the LORD to atone upon it, to send it off to Azazel in the wilderness (Leviticus 16:7–10).
One of the goats is supposed to be for God and the other one for Azazel. Commentators have tried to figure out the meaning of "for Azazel." This phrase appears nowhere else in the Bible, so several understandings have been put forth. Rashi, for example, believed that Azazel was the place to which the goat was supposed to go; a desolate area perhaps on the side of a steep ravine where the goat fell to its death. Other commentators believed that Azazel was some kind of demon.
William Tyndale (1494–1536) was the first to produce an English translation that drew directly from the Hebrew text. Tyndale saw the word Azazel as the combination of the Hebrew word for "goat" (ez) and "sent away" (azal). And so, Tyndale called it the "escape goat"—the goat that was released and escaped—which subsequently became the English word "scapegoat."
I was curious about the concept of the scapegoat, particularly because of the discourse in our society today. So I looked it up and found out that this concept of putting our own transgressions on something else, so that this something else can take all the bad stuff away from us, can also be traced to some rituals that were practiced in ancient Greece.
In ancient Greece when things were really bad, like in the middle of a famine, a drought, or a plague, they had a ritual, where they would expel the pharmakoi from the community. The pharmakoi were usually individuals of lower society such as criminals, slaves, or poor people. It was believed that this would bring about the purification of the community. On the first day of the Thargelia, a festival honoring Apollo, two men known as the pharmakoi were led outside in a ritual meant to cleanse the community of its sins.
This got me thinking that the practice of blaming either one person, or more than one person for what's happening to society at large is very ancient. I kept digging and found more recent examples from the Jim Crow era where judge, jury, and prosecutor well knew that the accused black man was innocent of the charge of raping a white woman. However, because the white supremacist social order was threatened by consensual interracial intercourse, they executed the accused black man anyway, and if they failed to do so promptly he was lynched.
We find here a similar structure, where an individual of lower society is sacrificed in order to maintain the perceived order of society at large.
Blaming specific people for all the ills of society is a common practice today. Modern scapegoats must be, as legal scholar Roberta Harding has put it, "in, but not of, the society." This is why, during the Black Death, mobs roamed about murdering Jews for "poisoning the wells." The entire Jewish population of Basel was burned alive, a scene repeated throughout Western Europe. This was not the result of preexisting virulent hatred of Jews waiting for an excuse to erupt; it was that victims were needed to release social tension.
Obviously the sacrifice of the scapegoat doesn't solve any of the problems. The scapegoat is a symbol, but it doesn't do anything with the real problems of society. The structure of the scapegoat includes a desire to restore order in society by expelling someone, the scapegoat, from society as an act of purification. What is needed is a dehumanized scapegoat to whom people can direct their rage. Totalitarians are very good at harnessing this rage when they speak about ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and traitors in our midst.
We all have our own scapegoats that we blame for everything that is wrong in society. We normally don't have the power to eliminate our scapegoats from society because to do that we would need all of society to be on the same page; we would need the power of violent unanimity.
We are living in a time of rage and civil unrest without the broad consensus necessary to transform it into violent unanimity. For example, the right in the U.S. sees Antifa, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and undocumented immigrants as the embodiment of everything that is wrong with society; a threat to the social order. At the same time, the left sees the Proud Boys, right-wing militias, white supremacists, QAnon, the Capitol rioters, and "domestic extremists" also as the embodiment of everything that is wrong with society and a threat to the social order. They are the symbols of everything that is wrong with society. We believe that if we could just get rid of all of these then we would restore order to society. All these are scapegoats; they are not the source of everything that is wrong with society.
Another great example on the left is Trump. During his presidency, Trump became the most powerful symbol of everything that is wrong with society for the left. But Trump was never the root cause of all the issues in society, and the same is true about the fringe groups of white supremacists that exist in the US: they are not the root cause of the systemic racism in the country.
I can definitely think of several more scapegoats in our society today; groups of people that are blamed for all our problems. But I'm going to leave it here for now and ask you: What other scapegoats can you think of today?
The last two years have been devastating for the majority of people and everyone is angry. There is huge social unrest and the way it's being quelled is not solving anything. I pray and hope that we find the way to direct our anger to the right sources.
Content coming soon.
Content coming soon.
Content coming soon.
Content coming soon.