A few thoughts ahead of the Seder, based on last week's Torah portion, Tzav.
Tzav is one of the most difficult
portions of the Torah for the modern reader: not only because the sacrificial
cult is alien to contemporary religiosity, but because the general principles
of sacrifice have already been laid out in the preceding parsha,
Vayikra. Tzav merely supplements the
general commandments to the Israelite nation with more detailed instructions
for the priests. These regulations focus
exclusively on ritual minutiae and show no concern whatsoever for theological
or ethical matters.
This kind of obsession with ritual
detail has a long history in Judaism. Shabbat
Hagadol was historically one of two annual Shabbatot on which rabbis
would address their congregations (the other occasion was Shabbat Shuva
before Yom Kippur). Rabbis traditionally
used their talk to deal with the intricacies of the Pesach dietary laws; it has
been humorously suggested that the name “Shabbat Hagadol” – the great or big
Shabbat – was connected with the length of the rabbi’s speech. The prophet Malachi – the author of today’s haftara
– was similarly concerned with punctilious obedience to the law, sarcastically
condemning those with lower standards: “When you present a blind animal for
sacrifice – it doesn’t matter! When you
present a lame or sick one – it doesn’t matter! ... This is what you have done
– will [God] accept any of you?” (1:8-9).
Unlike the author of Tzav, Malachi had ethical concerns too (see 3:5), but
his ultimate concern was for faithfulness to God, expressed through adherence
to both ritual and ethical laws.
Were today not Shabbat Hagadol,
we’d be reading a different haftara, from the book of Jeremiah, whose
opening stands in stark contrast to the accompanying Torah portion:
“Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God
of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat!
[Rashi explains this sarcastic injunction: as your burnt offerings are
unacceptable to Me, why not use those animals for a sacrifice in which the meat
is eaten following the ceremony; at least then the meat would not go to waste]. For when I freed your fathers from the land
of Egypt, I did not speak with them or command them concerning burnt
offerings or sacrifice. But this is
what I commanded them: Do My bidding, that I may be your God and you may be My
people; walk only in the way that I enjoin upon you, that it may go well with
you” (7:21-23). While Tzav is all about
ritual detail, Jeremiah condemns an exclusive concern for the letter of the law,
insisting that sacrifice without obedience to the spirit of Torah is little
short of blasphemous.
Tzav, it seems, does not reflect a
monolithic Jewish voice which we must either accept or reject. Instead, the Bible consists of a dialogue
between different voices and positions, one in which we are invited to
participate. This diversity was
celebrated by the seminal secular-cultural Jewish thinker, Ahad Ha’am, at the
turn of the twentieth century. Ahad
Ha’am condemned the tendency of Jews (the ‘people of the Book’) towards a myopic
sanctification of the letter of the law.
In “The Law of the Heart” (1894) he wrote: “The Oral Law (which is
really the inner law, the law of the moral sense) was reduced to writing and
fossilized ... not conscience but the book became the arbiter in every human
question.” He celebrated the prophets
and the early rabbis as radicals who refused to submit to the authority of
written texts or to allow the tradition to stagnate: “If on occasion the spontaneity of thought
and emotion brought them into conflict with the written word, they did not
efface themselves in obedience to its dictates; they revolted against it where
it no longer met their needs, and so forced upon it a development in consonance
with their new requirements.”
No comments:
Post a Comment