Scapegoats

Sermon Parshat Acharei-Mot 5782

Do you know the two Yiddish words, Schlemiel and Schlemazel?  They are similar, of course, but they convey slightly different meanings.  Both a schlemiel and a schlimazel are, well, losers, but there is a subtle difference between the two words.  To clarify, a schlemiel is someone who spills his entire bowl of hot soup on the guy next to him.  The schlimazel is the one he spills the soup on.

I was thinking about that important Yiddish linguistic distinction while reading this week’s Torah portion of Acharei Mot, because it is in the beginning of this portion that we get what might be the most important example of a ritual version of the shlemazel in all of Jewish tradition.

This famous section of Acharei Mot describes the rituals of Yom Kippur, and the way we atone for our collective sins.  The most notable part of this ancient practice is the way that the High Priest, the leading religious figure of antiquity, transfers the guilt of the entire people of Israel to a poor innocent goat, sending it out into the wilderness to carry the iniquity of the nation away.  This marks the invention of the function of the scapegoat, the sacrificial goat who is not actually sacrificed, but instead is preserved to wander the wastelands on the fringes of the Promised Land, carrying its permanent burden of the errors and evils of others into eternal semi-exile.

Of course, our society has accepted this term, scapegoat, for anyone who is blamed for the wrongdoing of others and sent off to suffer a dismal fate for the crimes and misdemeanors of others, usually higher ups.  That scapegoat term from right here in Leviticus has received such universal acceptance that those who foul up and are blamed for losses in sports, fairly or otherwise, for many years have been called simply the “goat” of a lost World Series or Super Bowl or NBA Championship; the “scape” part was dropped in the sports world’s usage.

In recent years a new sports term has come along, oddly, the “GOAT”, in our craze for acronyms, standing for “Greatest Of All Time”.  It is applied and argued about, who is the “GOAT”, the greatest quarterback, pitcher, basketball player, hockey goalie, and so on.  There is an irony to this; apparently the scapegoat remains damned, but the GOAT is now actually a hero. 

The idea of a scapegoat accepting the sins of his betters and becoming the fall guy—by the way, there is a section in the Talmud that says that the scapegoat wasn’t just sent off to wander but was actually pushed off a cliff, making the scapegoat also the fall guy, I suppose—has become universal in our society.  The truth is that when people at the top of a company, or a government, or a social organization get into trouble it’s handy indeed to have someone further down the pecking order to blame.  What was that term that became popular during the Watergate scandal?  Plausible deniability?  If you can just blame someone further down the food chain for what went wrong, well, perhaps you can simply skate past the scandal with minimal damage.

I’ve been listening to a podcast the past few months when I go cycling called “American Scandal.”  It’s put together and narrated by a successful podcaster named Lindsay Graham—not that Lindsay Graham, a different guy altogether—and it chronicles a wide array of national scandals that range both geographically and chronologically.  The scandals on this show come in many varieties: political, economic, environmental, military, religious, bureaucratic, sexual, commercial, musical, obscenity, and on and on, and since they have recorded some 40 seasons of these scandals—some are just a few episodes; others take as many as 6 shows to complete—after a while you get a good sense of how these things work.  While sometimes the scandals depict bad events that led to some sort of justice being done and the perpetrators punished and the damage restored or at least compensated, more often than not the guilty parties in these scandals manage to transfer the righteous punishment to someone down the line; that is, they dump it on, you know, a scapegoat.  Sometimes the scapegoat takes all the blame, and sometimes the true perpetrators eventually find a way to pardon even the scapegoat.

While I like this “American Scandal” series and have learned a great deal about famous controversial events I thought I knew well, and even more about some events I didn’t know existed, I must admit that after a while it can be, well, depressing to realize that so many of these scandals resulted in the guilty escaping punishment and innocent people suffering.  And of course, quite frequently—nearly always—some poor schnook became the scapegoat for the failings of a system or a person or a nation or an institution.  A lot of the scapegoats in these scandals actually become schlemazels, abandoned and blamed by the very organizations and people they helped reach their seedy heights.

Clearly, that was never the intent of the Leviticus ritual for Yom Kippur.  After all, the Day of Atonement was one in which collective responsibility for the good of society was shared by all Israelites, in which the greatest and the humblest both were required to atone for sin seek forgiveness, not dump their mistakes on the nearest likely candidate for schlimazelhood.  The symbolic goat was just one aspect of this day of self-examination, self-reflection, self-abnegation.  We were immersed in the idea of responsibility for own actions, not the culture of passing the buck to a likely loser. 

So what do we learn from Acharei Mot and that poor wandering goat in the Wilderness?  Is the scapegoat just an older version of the chad gadyo, the only kid my father bought for two zuzim in the Pesach Seder who gets bitten by the cat, who is eaten by the dog who is beaten by the stick that is burned by the fire, etc. etc., low animal on the totem pole always getting the worst of it from above?

Perhaps the most important function of religion is to assure us that eventually God will restore justice to unjust situations, will find a way to balance the inequities we see in our own lives and in our society.  The Jewish God, in particular, is a God of Justice, insisting that ultimately it is both our responsibility, and God’s, to create   Looking around at the world we live in, as our ancestors must have done, does not yield a rosy picture of justice fulfilled on a planet teeming with righteousness and goodness.

The scapegoat, by allowing the Israelites to be relieved of the sins they had committed, literally helped free them of the burden of seeing an unjust world and believing they had caused it.  It allowed them to let go of their sins of the previous year and permitted them to enter the newish year with clean hands and pure heart, at least officially.

By the way, the English term for this goat, scapegoat, is said to come from famed Bible translator William Tyndale, who called it the “escapegoat” because it avoided the fate of its partner goat who was slaughtered and offered to God.  It took on the sins of the people, but remained alive and headed off to the hills, as goats are wont to do.  “Escapegoat” became “scapegoat” forever.

What are we to make of the scapegoat now?  Of course, we know that it is often easier to seek to blame another for one’s own failings, and to redistribute blame towards an innocent instead of accepting responsibility.  Psychologically, it is far easier to shunt misdeeds and errors off on another than to carry the burden oneself.  This tendency to avoid responsibility is certainly human, and normal.  Who wants to walk around with the guilt of the world, or even of our own mistakes, on your own back when you can blame it on someone, or something, else?

The scapegoat, sent off to Azazel in Acharei Mot on Yom Kippur, directed to wander the wilderness bearing its sinful burden, served a most useful purpose.  It allowed our ancestors to let go of the weighty detritus of their own failings and gave them the opportunity to begin again free of that painful baggage.

So what should we use in place of this Azazel scapegoat today?  The last of these poor animals went off into the Judean Desert nearly 2000 years ago.  You would think that we would have figured out a better way to handle things than dumping our problems on a scapegoat.

How are we contemporary Jews to handle our own burden of sin and error?

Of course, some of us still employ scapegoats to take on the responsibility for our own mistakes.  Our parents didn’t love us enough: we were misled by our spouses; we were pressured by our employers, or employees, or our neighbors; we cut corners because bad guys run the world and we don’t want to play into their hands.

Doing good can be hard.  Blaming others is easy.

I would suggest that we are in fact fortunate that Judaism abandoned the scapegoat motif so long ago.  Instead of a magical transfer of guilt to a goat, we instead took on the responsibility of resolving our own issues directly.  It was up to us—it is up to us—to seek to fix those damages we create in our own lives and in our world.  No High Priest can transfer out sins and errors to a helpless animal and send our guilt off into the wilderness.  We must seek out the people we have injured and make amends.  We must see the world’s damages and try to repair them. 

In a world that has so many challenges—brutal invasive wars, global warming, paralyzing political polarization, and the eternal scapegoating of minorities—among them, of course, Jews—it is up to us to address those challenges.  It is our responsibility, not that goat’s, to right the wrongs and restore justice.  In our own lives, and in our world.  May we learn from Acharei Mot to do so speedily, and soon.