What We Live For

Shabbat Vayikra 5783

As a senior rabbinic student, approaching ordination, I remember delivering a sermon at Hebrew Union College on this week’s portion.  At that time, I was really beginning to wonder just what would happen to us after semichah the formal process of being ordained, still practiced today, in which an older, experienced rabbi lays his or her hands on the head of the student who is now becoming a rabbi and conveys authority on him or her. 

This week's Torah portion gave us rabbinical students our first clue.  In the beginning of Vayikra we are told how the process would work: first, the prospective musmach, the designee, is brought to the door of the sanctuary, up close before God; next the highest religious authority, the High Priest, the Chancellor of the seminary, if you will, of the Torah, samach yado al rosh, ceremonially lays one of his hands upon the head, and performs s'michah, the laying on of hands.  And then, immediately afterwards, he whips out a razor-sharp knife v'shachat oto—and ritually slaughters it.  Right here in Vayikra, the clouds obscuring our future had been parted: First ordination-- then, kaddish.

Now this same sequence occurs eight different times in our parshah, and each time it works identically.  Semicha is followed immediately by sh'chitah-- first, hands are put on the head, and then-- bloodbath! Instant slaughter, vayismach oto-- v'shachat oto; a form of Biblical fatal attraction.  It's like one of those horror movies with Jason in it where you just know the teenager shouldn't go into that dark room.  In walks the candidate, the hand goes on the head, and—you know it’s coming, the priest knows its coming, Jason knows its coming, only the poor musmach doesn't see the razor-sharp knife in the other hand.

Of course, Vayikra is talking about laying hands on animal sacrifices, not rabbinic students.  While there are similarities—the same powerlessness, the same confusion, the same glazed look in the eye—the differences are more significant.  This is not the exalted, symbolic ordination ritual of rabbis, passing the shalshelet hakabbalah, the religious tradition from one generation to another.  This is butchering animals.  Obviously, semichah came to mean rabbinic ordination much, much later; in the Torah it has nothing to do with it!  What a ludicrous comparison!

But is it?  Samach means to place a hand upon, to support, and to uphold.  In fact, the word samach implies that the musmach is now able to uphold others, to lift them up.  In the gevurot that we chant in every Amidah we bless God as somech noflim, one who lifts up the fallen.  In the Torah itself, in Devarim, Joshua is said to be filled with the spirit of wisdom ki samach Moshe et yadav alav; because Moses placed his hand upon him, he was raised to wisdom; ibn Ezra even says that smichah conveys the ru'ach Adonai, the very spirit of God.  Yet here in Vayikra this fine, supportive word is linked in strange combination with slaughter and death.  The tie between upholding and killing, between supporting and slaughtering, is real, and it is disturbing.  If the word semichah always led to sh'chitah, why was it used later for rabbinic ordination?  What do holiness and death have to do with each other? 

Clearly, our ancestors, both priests and people, took animal sacrifice most seriously.  This was, quite simply, a matter of life and death.  Getting close to God, touching the hem of God's holiness, standing in the very presence of this awesome God who could kill or heal in a nanosecond-- this is not casual religion.  They believed profoundly, deeply, passionately that God was right here, that their lives depended on God's acceptance of their offering.  Death was always a distinct possibility, and every detail mattered: the clothing, the timing, the words, the offering—the laying on of hands.  Samach also means connection; our ancestors were intimately connected with the most frightening, awesome power that ever was, and what they did made all the difference.

In sacrifice and death they truly connected to the Source of all life.  What an incredible idea!  Even the Hebrew words are from the same root: yakriv—karov—Korban: to come close to God we must ritually kill.

This is not just true in Vayikra.  In fact, death and God are interwoven in the tapestry of Jewish tradition.  Death and holiness interlock, embrace, intimately intertwine.  Sacrifice becomes saintliness.  In the eileh ezkereh Martyrology on Yom Kippur we speak of the great rabbis slaughtered by the Romans with sacrificial words like zevach and olah, sacrificial words from Leviticus.  When we pray for the souls of the martyrs of our people, we poetically describe them as korbanot, sacrifices to God.  We proclaim that they died al kidush hashem, for the sanctification of the sacred Name.  Death becomes holiness, and holiness leads to death. 

We have no Jewish dia de los muertos, no Day of the Dead, no Dance of Death.  But at the center of our Torah, in the middle of the concentric circles of Genesis and Deuteronomy, of Exodus and Numbers, right smack in the thematic ground zero of our holiest text is the instruction of the kohanim and priests explaining all about the sacrifices.  Here at the living heart of the Torah we talk mostly about administering death.

Now, to contemporary Jews there is something sinister and crude in all this gore and sacrifice.  Industrial society has removed us from daily encounter with blood or death.  Chicken comes wrapped in plastic; Cows are an entirely different entity from steak.  We don't know from butchering and sh'chitah, and this makes us a little squeamish about blood, you and I.  We can handle all the pseudo-gore contained in the ketchup packets of ultraviolent Quentin Tarantino films but tell us about pulling the gizzard out of a chicken or how to cut out and burn the lobe of a sheep's liver, and we become distinctly uncomfortable.

Worse than that, these korbanot are profoundly irrelevant to us and to the way we worship our deity, sitting solemnly in rooms full of "sacred space", with our carefully updated liturgies and our climate-controlled comfort.  Even more so when we are watching Shabbat services on our laptops on Facebook or Zoom from the comfort of our homes.  Religion has become a brief, antiseptic, social congregating, a hermetically sealed moment of safely spiritual experience.  And perhaps in virtual experience, less even than that: a background video program to watch or ignore as we do other things.

But that's not what it was to our ancestors; and, if we take Leviticus seriously, if we get the message of this central book Vayikra, it cannot remain so for us, either.  

It's that linkage of death and holiness that we need to look at, to stare straight into its unpleasant face.  In modern society the idea that you would die for a belief is bizarre, even insane.  Even the notion that you would die for any other person is pretty repugnant in a therapeutic world.  But Vayikra raises the question anyway: what would you die for?  For what reason or purpose or person or idea would you be willing to give up your life?

Unlike the centuries of our ancestors for whom this was an everyday dilemma, we don't really think it will ever come down to dying for our beliefs.  We all pray that we will never have to join the Jewish martyrs of the millennia.  But my question is not an introduction to Holocaust memories or Antisemitic stories.  I'm asking because, as Jewish philosopher Steven Schwarzschild said, until we know what we would die for we cannot truly know what it is that we live for. 

So just what would you die for?  How can we truly know what it is that calls to our souls, that stakes its claim upon our very existence? 

The opening word of our portion tells us: Vayikra, and God called.  In the Torah, it is God's call that brings us out of our own confusion and loneliness; it is God's call that brings us to stare our mortality in the face, to touch and feel it, to release a little bit of ourselves, our denial of mortality, and gain a great gift: to know through that encounter what it is we care about and what it is we live for. 

This Leviticus story is not just about priests or even rabbis.  In Exodus, semichah is done by the kohanim, but our text here is addressed to adam, to every single human being.  Each and every one of us, male and female, has the responsibility of getting up close and personal with our God, staring death in the face, determining what really matters to us, and choosing to live for that.  No one else may do this for us, not priest nor rabbi, not parent or teacher. 

We each must make this commitment personally; and this commitment applies to every aspect of life, not just the ritual moments.  It is true for the intimacy of our private lives, for the offerings of the heart and self that emerge from our own, personal choice to come near to God. 

The great medieval poet and philosopher Judah Halevi describes the sacrifices as an olam katan, a world in miniature; for us, it is these decisions that make our lives, and our personal relationships, into a sacred olam katan of our families, our friendships, and our chosen paths.

Deciding what it is that truly matters to us can be a daunting prospect.  Thinking about our own death, and valuing something beyond our own, finite, life, forces us to admit that our existence is not the most important thing in the world.  It means surrendering a portion of our ego, allowing that there is a greater value in the world even than our own survival. 

There are many beautiful interpretations of why the last letter of the first word of our portion, Vayikra, is written with a small alef.  The Chasidic rebbe, Simcha Bunem, explains that it highlights the modesty of Moses: though called to come up closer to God than any other human being, Moses retained his humility.  The alef of his ani remained small, diminished.  It was his modesty that left room, within his soul, for God.  I think that the humility of the small alef is also a clue; change the last letter of vayikra to the next Hebrew letter, bet, and you arrive at vayikrav, and he came near; change the vocalization and it becomes vayakriv, and he sacrificed.  It is all one; through God's call we are brought near, sacrifice our independence from commitment, and learn the purpose of our lives.  Vayikra, God's call, is to a life lived fully, completely, modestly.

And that, I believe, is what Vayikra is trying to get at all along: all this talk of referred death, of substitute sacrifice, is designed to force us to place full value on our own lives.  It's a way to force to consciousness just what it is that really matters in our lives.  What is sacrificed before the altar here, what we must bring before God willingly and kill with our own hand, is our liberty to lead an unexamined life.  Vayikra insists that it is not enough to float through life without knowing why; in exchange for the sacrifice of that false freedom, it offers meaning and value and holiness.

As Samson Raphael Hirsch says, "the Sanctuary of God's Torah demands the full complete life with nothing left out, nothing missing, and promises in exchange a rich, full life in which even death and pain lose their sting."  It is within that commitment, to your God, to your mate, to your lover, to your children, that you will find that the samach has been changed to same'ach, that the hand upon your head has become joy within your heart.  Today, we pray, God, that you bring us to face our mortality, to sacrifice our empty isolation, and to commit to lives dedicated to sanctifying what we love.  For when we know what we might die for, we know how we must choose to live.