The Revolutionary Usurpation of the Firstborn (פרשת תולדת)

The biblical motif of the revolutionary usurpation of the firstborn begins in the first Torah portion, Bereshit, when God favors the offering made by Abel and not that of his older brother Cain (Gen. 4:4-5). The motif reappears in Vayera when Sarah insists that the younger Isaac, and not Ishmael, will receive Abraham’s inheritance. And now the motif continues in this week’s Torah portion Toldot (“generations”) with Jacob and Esau. After they clash together in their mother's womb, Jacob emerges second grasping the heel of his firstborn brother Esau (Genesis 25:22, 26).

שני גיים בבטנך
ושני לאמים, ממעיך יפרדו
ולאם מלאם יאמץ
ורב יעבד צעיר

Two nations—in your womb,
two peoples from your loins shall issue.
People over people shall prevail,
the elder, the younger’s slave.

Genesis 25:23

Robert Alter points out the ambiguity of this verse. Which nation shall prevail over which? “The Hebrew syntax leaves unclear which noun is subject and which is object—‘the elder shall serve the younger,’ or, ‘the elder, the younger shall serve.’”

Jacob (also called Israel) is, of course, the progenitor of the Jewish nation, while his brother Esau is identified as the ancestor of the Edomites. Notwithstanding Jacob and Esau’s eventual reconciliation (Genesis 33), the Hebrew Bible relates that the Jewish nation under David’s leadership later conquered Edom (II Samuel 8:13, I Chronicles 18:12). The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the Hebrew Bible describes Edom as “the eternal enemy of Israel (and Judah, Amos 1:11; Ezek. 35:5) who not only always oppressed Israel, but at the time of the destruction of the First Temple took advantage of the situation and seized control of parts of Judah (Ezek. 25:12; 35:5, 10, 2; Obad. 11–16), and it is hinted that Edom also took part in the destruction of Jerusalem (Ps. 137:7; Obad. 11) and even in that of the Temple itself (Obad. 16).” Much later, around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire, Edom was identified with Rome (ostensibly founded by the children of Esau and included among the cities of the chiefs of Esau mentioned at the end of Genesis 36).

Another interesting feature of this portion concerns Abimelech’s words to Isaac in Genesis 26:10: כמעט שכב אחד העם, את–אשתך (“one of the people might well have lain with your wife”). This is apparently the only place in the Hebrew Bible where the phrase אחד העם appears. According to Rashi, “one of the people” refers here to “the special one of the people, namely the king.” Of course, אחד העם was also the pen name of the great theoretician of cultural Zionism, Asher Ginzberg. As Ginzberg's biographer Steven Zipperstein points out with Rashi's commentary in mind, this pen name may have been a “bid for leadership” as much as a sign of anonymity, modesty, and humility. Asher, though, was no Jacob--he had no older brother, only two younger sisters.

A Vision of Unity (פרשת ראה)

The Shema--perhaps the most important prayer in Judaism--stresses divine unity. "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Hebrew word for unity, we should bear in mind, is אחדות, which is related to the word אחד (one). This week's Torah portion, Parshat Re'eh (פרשת ראה, Deuteronomy 11:26–16:17), articulates a manifold unity: one vision or one right perspective, one good, one God, one place of worship, and one people.

The portion begins with the imperative to see: "See [ראה], I set before you today blessing and curse: the blessing, when you heed the instruction [מצות] of the Lord your God with which I instruct (מצוה) you today; the curse, if you heed not the instruction of the Lord your God" (Deuteronomy 11:26-28). The imperative is addressed not to the individual (לפניך), but collectively to the people as a whole (לפניכם).

The people are admonished, "You shall not do after all that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes" (Deuteronomy 12:8). Instead, Moses repeatedly directs the people's gaze to "what is right [הישר]" or "what is good and right [הטוב והישר] in the eyes of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 21:25, 21:28, 13:19). Following the initial imperative to look, the intent is to align the vision of the people with the vision of their God, so that it is a single vision.

Moreover, it is a vision of one good. In the Midrash (Devarim Rabbah 4:3), R. Eliezer links the opening verse of this week's portion ("See, I set before you today blessing and curse") to Lamentations 3:38: "out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good?" The Bible scholar and commentator Nehama Leibowitz, following previous commentators, points out that the Hebrew word for evil in Lamentations 3:38 occurs in the plural form (רעות = evils), but the word for good (טוב) is in the singular.

The portion stresses the oneness of God throughout, warning the people to choose their God (it is always "your God") over "other gods" (the gods of other peoples) that they have not known.

Another feature of the portion is the abolition of religious sacrifice at local shrines and its centralization in Jerusalem ("the place that the Lord your God will choose," Deuteronomy 12:5), which occurred historically between the late eighth century BCE (Hezekiah's reform) and the late seventh century (Josiah's reform). This centralization has a number of consequences, including the innovation of what the rabbis called secular slaughter (שחיטת חולין) outside of Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 12:15). More to the point of this drash, centralization of the Israelite cult is another expression of unity. As the first-century CE Jewish priest, scholar, and historian Flavius Josephus argued, centralization of worship teaches that just as there is only one God, there should only be one Temple, and the Temple should be "common to all men because He is the common God of all men" (Against Apion, book II, paragraph 24).

The argument that Josephus makes concerning the centralization of worship brings to mind a similar argument that the French historian and political writer Alexis de Tocqueville would make centuries later. In the second volume (chap. 5) of Democracy in America, first published in 1840, Tocqueville wrote: "Men living in a similar and equal condition in the world readily conceive the idea of the one God, governing every man by the same laws, and granting to every man future happiness on the same conditions. The idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator; while, on the contrary in a state of society, where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to Heaven."

Along these lines, we can see that in addition to emphasizing one vision or right perspective, one good, one God, and one place of worship, this week's portion also underscores the oneness of the people. This is evident in the solidaristic provisions for the Levite, who has "no portion or inheritance" (i.e., they did not receive a portion of the land like the other tribes, Deuteronomy 12:12), and the social obligations stipulated in Deuteronomy 15 to one's "fellow man and brother," including the debtor and the pauper. Remission at the end of every seven years is a leveling practice that restores equality between the erstwhile debtor and his creditor. The instruction to "open your hand to your brother, to your poor, and to your pauper, in your land" (Deuteronomy 15:11), may not place the pauper on an equal footing, but at least it ensures that he will not be treated as an outsider to whom one owes nothing. To be sure, these provisions are in one sense inconsistent with Tocqueville's thesis because they presuppose inequality that must then be compensated. Nevertheless, they express an egalitarian ethos and aspiration, and in this sense they are consistent with Tocqueville's point. As the Bible translator and professor of Hebrew Robert Alter puts it, "whatever the social and economic differences, all Israelites should regard each other as brothers." The social ethic of Deuteronomy thus aims to prevent inequalities from deepening and hardening into caste divisions that would break up the nation.

The ideal of אחדות (unity or oneness) runs against the grain of the individualism that prevails today. Taken to an extreme, this ideal surely has its dangers. But this week's portion reminds us that the ideal of אחדות is also closely connected to the Biblical social ethic and may be needed in some measure today to counterbalance individualism and reinvigorate our sense of mutual social obligations.

Nature and Culture (פרשת אחרי מות־קדשים)

In a previous blog post, I wrote that Judaism is all about distinction, and no book of the Torah exemplifies this concern more than ויקרא (Leviticus in Latin). As Robert Alter points out, the same process of division we find in בראשית (Genesis) is also “manifested in the ritual, sexual, and dietary laws of Leviticus…. Just as one has to set apart permissible sexual partners from forbidden ones” (the incest taboo), “one must set apart what may be eaten in the great pullulation of living creatures from what may not be eaten” (the laws of kashrut); and the Jewish people, through its acceptance of these categorical divisions, “sets itself apart from other peoples and becomes holy, like God.” This week’s double portion, Acharei-Kedoshim (Leviticus 16:1–20:27), continues to develop this theme.

The double portion includes the famous scapegoat ritual, in which the high priest Aaron sacrifices one goat to the Lord at the entrance to the Mishkan (Tabernacle) and sends off the other “to Azazel in the wilderness” (Lev. 16:10). By means of the latter act, the people’s transgressions are carried off by the goat. This ritual continued to be performed in the Second Temple until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE. The ritual is similar to one used to purify persons afflicted with skin blanch, which is described in Parshat Metzora. In that ritual, the priest slaughters one bird and sends out another bird “over the open field” (Lev. 14:4–7).

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, “the exact meaning of Azazel was a point of dispute already in the times of the talmudic sages: some held that it is the name of the place to which the goat was sent, while others believed that it was the name of some ‘power.’” In Alter’s view, “the most plausible understanding—it is a very old one—is that it is the name of a goatish demon or deity [the name incorporates the Hebrew word for goat] associated with the remote wilderness.” Alter adds: “the ritual depends upon a polarity between YHWH/the pale of human civilization and Azazel/the remote wilderness, the realm of disorder and raw formlessness…. It is as though the goat piled with impurities were being sent back to the primordial realm of ‘welter and waste’ [תהו ובהו, Genesis 1:2] before the delineated world came into being, but that realm here is given an animal-or-demon tag.”
 
In a subsequent passage that seems to support Alter’s interpretation, the Lord tells Moses to instruct the people that “they shall no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to the שעירם after which they go whoring” (Lev. 17:7). Who or what are the שעירם? Alter and the Jewish Publication Society translate the word as “goat-demons.” My Sapirstein edition of the Torah with Rashi’s commentary translates the word simply as “demons.” They follow the Greek Septuagint in this respect, which used the Greek word demon to translate the Hebrew word that the Encyclopaedia Judaica says means “hairy satyrs.” And indeed Chabad.org and my grandmother’s old Menorah Press Jewish Family Bible translate the word as “satyrs.” (In modern Hebrew, a שָׂעִיר is a satyr or billygoat.) These creatures are “surely to be associated with Azazel,” notes Alter. “Though our knowledge of their precise nature is limited, they are clearly archaic nature gods of the wild realm ‘beyond the camp,’ outside the pale of monotheistic civilization that the sundry Priestly writers are laboring to create.”

All of this brings to mind to Nietzsche’s famous contrast in The Birth of Tragedy between Apollo and Dionysius. While it may be unseemly to explicate the Torah with a pagan distinction, this week’s double portion seems to lend itself to the analogy. The Mishkan (Tabernacle) of the Lord, who creates clear categorical distinctions and enjoins the people to keep them clear, would correspond in this reading to the Apollonian spirit that gives form and creates harmony. In contrast, the wilderness inhabited by Azazel and the goat-demons recalls the Dionysian frenzy that (in Walter Kaufman’s words) “defies all limitations” and “threatens to destroy all forms and codes.” Like Dionysius, the creatures of the wilderness signify (in the words of Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large) “formless flux,” “excess,” and loss of individuation—in a phrase, welter and waste (תהו ובהו).

This week’s double portion also brings to mind an influential thesis once put forward by the Jewish anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. “For Lévi-Strauss,” as his biographer Patrick Wilcken writes, “the incest taboo was the social rule, from which all kin systems flowed. It distinguished humanity’s rule-bound existence from nature’s promiscuity; it marked the passage from nature to culture.” As Thomas Meaney put it in a review of Wilcken’s book, “Lévi-Strauss interpreted [the incest taboo] as humanity’s most basic attempt to rein in the randomness of nature.” Perhaps not coincidentally, this week’s double portion, which shows such deep concern for keeping the disorder and formlessness of the wilderness at bay, also includes the Torah’s prohibition of incest (Lev. 18).

Peace-Offering in a Time of Pandemic (פרשת צו)

Reading Parshat Tzav (Leviticus 6:1–8:36) in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the overriding concern of ויקרא (Leviticus) with purification seems all too fitting. There seems no better time for Rashi’s invitation: “Let the pure ones come and study laws of purity.”

Accordingly, it’s hard not to be preoccupied in this week’s portion with the elements of contagion (of holiness, 6:11) and the seven-day quarantine of Aaron and his sons: “And from the entrance of the Tent of Meeting you shall not go out seven days…. [Y]ou shall keep the Lord’s watch and shall not die” (8:33-35). There you have it: a biblical warrant for sheltering in place.

Moreover, the sacrifice of the peace-offering (זבח השלמים), which is described in Leviticus 7:11-16, is also obliquely tied to the theme of illness. Robert Alter translates זבח השלמים as “communion sacrifice,” presumably because it culminates in a communal meal, and the Jewish Publication Society translates it as the “sacrifice of well-being,” but peace-offering seems the best translation because the Hebrew name זבח השלמים is related to the word שלום (peace). The Torah portion tell us this particular type of offering may be brought forward in or for thanksgiving (7:12). Thanksgiving for what? Rashi (following the Talmud, which bases the interpretation on Psalm 107) explains that one should give thanks for recovering from an illness, among other things. And indeed among the great national events that called forth the peace-offering in biblical times was the cessation of pestilence: after David made peace-offerings, a “plague against Israel was checked” (II Samuel 24:25).

With the destruction of the Temple, we can’t follow David’s example, but maybe there is nevertheless still a lesson we can take away from the portion. Why is this particular type of sacrifice called a peace-offering? Some commentators in the Jewish tradition point out that a portion of the offering is burnt on the altar, a portion is given to the כהנים (priests), and the remainder is eaten by the person who brings the offering and his family—in short, everyone gets a part. Thus, as Nehama Leibowitz, paraphrasing Rabbi Yehuda in the Talmud, says: “It harbors ‘peace’ for all parties”: the altar, the priests, and the owners. She cites a commentator named Hoffman who suggests that the peace-offering thereby “reflects the harmony between the offerer, the Lord and His servants.”

Scientific efforts to find a cure for the deadly coronavirus reportedly reflect this spirit of sharing. “While political leaders have locked their borders,” the New York Times reported, “scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history.” “What is important,” said the French doctor Yazdan Yazdanpanah, “is to come up with a solution for everyone. The way to achieve that is to collaborate.” Let’s remember that lesson after the crisis.

(פרשת ויקרא) Division and Communion

Judaism is all about distinction, and no book of the Torah exemplifies Judaism’s concern with distinction more than ויקרא (Leviticus in Latin). As the Hebrew and comparative literature expert Robert Alter puts it:

There is a single verb that focuses the major themes of Leviticus—“divide” (Hebrew, hivdil). That verb, of course, stands at the beginning of the Priestly story of creation: “And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness…. And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was.” In this vision of cosmogony, the condition before the world was called into being was a chaotic interfusion of disparate elements, “welter and waste” [תהו ובהו]. What enables existence and provides a framework for the development of human nature, conceived in God’s image, and of human civilization is a process of division and insulation—light from darkness, day from night, the upper waters from the lower waters, and dry land from the latter.

Deconstruction may be the invention of a Jewish philosopher, but nothing could be less Jewish than destabilizing hierarchical oppositions.

Alter argues persuasively that the same process of division we find in בראשית (Genesis) is also “manifested in the ritual, sexual, and dietary laws of Leviticus…. Just as one has to set apart permissible sexual partners from forbidden ones” (the incest taboo), “one must set apart what may be eaten in the great pullulation of living creatures from what may not be eaten” (the laws of kashrut); and the Jewish people, through its acceptance of these categorical divisions, “sets itself apart from other peoples and becomes holy, like God.” Alter adds: “This last element of imitatio dei suggests that God’s holiness, whatever else it may involve and however ultimately unfathomable the idea may be, implies an ontological division or chasm between the Creator and the created world.”

The first portion of ויקרא (Leviticus 1:1–5:26) concerns the laws of the קרבות (korbanot), the animal and grain offerings brought to the משכן (Mishkan or Tabernacle). These laws raise the question that the rabbis Maimonides and Nachmanides famously debated in the twelfth century, namely, what is the meaning and purpose of the sacrifices? And to this question we may add another: What do the sacrifices have to do with the process of division that Alter highlights?

Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed contends that God did not instruct the Jews to make sacrifices for their own sake but only as a means to wean the Jews away from idolatry and instead to God’s service. He reasons that the Jews were accustomed to the Egyptian practice of sacrificing animals to idols. Because human beings cannot suddenly discontinue everything to which they are accustomed, God permitted the sacrifices to continue while transferring them to His service.

Nachmanides challenged this interpretation, pointing out that Abel and Noah made sacrifices to God in the absence of idolatry. He argued that the “sin” or offense offering described in this week’s portion was a means (as Nehama Leibowitz puts it) to “express man’s readiness to sacrifice himself for his God.” From this perspective, the sacrificial animal is substituted for the person who has committed a transgression.

I’m no rabbinical scholar, but I don’t see a great divide between the views of Maimonides and Nachmanides. Leibowitz suggests that Nachmanides, in contrast to Maimonides, attributed “intrinsic value” to the sacrifices, but that can’t be right. As she later notes, the prophets expressly denied that the sacrifices had instrinsic value, insisting that they were only a means of drawing nearer to God and were only valuable when they served this purpose. So everyone—Maimonides, Nachmanides, and the prophets—characterizes the sacrifices as a means to an end. Maimonides and Nachmanides appear to disagree about the precise nature of that end, but even on this point the difference between them is not great. Maimonides emphasizes not just the rejection of idolatry but also devotion to God’s service. A readiness to sacrifice oneself for one’s God is arguably the most extreme form of service.

Still, what do the sacrifices have to do with the process of division? One answer, as Alter points out, is that the laws of sacrifice carefully regulate access to the sacred space of the sanctuary, preventing the unsanctioned mixture of the sacred and the profane. The two brief stories contained in the book of ויקרא (though not in this week’s portion) illustrate the dangers of such unsanctioned mixture: Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu are divinely punished for bringing “alien fire before the Lord” (Leviticus 10), and an Egyptian who profanes God’s sacred name is stoned to death (Leviticus 24). According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, the entire book of Leviticus is structured by a system of correspondences between the divisions of the Mishkan (holy of holies, sanctuary, outer court), Mount Sinai (summit, perimeter, foot of the mountain), and the body of the sacrificed animal. For example, she argues, this week’s portion prohibits consumption of the suet (Leviticus 3:17) because it “divides the body at the diaphragm below the lower ribs” and thus “corresponds in the body to the boundary of a forbidden sacred space on the mountain.”

But the sacrifices do not only divide; they also connect. As Leibowitz says, the sacrifice “allows us to draw closer to the Almighty.” This is evident from the fact that the word קרבן (sacrifice) is derived from the root ק–ר–ב, from which we also get the word קרוב (close). This interpretation also finds support in the work of Jewish sociologist Émile Durkheim. In Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, first published in 1912, Durkheim argued that sacrifice is not a “tribute or homage” to the deity. Rather, he argued, sacrifice should be seen as an “act of alimentary communion,” a “meal of which the faithful who offer it partake at the same time as the god to whom it is offered.” While some parts of the sacrificial victim are “reserved for the deity,” others are consumed by the celebrants, and in this way sacredness is “communicated to the faithful.” This interpretation casts a new light not only upon the sacrifices themselves but also upon the divisions of the cosmos. If the sacrifices bring us closer to God, then perhaps the ontological chasm that Alter infers between the Creator and the created world is not as unbridgeable as it may at first appear.