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.
