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).
