Shabbat Shalom Weekly
Torah Portion: Acharei Mot (Leviticus 16 – 18)
Rabbi Avraham Twerski’s Insights on Torah
God is Always With Us, Even After We Transgress
by Rabbi Avraham Twerski
The Tent of Meeting that dwells with them in the midst of their impurities (Vayikra, 16:16).
“Even when they are in a state of contamination, the Divine Presence is with them” (Yoma 57a).
Although disobeying the Divine will sets up a barrier between man and God, it is somewhat like a one-way mirror. We cause ourselves to be distant from God, but He is never distant from us. This is rather easy to understand. We sometimes see children who reject their parents, but regardless of how defiant the child may be, the parents’ love for him is as intense as ever, and they long for his return to them.
When R’ Mendel of Kotzk first joined the court of R’ Simchah Bunim of P’shis’che, the latter asked him, “Young man, where is God?” R’ Mendel answered, “The entire world is full of His glory.” R’ Simchah Bunim repeated, “Young man, I asked you, where is God?” R’ Mendel answered, “There is no place that is devoid of Him.” R’ Simchah Bunim persisted, “Young man, I am asking you, where is God?” R’ Mendel said, “If my answers do not satisfy you, then you tell me.” R’ Simchah Bunim said, “God can be found wherever He is welcomed.”
“He who is haughty of eye and large of desire, him I cannot tolerate” (Psalms 101:5). Of a vain and arrogant person the Talmud quotes God as saying, “He and I cannot share the same dwelling” (Arachin 15b). God is indeed everywhere, but He withdraws His presence from a vain and arrogant person.
Committing a sin is not necessarily a denial or rejection of God. A person may simply have been overwhelmed by an urge that he did not suppress, or may not have realized that a sin causes him to be distant from God. However, a vain, egotistical person is one who is his own god. Inasmuch as there cannot be two gods, if a person thinks himself to be god, he cannot believe in the true God. There is no form of idolatry as absolute as the person who worships himself.
In my writings on self-esteem, I suggested that vanity and conceit are desperate defenses whereby a person tries to cope with a sense of unworthiness. I was thrilled to find that no less an authority than Rabbeinu Yonah validates this concept. “The vain person seeks to compensate for his feeling of defectiveness by means of grandiosity” (Rabbeinu Yonah al HaTorah, p. 156). A person with healthy self-esteem does not seek the praise and recognition of others to remind him that he has value.
If a person truly believes that he possesses a Divine neshama, soul, he will realize that he has great worth, and even if he may have gone astray in his behavior, he is nevertheless worthy by virtue of his Divine neshama. Anyone with a profound feeling of unworthiness must be in denial that he has within himself the breath of God.
Man’s closeness to God is by virtue of his soul, which craves to be united with its Source. Denial of having a Divine neshama precludes a close relationship with God.
God is with us even if we have sinned. As long as we feel a desire to be close to God, we know ourselves to be of His essence, and that we are capable of becoming more spiritual.
This opens the door to teshuvah, repentance, and this is why the above verse is contained in the narrative of the Yom Kippur service.
Covenant & Conversation
Judaism’s Three Voices
by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (z”l)
The ethics of the King, the priest and the prophet
The nineteenth chapter of Vayikra, with which our parsha begins, is one of the supreme statements of the ethics of the Torah. It’s about the right, the good and the holy, and it contains some of Judaism’s greatest moral commands: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” and “Let the stranger who lives among you be like your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt.”
But the chapter is also surpassingly strange. It contains what looks like a random jumble of commands, many of which have nothing whatever to do with ethics and only the most tenuous connection with holiness:
Do not mate different kinds of animals. not plant your field with two kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. (Ex. 19:19 Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it. Do not practise divination or sorcery. Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard. (Ex. 19:26-28)
And so on. What have these to do with the right, the good and the holy? To understand this we have to engage in an enormous leap of insight into the unique moral/social/spiritual vision of the Torah, so unlike anything we find elsewhere.
The West has had many attempts at defining a moral system. Some focused on rationality, others on emotions like sympathy and empathy. For some the central principle was service to the state, for others moral duty, for yet others the greatest happiness of the greatest number. These are all forms of moral simplicity.
Judaism insists on the opposite: moral complexity. The moral life isn’t easy. Sometimes duties or loyalties clash. Sometimes reason says one thing, emotion another. More fundamentally, Judaism identified three distinct moral sensibilities each of which has its own voice and vocabulary. They are [1] the ethics of the king, [2] the ethics of the priest and [3] the ethics of the prophet.
Jeremiah and Ezekiel talk about their distinctive sensibilities:
For the teaching of the law [Torah] by the priest will not cease, nor will counsel [etzah] from the wise [chakham], nor the word [davar] from the prophets. (Jer. 18:18)
They will go searching for a vision [chazon] from the prophet, priestly instruction in the law [Torah] will cease, the counsel [etzah] of the elders will come to an end. (Ez. 7:26)
Priests think in terms of Torah. Prophets have “the word” or “a vision.” Elders and the wise have etzah. What does this mean?
Kings and their courts are associated in Judaism with wisdom –chokhmah,etzah and their synonyms. Several books of Tanakh, most conspicuously Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (Kohelet), are books of “wisdom” of which the supreme exemplar was King Solomon. Wisdom in Judaism is the most universal form of knowledge, and the Wisdom literature is the closest the Hebrew Bible comes to the other literature of the ancient Near East, as well as the Hellenistic sages. It is practical, pragmatic, based on experience and observation; it is judicious, prudent. It is a prescription for a life that is safe and sound, without excess or extremes, but hardly dramatic or transformative. That is the voice of wisdom, the virtue of kings.
The prophetic voice is quite different, impassioned, vivid, radical in its critique of the misuse of power and the exploitative pursuit of wealth. The prophet speaks on behalf of the people, the poor, the downtrodden, the abused. He (or she) thinks of the moral life in terms of relationships: between God and humanity and between human beings themselves. The key terms for the prophet are tzedek (distributive justice), mishpat (retributive justice), chessed (loving kindness) and rachamim(mercy, compassion). The prophet has emotional intelligence, sympathy and empathy, and feels the plight of the lonely and oppressed. Prophecy is never abstract. It doesn’t think in terms of universals. It responds to the here and now of time and place. The priest hears the word of God for all time. The prophet hears the word of God for this time.
The ethic of the priest, and of holiness generally, is different again. The key activities of the priest are lehavdil – to discriminate, distinguish and divide – and lehorot – to instruct people in the law, both generally as teachers and in specific instances as judges. The key words of the priest are kodesh and chol (holy and secular),tamei and tahor (
The task of the priest, like God at creation, is to bring order out of chaos. The priest establishes boundaries in both time and space. There are holy times and holy places, and each time and place has its own integrity, its own setting in the total scheme of things. The kohen’s protest is against the blurring of boundaries so common in pagan religions – between gods and humans, between life and death, between the sexes and so on. A sin, for the kohen, is an act in the wrong place, and its punishment is exile, being cast out of your rightful place. A good society, for the kohen, is one in which everything is in its proper place, and the kohen has special sensitivity toward the stranger, the person who has no place of his or her own.
The strange collection of commands in Kedoshim thus turns out not to be strange at all. The holiness code sees love and justice as part of a total vision of an ordered universe in which each thing, person and act has their rightful place, and it is this order that is threatened when the boundary between different kinds of animals, grain, fabrics is breached; when the human body is lacerated; or when people eat blood, the sign of death, in order to feed life.
In the secular West we are familiar with the voice of wisdom. It is common ground between the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the great sages from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius to Montaigne. We know, too, the prophetic voice and what Einstein called its “almost fanatical love of justice.” We are far less familiar with the priestly idea that just as there is a scientific order to nature, so there is a moral order, and it consists in keeping separate the things that are separate, and maintaining the boundaries that respect the integrity of the world God created and seven times pronounced good.
The priestly voice is not marginal to Judaism. It is central, essential. It is the voice of the Torah’s first chapter. It is the voice that defined the Jewish vocation as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” It dominates Vayikra, the central book of the Torah. And whereas the prophetic spirit lives on in aggadah, the priestly voice prevails in halakhah. And the very name Torah – from the verb lehorot – is a priestly word.
Perhaps the idea of ecology, one of the key discoveries of modern times, will allow us to understand better the priestly vision and its code of holiness, both of which see ethics not just as practical wisdom or prophetic justice but also as honouring the deep structure – the sacred ontology – of being.
An ordered universe is a moral universe, a world at peace with its Creator and itself.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Community is society with a human face.” – Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l)
JOKE OF THE WEEK
Becky took a job at her shul as the new youth director which included talking about the weekly Torah portion. This Shabbat, she was leading a discussion with the her group about Noah and the ark. She asked them what they thought Noah may have done to pass the time in the ark for so many days.
After waiting a few moments, Becky suggested, “Maybe he did a lot of fishing. How about that?”
Little Moishie gave her a funny look and said, “I don’t think so. It’s kinda hard to fish with just two worms!”
SHABBAT SHALOM!
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