Our parasha today reads like an instruction manual, which, in fact, it is. The Book of Leviticus is called Torat Cohanim, the instruction manual for the cohanim, the priests, who offered the animal sacrifices at the ancient altar of the Israelites. Animal sacrifice is such a strange form of worship, one that is so hard for us to relate to. But for our ancestors, it was the obvious way to connect to God: to offer expressions of peace and thanksgiving or to purify ourselves after a transgression.
Animal sacrifice had been around for a long time. The Torah indicates that, going back to the beginning of time, we tried to reach God by offering animals: Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, all made offerings. In the minds of our ancestors, offering a gift of an animal somehow expressed our joy of gratitude or our fear of punishment.
But here in our parasha, in the book of Leviticus, the practice of animal sacrifice changes. No longer are animals offered by individuals as a spontaneous expression of joy or hope or fear. Rather, sacrifice becomes institutionalized and regimented to particular times, places, and people. Look how our parasha begins: Tzav et Aharon v’et banav leymor. Zot Torat Ha’olah. Command Aaron and his son: this is the Torah of the burnt offering. And the Torah proceeds to detail the precise instructions for each of the offerings: what the priest should wear, when the fire should be fed, who should eat the offering and where, and what the exact measurements of the offerings should be.
This is quite different than the sacrifices found earlier in the Torah, different than the isolated altar that Abraham or Jacob set up after having godly experiences, or the sacrifice that Noah offered after stepping out of the ark. Here in Leviticus, the common person still can be emotionally moved to want to make an offering, but they way they offer it is now centralized and legislated. Soon, the Torah will decree that people are no longer permitted so set up their own private altar wherever they want and offer in their own way. (Lev. 17 and Deut. 12).
So, within sacrifice, the Torah presents a tension between individual practice and communal practice, between spontaneous offerings and fixed offerings. And although we stopped animal sacrifice when the Temple was destroyed, this tension still exists in Jewish practice. In fact, in our own community, there has been a heated discussion in the last few weeks about this very topic.
It’s a tension that is particularly challenging for people like us. Here we are in Marin County, in the San Francisco Bay area, a place of creativity and individuality, a place where many people come to get away from their roots, yet we are part of a Conservative synagogue, with rules and laws and traditions. If we were a Reform synagogue, we wouldn’t be bound by halacha, and we’d be part of a movement based on the principle of “individual autonomy.” If we were an Orthodox synagogue, we’d all accept that we were bound by halacha, and there would be no question of individual autonomy. But we live in that complex middle ground.
What I’d like to ask us to think about is (not to solve any specific problems of kashrut or hosting Shabbat dinners in this community but) the value both of individual, spontaneous practice, as with our ancestors in Genesis who made offerings when they were moved to do so, and of fixed, communal practice, as with our parasha, where it is institutionalized and regulated. And when we think of those types of offerings in terms of the way we connect to God today through prayer and ritual, what makes more sense to you: the free form or the fixed?
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes beautifully about the needed balance between what’s called keva and kavannah, the fixed form of the ritual and the inward, heart-felt experience. Judaism, he wrote, must be understood as the balance between two opposite polarities: regularity and spontaneity, uniformity and individuality, and our task is to learn how to maintain a harmony between these two. (God in Search of Man, p. 341)
When he wrote this in 1955, his concern was that Judaism was too much form and not enough spirit. Heschel was concerned about Jews who were praying 3 times a day, for whom ritual had become rote. He is trying to infuse kavannah, the spirit of delight, emotion, and spontaneity into highly structured, fixed practice.
We, on the other hand, live in the world of individuality. What is the most popular product in our culture today? The ipod, emphasis on the “I,” a device that gives us an individualized experience where we block out the world around us and listen to exactly what we want. We don’t even have to buy the whole album anymore and listen to songs in the order the artist intended. We get our own personalized “I” experience. Same goes for television these days – we can watch exactly what we want when we want – same goes for shopping, the computer and most aspects of our world.
Heschel is right that we need a balance between keva and kavannah, but in our time and place, when it comes to Jewish ritual practice, we need more balance on the side of the fixed and communal. One of the biggest topics in recent years around here has been that people are yearning for a greater sense of community and connectedness. We hear over and over that people feel isolated and alienated, and we’ve got people are working on this problem in our community through Panim el Panim.
But we have the solution to this problem already built in: Jewish rituals - whether it is sharing a Shabbat dinner on Friday night, praying together on Shabbat morning, hearing the Megillah read on Purim, making a seder on Pesach - create identity, create community, and turn mundane life into shared poetry, where the deepest teachings of our tradition are acted out in real life. (For more on this, see Neil Gillman’s Sacred Fragments, Chapter 9)
Human beings need rituals, and all of us create them to give meaning and order to our days and seasons. We all have our daily rituals like making our coffee or saying goodnight to our kids. We have rituals that mark time and turn life into a shared experience: blowing out candles at a birthday party or singing the National Anthem at the beginning of sports events.
And that’s how Judaism works, too, but on a daily basis. And that’s why sacrifice changed in the Torah from individual offerings to communal offerings. We needed ritual that bound us not only to God, but to each other. We all create structure in our lives, even if it’s just the way we always floss before we brush, but Jewish structure infuses our lives with holiness and connection that we share with other people, past, present, and future. We discover this at important moments, like when there’s a death in our family, and the structure of ritual gives us community and comfort and a sacred container for our loss. And this is true for joyous moments, too.
Heschel is right: we need kavannah, and spontaneity, and personal expression, but without a shared ritual, there is no container for these, and there is no community to share these with. In the words of Heschel, “the way to kavannah is through the deed.” Fixed ritual and individual expression go together. One is the string and the other the bow. “When the string is tight, the bow will evoke the melody.”
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