WHAT IS AN ACCEPTABLE WAY TO TRANSFER OUR SINS TO THE MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD?
WHAT IS AN ACCEPTABLE WAY TO TRANSFER OUR SINS TO THE MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD?
The parsha last week contained the famous story of the scapegoat ritual, from which we derive our common noun “scapegoat”. The ritual was the original core practice of Yom Kippur. It consisted of transferring everyone’s sins onto one goat who was then sent out to “Azazel” which means either the wilderness or a wilderness demon who was opposed to YHVH. Thus we purified ourselves by dumping our sins into the wilderness.
Is this an ethical practice? There’s a brilliant essay by L. Teal Willoughby entitled “Ecofeminist Consciousness” in a book entitled Ecofeminism and the Sacred where she points out that we are treating the more than human world as a thing, an object, when we perform rituals that ask the more than human world to take away our sins without first asking permission to dump the sins there. Many of us have participated in practices where we have written things we wish to complete on paper and burned them, or tossed them into a river at Tashlich or sent them on balloons into the atmosphere etc. These can be really powerful rituals.
How might we capture the power of these rituals while behaving differently than any polluter who dumps their waste and leaves it to poison the world? The “inaccessible land” to which the goat, is sent is being treated as a dumping ground or an “it”, to use Buber’s language. How can we capture the power of these rituals and treat the land, the water, the air as a “thou” (to use Buber’s language), as a living being
I think we need to begin with creating relationship. If you are going to a river to do Tashlich, say hello before you do anything else. Tell the river why you have come and say some words of praise for the beauty of the river and her (his? its?) life giving waters. Tell the river what you are planning to do and ask permission. Then stop and listen and see if he/she/it objects. Don’t do the ritual without permission. Don’t do the ritual especially if you get a negative feeling. See if the river wants something in return for permission to perform the ritual, for instance, picking up some of the litter on her/his/its banks. Then once you have received permission, perform the ritual and say thank you.
This is for sure a different approach to performing rituals in the more than human world, one which I certainly have not faithfully done. We take the more than human world so much for granted. It is past time to move ourselves into a moment of right relationship before we perform rituals.
