ACHAREI MOT 5784
Acharei Mot, After the death (of Nadav and Abihu, two sons of Aaron) (chapters 16-18) is the parsha in which the distinction between moral and ritual pollution starts to break down with the ritual of the scapegoat in Chapter 16 and the moral prescriptions around with whom you can and cannot have sex in Chapter 18.
Chapter 16 has the ritual of the scapegoat (16:2-28) and the establishment of the holy day of Yom Kippur (16:29-33), though not by name. Yom Kippur consists of a day of no work, the ritual scapegoat and the “degrading” of the people, whose meaning is unclear. It seems to me that the scapegoat ritual is the core ritual practice of Yom Kippur in these Biblical origins. Chapter 17 features the demand for the centralization of sacrifice at the mishkan, (and later at the Temple in Jerusalem), There’s also a prohibition against sacrifices to se’irim or goat demons to whom they used to sacrifice. (17:7) I would discuss this if I could find anything about any kind of native worship of them, but the commentators are all stumped by the reference. There is also the demand that blood not be eaten because blood is life. This is the basis for part of Kosher slaughter where all the blood is drained from the animal. Chapter 18 includes a famous series of laws covering with whom one can have sex, including the prohibition of male homosexuality “You shall not like with a male like lying with a woman.” (18:22). These prohibitions almost all are written about what males can or cannot do (the exception is “a woman shall not stand in front of any animal to mate with it.”(18:23). It also includes the prohibition of having sex with menstruating women. Friedman argues that this chapter is the beginning of the mixing of ritual and ethical laws and the idea that observing the laws are the path to a good life (18:5). I agree with his interpretation.
I want to discuss the following themes:
The efficacy of the scapegoat ritual
The ethics of sending our sins to the wilderness
The question of being different from Egyptian and Canaanite societies as a motivation for action.
Polluted land vomiting out the inhabitants
The scapegoat ritual of Chapter 16 itself is straightforward enough, if a bit more complicated in its specifics. There’s a bull for a sin offering, a ram for an elevation offering, two goats for a sin offering for the congregation of Israel, one of whom will be the scape goat and another ram for another elevation. Five animals in total. Let’s focus on the two goats.
Aaron casts lots to decide which one is for YHVH and which one is for Azazel. It’s unclear what Azazel is, though tradition seems to think this is the name of a wilderness or desert demon. As the JPS commentary says “Thus the sins of the people are symbolically cast into the realm beyond civilization, to become property of a being who is the antithesis of the God of Israel.”
Aaron slaughters the goat for YHVH and all the other animals, purifying his family, the congregation and all of the mishkan. The text makes clear that he purifies the innermost or “holy” part of the mishkan, the tent of meeting and the altar. It seems to me that it is a more detailed purification. Then Aaron places two hands upon the live goat, confesses all the wrongdoings of everyone. Thus the community’s sins are transferred to the goat who “will carry all the crimes on it to an inaccessible land. And he shall let the goal go in the wilderness.” (16:22)
Are all of these sins all the unintentional ones that are normally handled by sin offerings for unintentional trespasses, or are they rather moral sins? The text is silent on this. But we need to understand why the sins can’t be taken care of in the normal way. It’s certainly plausible to suggest that what is being atoned for are moral failings. This is what became the traditional Jewish understanding.
The logic of the ritual is pretty straightforward. Purify everything, transfer the moral failings of the people onto the goat and send the goal and our failings with it into the wilderness. I believe in the power of ritual and it’s ability to move us and cleanse us.
Is this an efficacious way of dealing with our sins? In my mind, I both affirm te power of ritual and keep coming back to the thought that this wouldn’t work because there’s just no evidence of anyone doing any kind of internal work. Is this is just a clever way of avoiding doing the necessary work? There’s no working through the sins, no forgiveness of self or other, no acknowledgement of our shadow sides. It’s not like the rituals of the way we celebrate Yom Kippur. And yet perhaps it is a way to finally clear out the sins we’ve been working on.
This parsha is often read right around Pesach. Liberation it seems to me, has to be both internal and external, has to be a function of changing one’s circumstances from a narrow place (the literal meaning of the name of Egypt in Hebrew) to a wider one as well as doing the necessary internal work. It’s never enough to just leave Egypt. Equally, while someone like Viktor Frankl can talk about freedom in the context of a concentration camp and I agree that one can always choose one’s response to the situation in which one finds oneself, there are external situations that are more supportive and less supportive. I write this as an Ashkenazi Jew from a comfortable home that no one is blowing up. That’s good.
And because this is a reading of Torah with a preoccupation with our relation to the more than human world, I’m driven to ask if we can truly repair our relationships with each other and with ourselves if our relationship with the more than human world is out of whack.
What do you make of the efficacy of the scapegoat ritual—what parts do you think would work and should be reclaimed? What’s the status of your relationship with the more than human world? How does that relationship impact your relationship with other humans and your relationship with yourself?
These questions about the efficacy of a scapegoat ritual aren’t the same as the questions about the morality of dumping our sins into the wilderness. 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. We are behaving no 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, rather than a “thou” (to use Buber’s language) or a living being with agency. Indeed the sentience and agency of at least domesticated land is something that is affirmed later on in this parsha, as I discuss below.
So what is a responsible way to work with the healing power of the more than human world, what is a responsible way to have the earth absorb our sins, or the living waters of the mikveh purify us? It begins with asking permission. It includes deep listening to what the wilderness, the body of water, the tree etc want from us as humans. It includes a conversation where we express what we want as humans, explain why we’ve chosen to work with whichever aspect of the more than human world we’ve chosen, and listen, listen for what that aspect of the more than human world wants from us.
Do you believe that all of the more than human world has moral agency? Do rocks and lizards have the same rights as deer and bodies of water? How might you work with the more than human world in your ritual practice?
“I am YHVH your God. You shall not do like what is done in the land of Egypt in which you lived; and you shall not do like what is done in the land of Canaan, to which I’m bringing you; and you shall not go by their laws. You shall do my judgments and you shall observe me laws, to go by them. I am YHVH your God.” (18:2-4). It is entirely possible to read this through the lens of the insistence that the Hebrews follow the commandments of their jealous God and not mix with the other people and their Gods. This is the fundamentalist reading. We’re right and you are wrong, we have the only true God. The fundamentalist reading is completely supported by the text.
But what if we read this instead as being a warning against the moral corruption of dominant society? What if for Egypt we substituted the totalitarianism of Mother Russia where it is currently a crime to call the sun yellow? (literally, it is a crime to call the Russian war against Ukraine a “war”). What if Canaan is akin to the crony capitalism of the United States where we model for a world that needs too little modeling how the rich get richer and screw everyone else, while we poison the various ecosystems on which our very lives literally depend? We live in a world that is literally defecating in its own bed. Maybe then a clarion call to not be like the vast majority of the world is exactly what we need.
Do we need that call to not be like the vast majority of the world? Take a few minutes and evaluate the extent to which you oppose the ways of the world, however small. What feels right about your opposition to the ways of the world? How can you expand your opposition in ways that work for you?
“You shall not become polluted by all of these, because the nations that I am putting out from in front of you became polluted by all of these, and the land became polluted, and I reckoned its sin on it, and the land vomited out its residents.” (18:24-25). The reference to “these” here is all the proscribed sexual conduct enumerated previously in the chapter.
It is obviously possible to read this metaphorically and not literally and deny the agency of the land. That’s the traditional reading and the only possible one if you reject the animist orientation that extends sentience and agency to the more than human world as a whole. But I invite you to consider reading the text literally.
We also have here a new meaning of the term tameh that I am translating as “polluted.” Tameh has meant, to this point, ritually polluted such that someone who is tameh is ineligible to offer sacrifices. That’s been the major concern. The exception has been the fascinating insight that both clothes and houses can also become tameh through contracting tzara’at, skin disease. (Leviticus, 14 and 15). Land, like clothing and houses presumably can’t bring an offering to the priests to have them sacrifice it, even though without land, there’s nothing to sacrifice. But what’s making the land tameh is the sexual immorality of the inhabitants described earlier in Chapter 18, rather than any kind of ritual pollution such as tzara’at. Thus the concept of tameh, pollution, is now taking on a moral dimension that it did not have before.
Once the land is polluted, the land seeks to remedy this pollution not by any kind of sacrifice but by vomiting out its inhabitants—a gross but striking phrase. Reading this text literally gives agency to the land. The text does not say that YHVH will remove you from the land, it says the land will remove you from the land. Further, if we read this text in conjunction with the scapegoat ritual, we have the idea that it is OK to dump our perhaps unintended sins into the wilderness because somehow they will stay there and not come back to bite us in the behind, but if we deliberately sin through sexual misconduct, we will pollute the very land on which we depend for our physical lives and the land will exile us. Now I know we are inclined to read this text metaphorically, and there is certainly a long history of reading it that way.
The list of sexual sins includes things we would rightly reject and things we would embrace. I’m in favor of prohibiting incest or some of the family relationships that aren’t technically incest (18:6-18) and I think that sleeping with someone else’s wife is generally not a moral thing to do. On the other hand, homosexual behavior seems fine to me as does sex with a menstruating woman and in the case of female sex with an animal seems unobjectionable if it is not coercive though male sex with an animal is more likely coercive and thus should be morally prohibited (18:23).
I think there are much bigger sins that we are committing these days than the sexual ones listed in this chapter. And it is these sins that have given rise to global climate disruption and the degradation of our ecosystems that will result in the land vomiting us out.
What are the implications for our lives if we read the verses about the land vomiting out its inhabitants because of their sins literally rather than metaphorically? Are we in danger of being vomited from our good land?
QUESTIONS
What do you make of the efficacy of the scapegoat ritual—what parts do you think would work and should be reclaimed, and what parts of it should be simply dismissed? What’s the status of your relationship with the more than human world? How does that relationship impact your relationship with other humans and your relationship with yourself?
Do you believe that all of the more than human world has moral agency? Do rocks and lizards have the same rights as deer and bodies of water? How might you work with the more than human world in your ritual practice?
Do we need a clarion call to not be like the vast majority of the world? Take a few minutes and evaluate the extent to which you oppose the ways of the world, however small. What feels right about your opposition to the ways of the world? How can you expand your opposition in ways that work for you?
What are the implications for our lives if we read the verses about the land vomiting out its inhabitants because of their sins literally rather than metaphorically? Are we in danger of being vomited from our good land?
