PAYING RELIGOUS SPECIALISTS
We have just finished reading the book of Leviticus. One of its preoccupations is paying the priests who are doing the work of YHVH by offering the sacrifices to him, brought by the Hebrew people. The Levites have no land, and they live off of what are in effect surcharges or taxes on offerings. This got me to thinking about the whole question of paying religious specialists.
Some indigenous societies support religious specialists and in some cases the religious specialists participate in normal economic life (for a contemporary depiction of this, see Martin Prechtel’s work). We live in a world where we tend to want to delegate things to experts, so it doesn’t surprise me that we are oriented towards paying religious specialists for doing sacred work for us. And if we expect them to do the work, we should absolutely pay them appropriately. And yet, our payment of them is routinely a source of conflict, just as it was for our ancestors.
This leads me to ask a question that I think is behind some of the insecurity of the Levites in the Bible. Is the work they are doing sacred work?
You can say, of course it is, but what if you think having the Levites make sacrifices for you in Jerusalem isn’t any more sacred than doing it yourself at a local sacred shrine? Or paying less for the local holy person who also farms to perform the sacrifice?
Bring the question to today. Is having students memorize some words in a language with which they have no relationship and have them perform those words so they can have a big party (aka a Bar or Bat Mitzvah) sacred work? You can say of course it is, but what if you think that teaching a kid outdoor survival skills and having them do a solo overnight is more sacred? I grew up in a synagogue where the Rabbi gave simply terrible sermons—and we paid him to ramble and bore us for 20 minutes every Friday night. Why?
The Jewish community, and it is hardly just the Jewish community, faces a crises of a lack of willingness to support our institutions. But maybe we aren’t offering something meaningful enough, something sacred enough in our institutions. Maybe the institutions need to change, not because they aren’t being adequately supported, but because they don’t deserve to be supported. Maybe what they are doing is no longer viewed widely as sacred work.
Sacred work is a slippery concept, that’s for sure. The liberal Jewish community has lost a lot of whatever consensus we once had about what constitutes sacred work.
Two conclusions. I think our institutions will only survive and even thrive only if they can attract enough people with enough resources who find what they do to be sacred. Second, those of us who aren’t religious specialists need to clarify for ourselves what we believe deserves our support.
Do you have any clarity about what you think constitutes sacred work? Are there institutions or religious specialists you know that you believe should be supported? Are your actions consistent with your beliefs?
