This past Saturday was Shabbat Gadol, the Great Sabbath, which just means that services tended to go a bit long just before Passover. Our discussion didn’t go on very long, but it wound up being interesting, I think.
The parshah was Acharei Mot, Leviticus 16:1-18:30. This passage really is all over the place, but the three things that stick out for me are the description of the Temple practice on Yom Kippur, the laws concerning butchering meat, and the laws restricting sexual relations. We talked about Yom Kippur. There’s a sense in which I would have liked to discuss Leviticus 18:22, but another more accurate sense in which I wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. So. What we did talk about was the scapegoat (a bad translation, of course) in 16:8-10 and 20-22; for those that aren’t following along on pp. 482-3 of your Hertz, the cohen is brought two goats, one of which is chosen (randomly) to be sacrificed, and the other is given the sins of the community and led out to the wilderness, or the steep mountain, or to Azazel. It’s a bit hard to translate. At any rate, it’s clear that the one with the sins lives, and the one without the sins dies. And it’s a tremendous metaphor, and a tremendous ritual. I can imagine—can’t you?—the crowd lining the streets as the goat carries the shortcomings of the community away, and watching after it as it dwindles in the distance, and then welcoming the goat-leader back after the sins have been fully taken away (and he’s had a bath).
Anyway, I pointed out that we don’t have that communal metaphor, that metaphor for communal lifting of communal sins. We have tashlich, of course, but we don’t put the whole shul’s sins onto one big loaf and fling the loaf away; everybody has their own sins to feed to the ducks. And, of course, there’s the al hayt, the public confession of sins, in which we all use the same words, making it communal in a sense, but (a) it has no physical representation, and (2) it doesn’t feel as if we are all contributing (negatively) to a single communal load of sin. It’s a different relationship to the community, is what I’m saying.
Rabbi agreed, and we actually wound up brainstorming a bit about ideas for next year’s Yom Kippur service, which, I pointed out, may be one reason why it was a good idea to put these instructions in a reading six months away from the holiday itself. One great idea, which has nothing really to do with the goat business, is to write your failings on water soluble paper (which they make, I think, for embroidery backing and such), then set them in a bowl, and watch the water float the words off the paper and dissolve them. I think that’s a terrific version of tashlich, if you can’t get to running water (and perhaps if you can), but it doesn’t do anything about the community aspect.
Of course, the problem isn’t really finding the right ritual metaphor, it’s that our understanding of community is fundamentally different from the Levitical attitude. I think the old attitude is a good one, but of course I admit to romanticizing the past a bit. There is much about individualism I like, and much about the heavily communal societies that would have been awful for me. It’s possible that the cost of that community attitude really is too high, but it’s hard for me to read Leviticus without being aware that we are missing something, even if it’s something we never could have had.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.