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Religious
Action Center:
Consultation on Conscience
D’var Torah: Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26)
March 14, 2005
David Segal
Good morning! B’ruchim Haba’im – Welcome, all, to Consultation on Conscience 2005!
I’m grateful for the opportunity to give a sermon at a podium with the Seal of the House of Representatives on it. That’s new for me.
I think it’s a bit of an uphill battle to try and say something engaging, let alone inspiring, about Vayikra, because I think most people’s instinctive reaction to this portion is boredom or indifference or even revulsion. And not entirely without reason, since it reads like some kind of Burnt Offering User’s Manual, specific down to every last obsessive, gory detail of ritual slaughter and sacrifice; we only read the first 17 verses this morning, but it goes on like this for four more chapters.
Thank God, then, for our Torah readers, whose chanting made the words of Torah – literally – music to our ears. And thank God for the parashah cycle itself, whose genius is that it keeps us aware of context. We remember where we were last week, we know where we’re going next week, and we can therefore make sense of some difficult texts that strike us as boring or overly legalistic when taken out of context, like Vayikra.
So let’s look now at Vayikra with more open eyes, and consider the context: Why is there a catalog of ritual slaughter in the middle of our Holy Scriptures, right after the Exodus narrative? What purpose did sacrifices serve in biblical times? And what relevance, if any, might they have to us?
Not knowing quite where to begin myself, I went back to my middle school history teacher’s advice on note-taking: “When a teacher says something more than once, that probably means it’s a salient point and you should write it down.” Well, this Torah portion mentions “a pleasing odor to Adonai” (reach nichoach la’Adonai), as the end product of a burnt offering, 8 times by my count. So what does this obviously important phrase mean, a “pleasing odor to Adonai”? One interpretation is that the ancient Israelites were borrowing sacrificial rites from neighboring cultures. Textbook idolaters would sacrifice the choicest of their flock on an altar outside the temple of the appropriate deity, hoping that the burning fat and fragrant smoke would appease that god, win his or her favor, and thereby secure victory in battle, a plentiful harvest, or some other earthly reward. No doubt, cultural exchange did at least in part account for Israelite sacrificial practice and the idea of a burnt offering that sends a pleasing aroma to God.
But can the Torah really mean that God takes physical pleasure in smelling the burnt offering? The answer, which my instinct tells me and the text confirms, is no.
Back to the question of context – what exactly goes into each burnt offering that makes it pleasing to God? It is not simply burning animal fat that pleases God – but burning animal fat that has been selected from the choicest animals of the communities’ flocks, blessed just so by the priests, and ritually slaughtered, on an altar designed according to intricately detailed plans in front of the communally assembled mishkan. Only then does the emanating odor please Adonai. These requirements are, at their core, not physical in nature but metaphysical – and they require not just certain material objects but a community of faithful servants and a laborious assembly process. The so-called pleasing odor at the end is a symbol – a test, even – of the piety with which the community performed the ritual and went through the process. To us humans, lacking God’s sophisticated olfactory equipment, you’ve smelled one burning piece of fat, you’ve smelled them all. The divine palate, it seems, is more discriminating – only it’s a little more complicated than that. God has granted us a glimpse of the world through the “divine senses”, not just by modeling it in this Torah portion but also by giving us the gift of the Sabbath. How many times have we eaten a standard meal of roast chicken, salad, and rice – and how much more savory does it smell and taste on the Sabbath, with the candles lit and the family gathered together, often for the first time in a week packed with business trips, soccer games, ballet practice, homework, and, of course, social action projects!
The lesson I take from Vayikra’s outline of burnt offerings is about learning how to appreciate smell like God does – and taste, touch, sight, and sound too – all the ways we experience the world of detail. Maybe we should think about it as learning to become a sort of “piety connoisseur” or “sanctity aficionado”: you know, food as a pathway to communion with the divine. There’s a reason Christians call it a “communion wafer”; issues of transubstantiation aside, we could learn a good spiritual lesson from that. And remember this next month during the Passover seder, since that’s what the seder is all about.
But what’s the connection between burnt offerings, the divine sense of smell, and what we are doing here today? We’ve come here seeking justice and, dare I say, holiness. We have created our own mishkan and altar here in the wilderness of Capitol Hill – and let me tell you as someone who saw it firsthand, the intricate planning and communal effort that went into putting this thing together has got to be worthy of our Israelite ancestors who built the tabernacle – and the RAC staff didn’t even have the direct word of God to guide the work – just the voice of Rabbi Saperstein, which is not, incidentally, ever written in stone…
We’ve come together from across the US (and Canada) to assemble before the altar of social justice. What sacrifices do we bring to set before the community and Adonai? We aren’t shepherds or keepers of livestock or fowl, so what is our most valuable commodity, the choicest of which we should offer up to God? In this day and age, I think it is our time, and not just our time here this week but our commitment to carry back what we learn to our own communities and our pledge to stay active in a lifelong pursuit of social justice.
As we offer up our time and passion on the altar of social justice, let’s keep sight of the big picture and at the same time remember that God is still in the details: our lofty goals require nitty-gritty policy solutions. We need to break out of the popular paradigm that says that the prosaic is profane and the ordinary is unordained. For where else but in the world of the everyday does the change we seek actually occur? Not only is God in the details – more importantly, we are in the details!
That’s the world that our Creator has placed into our care, and the medium through which we experience our Creator’s presence. Like a fish who sees the sunlight only as light refracted through its watery surroundings, our perception of God is refracted through the world of detail in which we are immersed. That’s not a reason to begrudge our mundane medium as an impediment to communion with the divine; rather, we should celebrate it as our window to God. Only if we embrace this world of detail will we be able to expand our spiritual vision to see the holiness that lies within even the most trivial recesses of our everyday lives.
So I propose that we make this Consultation on Conscience also a Seminar on Sense. God of our ancestors, Creator of the five-fold gift of the senses, help us to let the lessons of the burnt offering and the pleasing odor infuse all of our senses with a little divine perspective, so that we may find the holiness hiding within tangible things; and enlighten our sense of joy so that we may take more pleasure in invisible things.
And let us not only say Ken y’hi ratzon, may this be God’s will; but let us also remember that the work will be our own.