Leviticus Cycle Five

Vayikra

I went out hiking today with one thing in mind. I wanted to find goats. Big goats. Fat goats. Thin goats. Goats chomping on the weeds. Goats climbing on the edge of the hill. That’s what I needed. Goats.

Sometimes in life it is time for the goat-sacrifice, that ultimate guilt/sin offering, goat-work, goat- transcendence, goat-peace.

Of course, I love goats so it was hard to assimilate any harsh killing into my goat-search. The idea of dashing their blood on the sides of an imaginary altar, removing their layers of fat, the kidneys, the fat on the flanks, and the lobe over the liver, and then burning them on this same altar… the big one outside with the steps going up (as compared to the small incense altar near the ark of the testimony) well it was hard to come to terms with.

Another problem was that I live in Ashland Oregon where there are plenty of dogs on walking paths and people and sometimes a bear but never a goat. I think I’ve seen one once… a baby. It was being walked like a puppy.

So, with Pesach around the corner, I decided to dream of a situation in which there was a goat-plague. Yes, this is what I saw.... they are blanketing the lovely hills of southern Oregon and destroying everything, chewing on the sides of houses, wrecking flower beds, guillotining any hope of healthy vegetation or safe driving, stopping traffic, annoying the tourists, annoying the deer, fooling with the sacred life in Lithia Park in ways I feel unmentionable in a Torah teaching. The goat plague has become so bad in fact that the town hall has issued an edict to kill all goats on sight.

This way, the piece of us that feels mistreated can pick up the first imagined filthy nasty but blemish-less goat we see, carry it to the house of someone who has hurt us (and people do hurtful actions all the time) and tie it to the doorpost next to the mezuzah. We could write a note and attach it to the goat’s ear: Here’s what you need for the sacrifice. See you tomorrow morning outside the ohal moed. But the problem is that sometimes one goat isn't enough. Sometimes there are people in our day to day lives and we feel they would need hundreds, so many in fact, that goats just might not do it. They may need a quick spa treatment within the bowels of the earth. But that’s another parsha so let's let that be. This moment all we have are goats (and bulls cows sheep birds cakes and rams) so we need to make use of them.

There would also be a much larger problem though and one much more important concerning this kind of goat-gift. Torah is quite specific that the person offering the goat must bring it of his/her own free will. The word used is ratzon (Vayikra 1:3). As the Dalai Lamah has said: I find hope in the darkest of days and focus on the brightest. I do not judge the universe. In other words, it isn't our work to present others with goats or to even determine if they have goat-issues. But it is our work to see beauty in these people no matter their actions.

This can be a hard lesson. But before I write further on this I want to enter into a small and hopefully instructive teaching on Vayikra.

This is one difficult book to understand. Certainly this week’s parasha as well is not exactly accessible to the Pacific Northwest 2012. The whole idea of it is that there’s this altar outside the tent of meeting and we are to present the kohanim with animals that will then be killed and burnt as offerings to God. There’s a purpose for each offering. They are to free us of guilt or sin as a community or individually. They are to supply an out if we might have taken part in deception. And they also offer repentance for the priests themselves. There are peace offerings as well.

It’s a science. The kohanim are instructed to handle each offering a specific way. In short, we, the common man, bring the animal to the priest and it’s the priests work to kill the beast as instructed, sprinkle the blood, cut out parts, pile parts, and set the animal on the flames. This, we are told, will create a pleasant fragrance for God. The idea of a pleasant fragrance brings us closer to the incense altar which creates a more esoteric and ephemeral connection, one that doesn’t include blood flying, animals screaming, people crying, people congregating. This offering, the incense offering, is pure, heightened, based on senses that collide and merge, smell and taste, a hint of Ein Sof.

So while the animal altar is rough, raw, larger, more stained with blood, more basic, it is the place of community connection and prayer. Why prayer? How does prayer come in? Because these offerings are a metaphor for prayer, according to Jonathon Saks in the Koren Siddur.

But how do we metpahor something so grizzly as the killing of innocent animals? How do we simply shrug off killing as symbol? I have two thoughts on this.

First, Rabbi Abraham Kook points to a tiny aleph at the beginning of the parasha. The aleph is at the end of the word Vayikra…and He called. Rabbi Kook simply says that the tiny aleph makes room for more white space. It shows us that God called to Moses from the white fire, the center of creation and breath, from the most intimate degree-of-intimacy humanly possible. This place is beyond black print or things or even instructions. Yet it manifests itself as instructions, as a how-to manual, to get there. So according to Rabbi Kook, metaphor is an inherent part of the parasha in that it’s in God’s very voice.

Next, many of us are familiar with the wonderful stories passed down from Rabbi Nachman and the Baal Shem Tov. They are beautiful myths filled with princesses and castles, beggars and scholars. It is known though that the very reason why they created so many myths…and there certainly are many…was to help us to train our mind in metaphor and to be able to apply it to Torah. Vayikra included.

I have a question though. How do we give modern day prayer the solidity and the real-ness of the happenings outside the mishkan? Can you imagine? The whole community watches as a man who was simply disrespectful or nasty to another human being steps forward with his animal…and the whole community witnesses this raw gift. The whole community is aware that this man is now in a place of atonement and freeing.

With prayer (our prayer) we can’t know what’s going on in the minds of others. A person can be praying for forgiveness and while it’s deep and real for that person we can’t see it or touch, hold, smell, grasp it to witness it. We can apologize to each other but it’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t. It’s hard to see the heart-blood, feel the freeing of the person approaching God. It’s hard to know the exact authenticity. There are levels. We can mean something. We can mean it kind-of. We can not mean it at all. Isaiah speaks out against senseless sacrifices. Those done by rote. I think we all speak out against rote apologies, those simply said to cover-up knowingly or unknowingly.

Therefore the question is what do we do? In situations where the community is involved and someone has said or done something hurtful what can we create that will be a solid enough offering? When the temple was destroyed we stopped doing sacrifices. And this is a good thing. The problem in my opinion is we haven’t found how to replace those offerings yet. Not really. That solid knowledge, that basic and material self-exposition, that submission before something as great as the creator of life and death…this we yearn for. We beg God for a third temple not so much so we can re-create an altar but so that the altar in our minds can have the pain and slam, the screams and finished feeling. Like something has really been clinched.

If prayer was the answer, in my opinion, we wouldn’t need to pray anymore. We would have already offered-up all of the possible mind-goats and mind-rams to expiate ourselves from even the most unconscious petty action. We would be finished with the lowest part of ourselves. We wouldn’t need goats. We would be conscious people acting in a world of consciousness. Here's another quote from the Dalai Lama: The happiness of one person or nation is the happiness of humanity.

Not an easy world to find.

Meanwhile though we can try. We can imagine and use metaphor and dig as deep as we can in our gut to create our own offerings. This is all we can do and therefore we must. And if we go at it, really go at it, then maybe others will as well. Then maybe we wouldn’t feel a need to create goat-plagues, to tie a goat to anyone's doorpost. The person in question would already be out goat-hunting herself. Or maybe not. And that's all right as well. Most of us though would be happy to be in touch with our inner- goat and use it to free ourselves of our own mess-ups…our own unconscious actions. It would be logical joyous wild and heart-opening...a celebration…such an intense form of prayer we could not even use the word prayer to define it.

And the doorpost of our homes would hold only one thing…the Sh’ma. And the stones for the third temple would be created. And...oh yes...goats would be very happy indeed.