Leviticus Cycle 6 Vayikra

Vayikra
 




Way back in the ancient days before text-messaging, before email, before Word, before Mac, before Facebook and LinkedIn, before Pandora and radio stations, before cable and Television sit-coms, before ball point pens and script and beautiful publications with fine language and templates and water- colors, before tattoos and finger painting, before cave drawings, before animal sacrifices and incense on the altar…there existed the spoken word alone.

The spoken word was an event of heightened consciousness, an experience, cause for a memory then a memory itself. Heard in a slice of time it was arranged in our minds with a million other impressions, there to rub elbows with the guttural sounds of a lifetime and maybe even to  settle in the ashes of  the primordial beginning of the world, the thunderous creation of dichotomies,  the swishing of fish, the squawking of birds, the pound of drizzle soon to be rain, the hushed repetition of acceptance: And God saw that it was good. And God saw that it was good.

The word was subjected to our memory and therefore there was cause for repetition, names upon names, chronicle upon chronicles, orders upon orders, oath after oath, covenant after covenant,  miracle after miracle. There wasn’t a way to write it, record it, engrave it all,  re-symbolize it, rip it apart and re-symbolize it to a flat single dimension  (ru understanding?) and therefore pretend to a foundation of meaning. No, the word was vocal and wide. That moment of vocalization it would take on the whole texture of one specific thrilling birthed thing. It could not re-appear like a rabbit out of a hat  with the same experience of senses in three minutes or three hours. It could not wear that mask of eternal solid knowing. It was a swift arrow  aimed to our hearts or from our mouths to the hearts of others. It would fly, it would hit the target (or not) then it would disappear as quickly as it had appeared. It would leave fine tiny filaments and an essence of change, of transformation, of import, of truth…and depending on the timing and the meaning…the essence would remain (or not).

Yes, that’s what it was like in the ancient days.

Some of us get a pointed reminder of those days now. This is how I experienced it recently:

A student who had been absent the previous lecture class approached me and said I am so sorry I couldn’t be there.  Did I miss anything?

Did I miss anything?

As a few students who overheard began to smile with understanding my head began to spin. Oh no, I thought, you didn’t miss anything at all, just words I had heard from my respected teachers and they from theirs. Words that are not the same in text books, words that might never be in that sequence again, visuals created from these words, visuals that in the writing stagnate in meaning, visuals  that converged in oneness as per the description of Alan Watts and had come alive right here for the collective subjective experience  of  student and teacher.

I thought, oh no, you didn’t miss anything, just your chance to be able to hear, to listen, to merge an immediate value with now experience, to grow from that merge, to grow from the silence between the words. 

I was nice though. I didn’t chop off a head that day. I never do.  I told the student to sit and listen that moment. Because that moment was what we had left.

Now let's look at Vayikra:

What's important to realize here is that  the opening call to Moses from God…the first word in Vayikra (vayikra...and God called) sets the tone for all sacrifice in the book.  That’s because the sacrifices are there to be a container for the word, to hold that absolute connection with the unknown. The sacrifices, one might say, are the echo of the spoken word before every little instruction from God could be written down like in a cookbook recipe.

The sacrifice attempted to contain the blood, the guts and the food of the spoken-experience, the spoken word that had already disappeared, is still disappearing and must somehow with thirst be remembered for eternity. There are increments of purpose for each sacrifice (for example guilt and sin)  just as there are increments of tone and style for each phrase of spoken word.  Ah, what desperation the Israelites must have felt to so fling themselves into the dedication of the call of God…to expose themselves for the moment of the event…not in some watered down published version online but in the bulging screaming vibrations of the moment, the hurtling sounds of an echo they so desperately tried to make real that it had to be (for them) divine-action. Ah, what desperation we all must feel when we speak, especially now when the illusion of the spoken word (in writing) and the illusion of the illusion (online) bleeds before us on the plastic altar of modern convenience (which does exist by the way up the Hill of Progress and a trillion megabites from the Mishkan Courtyard).

Next time a student asks me did I miss anything maybe (and I am just joking) I’ll bring in an unblemished lamb and slit its throat right there. Maybe then at least we all will remember enough to be able to blurt out in guttural astonishment what we had heard the day before.  But no, I don’t want to get fired. And yes, I love lambs. They're cute. And yes, I'm just a community college teacher and there isn't any reason to get extreme. And yes,  it’s all metaphorical anyway.  Those sacrifices.  Maybe not then but certainly now.

The spoken word though is not metaphorical. It remains the real event today.  Everything else is  YouTube-friendly, photo-shopped, written and rewritten, interpreted and re-interpreted to oblivion.

Vayikra, the whole book, seems to be about the priestly duties.  And on one level it is. On another level though these priestly duties are the one mask demanded by God to spark our memory of the spoken event.

A small tangent: Much of Judaism is based on our attempt to organize prayer around the priestly ritual of sacrifice. This is holy and foundational to the religion. However, as well as trying to re-find intimacy of sacrifice through prayer perhaps we should also (and more importantly) re-find what sacrifice itself was trying to re-find: The event of the call of God.

As it is now though,  we can study and metaphor the animal sacrifices. We can study and metaphor the written/online self-sacrifice. We can also wonder as we try (and try and try) to hitch a ride with  the meshiach (who travels on the Inter-State from the Speed of Sound to the Speed of Light)  if we forgot a few important details. 

Ask Ezekiel. Ask Jeremiah. Ask Heschel. Ask Kook. Ask Bob Dylan and Alan Ginsburg and ourselves in our one soul beyond the well-meaning dramatic facade of all ritual: Vayikra is (in its most heightened interpretation) about the spoken in-the-moment word-event that created and continually creates us all.


 Listen well. Attend. And we won’t miss anything.