Behar/Bechukotai 2015

Behar/ Bechukotai

 

Torah is a blueprint. We can place on it almost whatever we like. We can swing it into metaphor, shove it into the literal, love it, hate it, ignore it or follow the way we see it. However we deal with it though it is always there. And we can’t challenge it and expect to win, because it can’t be won.

Torah is not  a trophy...or a marketing tool. 

Message:  If marketing is what we use to determine holiness, we are all in trouble. 

This is what I mean. If we turn Torah into a thing that’s what we become, a finished thing. We show up at our funeral in a coffin and remain in the same dead form we were in life.  Except in this case, we are sold out.

The problem though is that many of us are sold out already, whether we occupy a high position or a low, whether we are gabbai or chazzan,  rabbi or preacher, whether we are teacher or nurse, truck driver or barista, senator or lobbyist, lifeguard or murderer,  bigot, anti-Semite, rock and roll star and/or high school debutante.   As soon as we own the position and align our egos with it we have marketed  ourselves to oblivion. Forgiveness becomes distant.  Mercy can barely be perceived at the far end of a long tunnel.  All actions  become equal in  the  mirror of our egos.  Even if we have studied all our lives,  prayed all our lives, healed  a million people or  loved God beyond our very senses,  once we materialize ourselves we have thrown ourselves into absolute mediocrity. Torah is gone even if it is Torah we are materializing.  The essence of the human, the earth, the sky, the sea, the sun, all of creation has been forgotten.  The earth becomes scandalized.

Sorry…don’t kill the messenger…but this is what the end of Vayikra is saying though  it’s hard  seeing it. It’s a very sure comment that should we turn our humanity and our earth into a thing we will remain one. And all of the worst thing-like things will befall us.

What does surprise me is how many people do not see that selling out can happen within one’s very own temple. We sell our bodies when we need to occupy the designated positions, when we take them over and turn them into leverage. We sell our soul. At the very least, we market it.

The emphasis on marketing though was not around in the time of the writing of Torah. Please remember this.  The earth was not an investment: It was an inheritance. Our bodies were not investments either. The salary of the Levite was determined by God, not by the Board of Trustees.  The people were not living for things but borrowing things to live.  A reach to protect community was sacred, not determined by possible losses  in medical and legal offices.  And all were welcome. Denomination did not exist. It certainly did not have the material power to create a  Jewish rubric for rabbinic students or for the secular.  

In the end we want to remember:  Money is fun.  Loyalty, charity and morality without faith and with ego helps us to buy Torah but not to be it. There are many faces of Torah, true. But such handling is clearly not what God intended if you look at these parashot.

Such handling is Torah twisted like a piece of lime in a martini.