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April 23, 1999/7 Iyar 5759, Vol. 51, No. 30
Ritual means to moral end
Torah Study
RABBI ISMAR SCHORSCH
Leviticus 16:1 - 20:27/Aharay Mot-Kedoshim
The first half of this week's double Torah portion reminds the reader of Yom Kippur, as both Torah readings for that solemn day are drawn from Aharay Mot.
The interlocking of synagogue and scripture, of liturgy and Bible, is pervasive in Judaism. It attests to the manner in which verbal worship evolved to fill the vacuum created by the abrupt end in 70 C.E. to Temple sacrifice.
The Bible, which had been canonized during the preceding centuries, provided the words for the petitions and praises, affirmations of faith and study texts that became the fabric of Jewish liturgy. Synagogue worship rested squarely on the biblical canon and served as its main medium of dissemination. In a moment of spiritual crisis, Judaism forged the synagogue, a setting of unique synergy in which scripture yielded the language of prayer, even as prayer deepened the knowledge of and attachment to scripture.
The chapters from Aharay Mot incorporated into the Yom Kippur liturgy signify also the two-fold nature of Judaism's behavioral system. What do we believe God wants of us? While we tend to think of mitzvot (commandments) in terms of positive and negative injunctions, the readings for Yom Kippur point to something deeper.
Absorbed with matters of purity and ritual, chapter 16 addresses the relationship between God and the community, including the individual. Impurities threaten to render the divine inaccessible, so once a year the pristine holiness of the sanctuary must be restored.
In contrast, chapter 18 addresses the way human beings ought to relate to each other. If every woman in the household was fair game for sexual conquest, if every form of sexual experimentation was within bounds, then neither the family nor society would long endure. Sexual restraint generates cohesion and intensifies those relationships that are permissible.
Religion must encompass morality as well as theology, if it is to enhance the social compact. The Yom Kippur liturgy appropriates chapters 16 and 18 to stress the totality of Judaism as a system of belief and practice, of ritual and morality. An exclusive concern with one's personal relationship to God is egocentric, while morality ungrounded in ultimate concerns is disposable.
If the decadent citizens of Nineveh had responded to Jonah's prophetic rebuke merely with fasting and sackcloth, the city would not have been spared. The Bible relates that God took special note of the radical change in the way they treated one another. Reading the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur strips us of the illusion that repairing our ties with God is enough. It is disconcerting to see how a preoccupation with ritual can subvert morality.
The rabbis recorded a chilling story as admonition. Many Temple duties were assigned to priests through lottery. One task was awarded to volunteers, who raced up an inclined plane leading to the altar, with honors going to whoever finished first. Once, when two priests approached the finish line in a dead heat, one pulled out a knife and stabbed the other. When a sage who witnessed the travesty rose to speak, he expressed greater concern for the desecration of the holy space than the loss of life. The father of the injured priest rebuked the sage: "My son's death will atone for the sacrilege. But he is not dead yet. He continues to writhe before you. ... Yet all you worry about is pollution, neither (trying to save him nor) condemning his assailant."
The tale suggests a religious culture capable of self-correction, one that harbors voices of protest for times of imbalance. For Judaism, ritual remains the means; morality is the end. Ritual and morality must work in tandem. The way to the Golden Rule leads over the bridge to God.
We must continually reaffirm the temperateness of traditional Judaism. To obliterate the distinction between ritual and morality, between duty to God and duty to one another, is to exacerbate the losses we already face through assimilation.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. For other messages visit www.jtsa.edu/pubs/schorsch.
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