“Shai Held is one of the most important teachers of Torah in his generation.”
—Rabbi David Wolpe, author of David: The Divided Heart
In The Heart of Torah, Rabbi Shai Held’s Torah essays—two for each weekly portion—open new horizons in Jewish biblical commentary.
Held probes the portions in bold, original, and provocative ways. He mines Talmud and midrashim, great writers of world literature, and astute commentators of other religious backgrounds to ponder fundamental questions about God, human nature, and what it means to be a religious person in the modern world. Along the way he illuminates the centrality of empathy in Jewish ethics, the predominance of divine love in Jewish theology, the primacy of gratitude and generosity, and God’s summoning of each of us—with all our limitations—into the dignity of a covenantal relationship.
“Shai Held is one of the most important teachers of Torah in his generation.”
—Rabbi David Wolpe, author of David: The Divided Heart
In The Heart of Torah, Rabbi Shai Held’s Torah essays—two for each weekly portion—open new horizons in Jewish biblical commentary.
Held probes the portions in bold, original, and provocative ways. He mines Talmud and midrashim, great writers of world literature, and astute commentators of other religious backgrounds to ponder fundamental questions about God, human nature, and what it means to be a religious person in the modern world. Along the way he illuminates the centrality of empathy in Jewish ethics, the predominance of divine love in Jewish theology, the primacy of gratitude and generosity, and God’s summoning of each of us—with all our limitations—into the dignity of a covenantal relationship.
The Heart of Torah, Volume 2: Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy
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The Heart of Torah, Volume 2: Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy
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Overview
“Shai Held is one of the most important teachers of Torah in his generation.”
—Rabbi David Wolpe, author of David: The Divided Heart
In The Heart of Torah, Rabbi Shai Held’s Torah essays—two for each weekly portion—open new horizons in Jewish biblical commentary.
Held probes the portions in bold, original, and provocative ways. He mines Talmud and midrashim, great writers of world literature, and astute commentators of other religious backgrounds to ponder fundamental questions about God, human nature, and what it means to be a religious person in the modern world. Along the way he illuminates the centrality of empathy in Jewish ethics, the predominance of divine love in Jewish theology, the primacy of gratitude and generosity, and God’s summoning of each of us—with all our limitations—into the dignity of a covenantal relationship.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780827613362 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Jewish Publication Society |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 520 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Va-yikra' #1
Order amid Chaos
Connecting to Leviticus
Around this time each year, the eyes of many shul-going Jews begin to glaze over. Leviticus seems so utterly foreign, the rituals and practices it describes so alien, the religious vision underlying them so obscure, that connecting to it seems impossible. And yet if we dig a little deeper, we find a great deal about Leviticus that can speak powerfully to modern sensibilities and yearnings.
Ask a traditionally educated Jew, and he or she is likely to tell you that before God began to create the world, there was simply nothing. "The" Jewish view, he or she will insist, is that God created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo).
Many philosophers object that the idea of creatio ex nihilo is actually incoherent, since, after all, something cannot be made out of nothing. In their words, "out of nothing, nothing comes" (ex nihilo nihil fit). The idea that God created something out of nothing is, at any rate, a far cry from the ways in which creation is portrayed in Tanakh. Biblical texts describe a God who creates the world by bringing order where before there was only chaos. As Genesis 1 portrays it, God takes an earth that is "unformed and void" (tohu va-vohu) and makes a cosmos, a place where life can survive and flourish, out of it. Bible scholar Jon Levenson writes that "two and a half millennia of Western theology have made it easy to forget that throughout the ancient Near Eastern world, including Israel ... creation is not the production of matter out of nothing, but rather the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order."
Genesis 1 presents God's rule as majestic and uncontested. But read Genesis 1 alone — assume that it represents the biblical approach to creation, rather than merely one of them — and you will miss something crucial about biblical theology as a whole: Many biblical texts explicitly invoke a God who created the world by engaging in combat with dangerous and threatening forces of chaos. Some assume, more dramatically, that this process of subduing chaos is far from over.
In much of the ancient world, water and the sea embody and symbolize chaos, threat, and a world not yet under control. (Picture the devastation wrought by recent tsunamis and hurricanes and you can begin to understand just how and why this is the case.) Psalm 74 evokes a great cosmic battle between God and the monstrous forces of chaos. The psalmist praises God for vanquishing the forces of cosmic evil: "It is You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters; it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan." Chaos defeated, God proceeds to order and structure the universe: "It was You who set in place the orb of the sun; You fixed all the boundaries of the earth; summer and winter — You made them" (Ps. 74:13–14,16–17).
And yet, crucially, even in a psalm that describes God's great victory over the forces of evil, the defeated forces of chaos still rear their ugly head and threaten to reverse God's good ordering of the world. The sea monsters may be defeated, but human forces acting destructively in history still wreak havoc with God's plans, leaving the psalmist at once pained and perplexed. Right before the verses we have just seen, the psalmist asks: "Till when, O God, will the foe blaspheme, will the enemy forever revile Your name? Why do you hold back Your hand, Your right hand? Draw it out of Your bosom!" (Ps. 74:10–11). And right after, he implores: "Do not ignore the shouts of Your foes, the din of Your adversaries that ascends all the time" (74:23). Leviathan may be dead, but all is still not right with the world. As Levenson poignantly notes, Psalm 74 "honestly and courageously draws attention to the painful and yawning gap between the liturgical affirmation of God's absolute sovereignty and the empirical reality of evil triumphant and unchecked."
Some biblical texts are much more radical than Psalm 74. They imagine a world in which the forces of chaos were not vanquished in the past; God's victory will take place only in an apocalyptic future. The prophet Isaiah looks forward to the day when "the Lord will punish with His great, cruel, mighty sword Leviathan the Elusive Serpent — Leviathan the Twisting Serpent; He will slay the Dragon (tannin) in the sea" (Isa. 27:1). In Isaiah's world God is not yet fully lord over all creation. There are forces afoot — dangerous, unpredictable, deadly forces. God will one day slay them, but they have not yet been defeated. In a similar vein, a talmudic sage imagines a future in which God will make a banquet for the righteous during which they will eat the body of the slain sea monster (BT, Bava Batra 75a). "We must not forget," Levenson writes, "that the optimistic element in this theology, which is the faith in God's ultimate triumph, is dialectically qualified by the pessimistic element, which is tacit acknowledgment that God is not yet God."
What contemporary sense can we make of such starkly mythological imagery? Are these texts not destined to seem hopelessly antiquated to contemporary readers?
It depends, I think, on how literally we want to take talk of sea monsters. The fact is that we live in a world that often seems chaotic in ways large and small, and that there is something wholly terrifying about this. On some level, all of us know that we — or, the worst thought imaginable, our children — could be hurt or harmed or killed in an instant in a freak accident, or at the hands of a crazed sociopath or a cruel monster. (The fact that we still use the language of monsters to describe people totally indifferent to moral norms and constraints is surely telling. Most of us still do believe in, and fear, monsters of one kind or another.)
What makes parts of Tanakh so powerful, so compelling, and so utterly contemporary is precisely the fact that they do not paper over the reality that life can be so totally frightening, and seemingly so random and chaotic. Biblical texts give voice to the pain of affirming the reality of a powerful God, on the one hand, while acknowledging the often excruciating ways that the world we believe God envisions and wants is unbearably far from being realized, on the other. Tanakh gives voice to the agony often felt by those who believe in the reality of a good, life-affirming Creator but who must nevertheless live in a seemingly endless period of "not yet." Divine dreams and human yearnings — all subjected to a protracted and painful period of not yet.
What does all this have to do with the Leviticus? An awful lot, I think.
Let's return to Genesis 1 for a moment. How does God bring about a habitable world? By dividing, separating, and ordering — and then bringing forth life. God "separates" (vayavdeil) light from darkness (Gen. 1:4); God separates the waters above the firmament from the waters below it (1:7); God distinguishes sea from dry land (1:9–10); God places lights in the firmament to separate day from night and light from darkness (1:14,18); God distinguishes Shabbat from other days and declares it holy (vayekadeish) (2:3).
Genesis 1 and Leviticus are closely intertwined, since the project of dividing and separating is at least as crucial to the latter as it is to the former. As Robert Alter writes, "There is a single verb that focuses the major themes of Leviticus — 'divide' (hivdil)" (what I have been rendering, following NJPS, as "separate"). Thus, for example, the catalogue of animals permitted or forbidden for eating ends with the following: "These are the instructions concerning animals, birds, all living creatures that swarm on earth, to separate (lehavdil) between the impure and the pure, between the living things that may be eaten and the living things that may not be eaten" (Lev. 11:46–47). Again, after presenting a list of forbidden sexual unions, Leviticus notes: "I the Lord am your God who has separated (hivdalti) you from other peoples. So you shall separate (ve-hivdaltem) the pure beast from the impure, the impure bird from the pure. You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves through beast or bird or anything with which the ground is alive, which I have separated for you (hivdalti) to treat as impure" (20:24–25).
There seems to be an element of "walking in God's ways" here: Just as God has separated and ordered, so Israel must engage in separation and ordering. By dividing sharply between permitted foods and forbidden ones, and between permitted sexual unions and forbidden ones, Israel engages in something godly.
But Israel does not merely imitate God by separating and ordering. Through its ritual life, it participates in ordering the world and thus in sustaining it. The consequence of all this separation is spelled out in the very next verse: "You shall be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you (va-avdil etkhem) from other peoples to be Mine" (Lev. 20:26). Israel, a people separated, affirms its special status by committing to acts of separating and ordering.
The tabernacle (mishkan) is nothing if not a tightly structured, highly ordered space. Who may enter where, at what time, and in what garb — all is tightly regulated. The profane must never spill over into and thus violate the sacred. The sacrifices are carefully choreographed and presented "just right." In a chaotic, terrifying world, one place, at least, is governed by order and structure. Bible scholar Richard Nelson explains that in Leviticus, "sacred space was seen as an island of structure and order surrounded by malevolent chaos. Sacred space provided the human mind with a fixed center, the solace of formed order in the midst of formless chaos."
It is perhaps tempting for many of us to adopt a condescending approach to all this preoccupation with order. We may imagine that we have moved beyond the kind of anxiety that seems at least partly to underlie Leviticus's manifold legislation, and congratulate ourselves for our willingness to embrace life's messiness. To be sure, there is something important — humanly and religiously — in our ability to tolerate and even embrace messiness. And yet the reality of chaos and the experience of seemingly total randomness are always with us, and the fear they induce is real — as is, for many of us, the theological questioning and struggle they call forth.
Leviticus presents another, alternate reality to inhabit. Worship in the mishkan is "intended [as] a counterworld to Israel's lived experience, which is dangerous and disordered. The counterworld offered in the tabernacle holds out the gift of a well-ordered, joy-filled, and peace- generating creation."
Bible scholar Samuel Balentine captures beautifully the point I am trying to make: "Who among us does not yearn for that one place, however small and difficult to find, that invites us to believe the 'very good' world God created and the world in which we scratch out our frail existence are in fact one and the same?" Leviticus attempts to describe and thus to evoke that place. In reading and studying Leviticus, we are invited to imagine and inhabit just such a space — if only for a brief moment.
What happens to a person who has visited the mishkan — and by extension into our own time, who has imaginatively entered the mishkan through close study of Leviticus? Having partaken of, or merely glimpsed, the counterworld that the mishkan represents, a person is changed (at least when the practice "works"). After the glimpse he or she has been afforded, nothing looks quite the same anymore. He or she sees that another reality is possible, that the chaos and suffering he or she observes all around are not ultimately all there is.
As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wonderfully puts it, "Having ritually 'lept' ... into the framework of meaning which religious conceptions define, and the ritual ended, returned again to the common-sense world, a man is — unless, as sometimes happens, the experience fails to register — changed. And as he is changed, so also is the common-sense world, for it is now seen as but the partial form of a wider reality which corrects and completes it."
To read Leviticus, then, is to enter a different kind of world, a small pocket of reality in which God's will is heeded and perfectly executed, in which chaos and disorder are kept at bay — in which, thus, God is already fully God, even as the realities outside fall painfully short of that long longed-for dream.
CHAPTER 2
The Fall and Rise of Great Leaders
Or, What Kind of Leaders Do We Need?
Human societies require leaders. But with hierarchy of any kind comes the perennial temptation of abuse of power. It may be almost inevitable that leaders will stray, and sometimes even commit grave crimes. But Judaism insists that how leaders respond to their own failures really matters: Do they deny them, cover them up, cast the blame elsewhere? Or do they own up to their misdeeds, hold themselves accountable, and repent? The path fallen leaders choose, the sages insist, has vast implications not only for the leaders themselves but also for the entire society they lead.
A seemingly innocuous grammatical point in Leviticus 4 has generated enormous controversy — and yielded profound insight into the nexus of leadership, power, sin, and transformation.
The chapter catalogues the various situations in which a purification offering (hatat) is required. After opening with a general description — "When a person unwittingly incurs guilt in regard to any of the Lord's commandments about things not to be done, and does one of them" (Lev. 4:2) — it goes on to describe the requirements in each case. The same introductory word — "if" (im) — is employed each time: "If (im) it is the anointed priest who has incurred guilt" (4:3); "If (im) it is the whole community of Israel that has erred" (4:13); "If (im) a person from among the populace unwittingly incurs guilt" (4:27); "If (im) the offering he brings" (4:32).
But one lone case reads differently: "In case (asher) it is a chieftain (nasi) who incurs guilt" (4:22). There is something odd about this shift from "if" to "in case," and it leaves the reader wondering why the usual formula is altered in this instance. The word asher (rendered here as "in case") can be "the equivalent of im, if ... or ka-asher, when." Some commentators find nothing remarkable about our verse and take asher to be effectively synonymous with im, or "if." But R. Bahya b. Asher (1255–1340) notes that although asher might mean "if," another explanation is possible: "[Asher] might express certainty [that the leader will sin] because he becomes extremely haughty, and arrogance, which is the cause of sin, is present in him by virtue of the magnitude of his rule. That is why the Torah warns the king, 'lest his heart grow haughty over his brothers' (Deuteronomy 17:20)" (comments to Leviticus 4:22).
Pursuing this line further, R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (Netziv, 1816–93) makes a startling observation. In subtle contrast to the NJPS translation cited above, our verse more literally reads: "In case it is a chieftain who incurs guilt by doing any one of the things which by the commandment of the Lord his God ought not to be done unwittingly." Noting that "unwittingly" (bi-shgagah) appears to be a misplaced modifier, the Netziv understands our verse to be "hinting" at a radical claim: "The [leader's] elevated status (nesi'ut) causes him to commit sins that are so egregious that [ordinary] people do not even commit them unwittingly" (Ha'amek Davar to Lev. 4:22). Power not only pulls leaders astray, in other words; it also blinds them in ways they themselves would have once found unimaginable.
The point these interpreters make is sobering: The leader, they argue, does not sin despite his exalted position but precisely because of it. Power all too often leads to a sense of entitlement, of being above the law, and of not being accountable to the same standards as "regular people" are. So the Torah warns the leader: Your status, no matter how much grandiosity it has fed, does not raise you above the moral (or religious) law and is no guarantee of impunity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Heart of Torah, Volume 2"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Shai Held.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ForewordAcknowledgments
A Note on Translations
Introduction
Leviticus
Va-yikra’ No. 1. Order amid Chaos: Connecting to Leviticus
Va-yikra’ No. 2. The Fall and Rise of Great Leaders: Or, What Kind of Leaders Do We Need?
Tsav No. 1. No Leftovers: The Meaning of the Thanksgiving Offering
Tsav No. 2. Buying God Off: Jeremiah and the Problem of Religious Hypocrisy
Shemini No. 1. Is Vegetarianism a Biblical Ideal?
Shemini No. 2. Of Grief Public and Private: Moses and Aaron Face the Unimaginable
Tazria’ No. 1. Living on the Boundary: The Complexity and Anxiety of Childbirth
Tazria’ No. 2, Metsora’ No. 1. Struggling with Stigma: Making Sense of the Metzora
Metsora’ No. 2. Life-Giving, Death-Dealing Words
‘Aḥarei Mot No. 1. Yom Kippur: Purifying the Tabernacle and Ourselves
‘Aḥarei Mot No. 2, Kedoshim No. 1. The Holiness of Israel and the Dignity of the Disabled
Kedoshim No. 2. Loving Our Neighbor: A Call to Emotion and Action
‘Emor No. 1. Covenantal Joy: What Sukkot Can Teach Us
‘Emor No. 2. Between Grief and Anticipation: Counting the Omer
Be-har No. 1. Another World to Live In: The Meaning of Shabbat
Be-har No. 2, Be-ḥukkotai No. 1. God’s Unfathomable Love
Be-ḥukkotai No. 2. Standing Tall: Serving God with Dignity
Numbers
Be-midbar No. 1. Divine Love and Human Uniqueness
Be-midbar No. 2. A Torah for All? Universalism and Its Dangers
Naso’ No. 1. On Channeling and Receiving Blessing
Naso’ No. 2. The Risk of Relationality: Or, Why Confession Matters
Be-ha’alotekha No. 1. It’s Not about You: Or, What Moses Knew
Be-ha’alotekha No. 2. After Pain, Prayer: What Moses (and Job) Can Teach Us
Shelaḥ No. 1. The Tragedy (and Hope) of the Book of Numbers
Shelaḥ No. 2. (Don’t) Follow Your Heart and Your Eyes: Between Numbers and Ecclesiastes
Koraḥ No. 1. Every Jew a High Priest? The Meaning of Tzitzit and the Sin of Korah
Koraḥ No. 2. Giving, Taking, and the Temptations of Leadership
Ḥukkat No. 1. When Everything Starts to Look the Same: Moses’s Failure
Ḥukkat No. 2. Putting Down Ancient Grudges (and Learning Kindness): Between Israel and Edom
Balak No. 1. The Lampooned Prophet: On Learning From (and With) Balaam
Balak No. 2. Not There Yet
Pinḥas No. 1. When Zealotry Metastasizes: The Passionate Self-Regard of Pinhas
Pinḥas No. 2. Between Zealotry and Self-Righteousness: Or, Was Elijah the Prophet Fired?
Mattot No. 1. Cattle, Cattle Everywhere: The Failure of Reuben and Gad
Mattot No. 2, Mase’ei No. 1. Serving God in All We Do: Israel’s Journeys and Resting Places
Mase’ei No. 2. Do Not Murder! Shedding Innocent Blood and Polluting the Land
Deuteronomy
Devarim No. 1. “Do Not Be Afraid of Anyone”: On Courage and Leadership
Devarim No. 2. A Bolt from the Blue: Or, When God Falls in Love
Va-etḥannan No. 1. Coveting, Craving . . . and Being Free
Va-etḥannan No. 2. A God So Close, and Laws So Righteous: Moses’s Challenge (and Promise)
‘Ekev No. 1. Will and Grace: Or, Who Will Circumcise Our Hearts?
‘Ekev No. 2. Always Looking Heavenward: Learning Dependence
Re’eh No. 1. Opening Our Hearts and Our Hands: Deuteronomy and the Poor
Re’eh No. 2. Women in Deuteronomy—and Beyond
Shofetim No. 1. The Future Is Wide Open: Or, What Prophets Can and Cannot Do
Shofetim No. 2. Give the People (Only Some of) What They Want: Deuteronomy and the King
Ki Tetse’ No. 1. Let Him Live Wherever He Chooses: Or, Why Runaway Slaves Are Like God
Ki Tetse’ No. 2. Combating Cruelty: Amalek Within and Without
Ki Tavo’ No. 1. Against Entitlement: Why Blessings Can Be Dangerous
Ki Tavo’ No. 2. Between Fear and Awe: Forgetting the Self
Nitsavim No. 1. Going in Deep: What It Takes to Really Change
Nitsavim No. 2, Va-yelekh No. 1. Returning to Sinai Every Seventh Year: Equality, Vulnerability, and the Making of Community
Va-yelekh No. 2. Why Joshua? Or, In (Ambivalent) Praise of Hesitancy
Ha’azinu No. 1. “I May Not Get There with You”: The Death of Moses and the Meaning of Covenantal Living
Ha’azinu No. 2. Hearing the Whisper: God and the Limits of Language
Ve-zo’t ha-berakhah No. 1. The Beginning and End of Torah
Notes on Leviticus
Notes on Numbers
Notes on Deuteronomy
A Note on Bible Commentaries
Bibliography
Subject Index
Classical Sources Index