Imagine, if you will, what life would be like without images. We have images for everything. We imagine what our children will be like when they grow up. We imagine what their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs will be like in a few years. We try to see ourselves in different situations before making any kind of decision. Those are the images of the future. What about the images of the past? Those have a deep impact upon us, as well.
For instance, if I asked you where you were on November 22, 1963 when you heard that Kennedy was shot there would probably be two images: the place you were actually at when you heard and the famous Zapruder film that defined that moment for all time. The same is true when we heard about the Challenger explosion or that moment when more than half the world watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. In our lives, the images that are fresh are plentiful: where we were and how we felt at the birth of children, our first love, our first death. Indeed, images from the past provide for us a framework of where we have come from and images in our imagination serve as a beacon that can drive us to achieve great things.
Unfortunately, we have become a greater culture of images. Everybody now keeps all the images they can ever have. I recently read a true story of parents who are addicted not only to their daughter Courtney but to the camcorder. They carry it around with them everywhere they go, literally. In their video library there are hundreds of hours of Courtney eating French fries, sitting in the wagon, banging on the piano, digging in the dirt, rolling in the leaves, playing with the telephone, wearing a hat, smelling a flower, holding a book, watching TV, singing a song, throwing a ball, kicking a ball, sitting on a ball, dropping a ball …. you get the picture. And, in addition to all of this video, there are, at last count, some 3,000 still photographs of Courtney. The bizarre part about this is that she is only 6 years old. Can YOU say, “Overexposure”?
Now there is nothing wrong with having lots of images. Everyone has boxes of memories ñ granted, some have more than others ñ but there is nothing wrong with archiving what has happened. The problem becomes that the images become so common that we lose the sacred moment that the image was supposed to capture and when we look back on those images all we see is Courtney eating French Fries as opposed to, perhaps, Courtney’s first restaurant experience. The sacredness of something leaves when you stop searching for its meaning.
I think that something like that happened in this book of the Torah. As we enter the book of Leviticus, some consider it to be the most boring book of the whole Bible. I cannot tell you how many parents have almost come on their hands and knees begging me, ìRabbi, please change my daughter’s bat mitzvah date. The Torah portion is so hard to relate to. And mom and dad would be right.
Leviticus is hard to relate to. We read about sacrifices and altars, blood and purity and all of this is interrupted only once by some ethical passages which everybody loves. When we read Leviticus, it is like going through all of Courtney’s tapes: it all begins to look the same and we miss the meaning behind the message. It is time to recapture the message and maybe in doing so, my dream will come true: parents will come begging to me to please give their child a portion out of the book of Leviticus because it is so meaningful!Alavai!!!
So what does Leviticus mean if not just obscure and ancient sacrifices which seem to have not bearing to the post-modern Reform Jew? To answer that, let’s start from the beginning of the book, always a good place to start when you begin a book and we don’t have to go farther than the first word, “Vayikre ñ God called.” This book is about a call by God to Moses and Aaron. It does not say “God commanded” or “God instructed.” Those are different words with different meanings.
“God called,” says something about the relationship that God is establishing at the very beginning of the book. Friends call each other. Families call each other. Lovers call each other. Calling means reaching out and from the very first word. God is telling us thatHe is reaching out for us and we should reach out for Him. But the call is to reach Him, not out of fear, not out of a sense of commandment, but out of love. God is basically inviting those wanderers in the desert to a holy barbeque because God knows that food somehow builds bridges. And bridges are what God wants to build.
There is something special about bringing food, especially in tense times. We take someone out to lunch to make peace. We bring food to the shiva. And when we were growing up, did not most of us somehow participate in the ritual of the Shabbat or Sunday visit to our relatives? And what was an essential part of that visit? I can still hear it in my ears: “Cy, don’t rattle the apple pie.” “Cy, keep the kugel straight.” And sometimes the dreaded, “What do you mean you forgot the mandelbroit on the counter!?” Back then, I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was about leaving dry cookies on the counter. It was only later that I recognized that, without the food, a bridge was could not be built. It’s kind of hard to stay angry when you are eating together. Indeed, as a colleague recently wrote, “(That food) cleared the way for the channels of camaraderie and companionship. Whether or not it expiated sin I can’t say, but it let us in the door where negotiations could begin.” I know exactly what he is talking about.
What is true in our families is also true in the way the Jewish family has dealt with its Av, its Parent. The gift of food that each person brought was something that would get the dialogue going. It would be food to be offered to express thankfulness and make peace. It would be a sin offering that would come after two have forgiven and offered forgiveness. Maybe it would be a free-will offering that would come, in the language of my 4-year-old, “just because.” Under whatever circumstances that gift was offered it was not a boring and meaningless exercise. It was a moving and important event and its image stayed with the person for a very long time.
The great irony is that the instructions for those sacrifices are not very exciting and that is why the book of Leviticus is not on the best-seller’s list of Favorite Biblical Reading. But instructions are never exciting. It is where the instructions lead you.
Were they instructions for building a your first bicycle as a kid? Those instructions started you on the process of widening your world on two wheels.
Were they instructions on applying for college? A major pain but still the first steps toward your imagined life.
So is Leviticus boring? Sure, if you are only looking at the sacrifices as instructions for a barbeque that no longer exists. But if you see Leviticus as a bridge to God and as a delight to the senses, all of these dry instructions point to a deeper and more satisfying truth and that truth is that God and we are bound to one another as a husband is bound to his wife or a parent to her child.
Nowadays we have not sacrificial system of worship and, consequently, the barbeque instructions in Leviticus mean little. But that is no reason to ignore what Leviticus is really trying to teach about God and prayer, the sacred moments and the sanctification of time. We deprive ourselves of its wisdom if we do not stop a while and take the time to go through the box of our people’s photos and spend a short time looking at them. They may look the same ñ a lot of passages in the book of Leviticus are very similar ñ but they are holy because they teach us of the importance of building that bridge to God and to one another.
To build that bridge to God is one of the goals of Judaism. But the sacrifices were not just to build that bridge to God. That would be selfish. The bridge inspired action. The ritual made sacred the secular so that when the person left the altar, they were changed. They were forgiven, they forgave, they thanked and they prayed ñ they were made holy. If we can get beyond seeing Leviticus as a collection of barbeque instructions, then perhaps we can be changed, as well. And changing for the better and building bridges is whatmitzvah is all about. For those are the bridges that really make a difference and those are the bridges that change lives. Sometimes the most mundane thing can be made holy.
A true story of the mundane made holy may illustrate. As you may or may not know, livestock sales are not the most exciting things. Animals are bought and sold for slaughter. But just because it involves an animal destined to die does not mean that holiness cannot be found. Let me explain:
Katie Fisher was a 17 year-old woman who entered the Madison County Ohio Junior Livestock Sale hoping the lamb she had for sale would get a good price. For months Katie had been battling cancer. She had endured hospital stays and been through chemotherapy a number of times. Before the lamb went on the block, the auctioneer told the audience about Katie’s condition, hoping his introduction would push the price-per-pound above the average of two dollars. As it turned out the lamb set for slaughter inspired holiness. Here’s how —
The lamb sold for $11.50 per pound. Then the buyer gave it back, and suggested the auctioneer sell it again. That started a chain reaction. Families bought it and gave it back; businesses bought it and gave it back. Katie’s mother said, “The first sale is the only one I remember. After that, I was crying too hard.” They ended up selling the lamb thirty-six times that day, raising more than $16,000 in the process.
My friends, Leviticus is not really about animals and sacrifices and priests. It is about God reaching out to us as a friend calls another friend or a lover calls His beloved. And it is about us reaching up to that Lover so that our lives can be made holy. It is about turning our backs from the altar and transformed in that holy moment so that we can turn our faces to life so that we may sanctify it. It is about making peace and making life meaningful. That is why we read Leviticus. That is why it is in the Torah. And that is why it is part of who the Jewish people are. I pray that its words and its meanings never depart from us for they are the essence of who we ought to be. May God open our eyes to its wisdom.
From <https://americanrabbi.com/get-to-the-meaning-not-the-image-by-cy-stanway/>
