Intimacy and Physicality
Before the pandemic, I was invited to a few zoom meetings, in which we used that remote conferencing technology for the sake of convenience, to allow a group of us to meet without having to get into our cars and drive to see each other. But I didn’t like it. It felt so sad to me to watch each other’s image on a screen, and to miss out on all the millions of tiny bits of non-verbal communication that happen when we are in each other’s presence. The hugs, the handshakes, the smells of perfume and sweat, the simple and wonderfully complex physicality of being together. From the first time I went on zoom, I felt that loss.
Then Covid came and suddenly we had no choice. Remember? We are all trying to put behind us that long, long year of isolation, but in our deep memory, we will never forget how far we felt from everyone outside of the tiny bubble of our own home. During that time, I came to see Zoom as a miracle, literally a gift from God. I was astonished on a daily basis by how much communication was actually possible using Zoom. I learned Spanish in weekly zoom meetings with my tutor. I met with grieving families and held funerals and shiva minyans on Zoom. We held a community Passover seder by Zoom attended by several hundred people…once we overcame the system crashing in the first few minutes. Our weekly Torah study gathering grew to over one hundred people coming together and arguing and laughing and diving deep into Torah together, all on Zoom. I never would have imagined how much intimacy and human connection was really possible thanks to that miraculous new technology.
But now that we can meet again in person, I want what I was missing. The physical contact. The non-verbal communication. The complete human presence. The intimacy of being close to each other.
This week in the Torah we begin the book of Leviticus, the third of the five books of the Torah, the heart and inner sanctum of the Torah, which is full of the messy, bloody, uncomfortable, sacred physicality of human life, up close. The great Torah scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg titled her new book of reflections on Leviticus The Hidden Order of Intimacy, because it is in the physical, the psycho-emotional, ritual details of Leviticus--sacrifice, childbirth, disease, guilt and atonement, purity and impurity, even eating and digestion --that we human beings may if we pay close attention, experience closeness and intimacy with the Divine.
The first chapters of Leviticus, which we read this week, begin with slaughter, blood, fire and smoke. Before I review it, I should offer a trigger warning. If you are squeamish, please don’t listen. From the very start, Leviticus is far from dull and boring.
A person, any person…including a non-Israelite…who seeks to draw close to God brings an animal to the tabernacle, the sacred tent at the center of the camp. If they are wealthy, it might be a bull. Or a sheep or a goat. If they are poor they might bring a bird. We read first the sacrificial procedure for the bull. The owner of the bull presses his hands on the head of the bull, leaning the weight of her or his body against the animal, and speaks words of confession. What they have done. Why they need this ritual. Then the person takes a very sharp knife and with a single stroke, severs both the trachea and the esophagus, so that the animal dies instantly. The priests step forward to collect the blood gushing forth in a bowl. They take the bowl and dash the blood on the northeast and southwest corners of the sacrificial altar. We read later in Leviticus, repeatedly, that blood is the life force of the animal. The life force of the animal is splashed upon the altar.
The owner takes their knife and skins the body of the animal, then cuts the body into pieces…without breaking any of its limbs. Meanwhile the priests are building a fire on top of the altar. When the pieces are ready, the priests take the head of the animal and the fatty parts, and the pieces of the body, and lay them on top of the fire. The owner washes the internal organs and the legs in water, and those also are placed on top of the burning wood. The fire rises up and engulfs the entire animal, transforming it into a column of smoke ascending, bearing the fragrance of roasting meat. It is, according to the text, a fire-offering, a reiach nichoach, a pleasing aroma to God.
The Torah calls this process korban, coming from the Hebrew word karov, meaning “close.” The animal is brought close to the altar. And more importantly, the owner of the animal experiences that he or she has come close, has become intimate with God.
This is how Leviticus begins, with death and intimacy, a closeness achieved with blood and fire and aromatic smoke. Our sages two thousand years ago said that we should begin a child’s Torah education with Leviticus. They said: “Let the ones who are pure, come and study the matters of purity.” And when I teach this to our children, I explain to them that our ancestors, the first Jews, used to pray to God by cooking. By turning an animal or a bird or some grain into smoke which smelled wonderful, and would rise up to God. Not so different, really, from the smells that fill our kitchen and our home when we prepare a delicious meal. Except that we pay someone else to do the killing, (unless we are vegetarians) far away from us and out of sight.
We drew close to God by cooking for the first thousand years of our history, and then stopped in the year 70CE, when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, the only place the sacrifices could be offered. In a stunning act of religious reimagination, the sages of the second century taught their communities that they could still make offerings to God. But from that time forward, intimacy with God would occur through prayer, the offerings of the heart. What we have been doing here, tonight.
Ever since that time, Jews have continued to read these portions, and to remember the fire and blood of the korbanot, the sacrifices, but for centuries there have been two fundamentally different views of the sacrifices. Maimonides, the towering figure of the Jewish Middle Ages, wrote in his Guide for the Perplexed that the sacrifices were a necessary phase in the early development of Jewish religion. The first Jews were surrounded by pagan religions, all of whom offered sacrifices, and the Jews themselves needed a gentle transition out of paganism. The sacrifices, said Maimonides, provided that transitional form of worship. But prayer, he says, is a better way of worshipping God. Now, in modern times, most reform and conservative Jews and rabbis would agree with Maimonides and say that the sacrifices were appropriate in that early phase of our history, but we prefer prayer, and have no desire to return to slaughtering animals and dashing blood as a way of drawing close to God.
But Maimonides was attacked for his position. The next giant leader of Spanish Jewry, Nachmanides, rebuked Maimonides, saying “read what the text says: The korban was a reiach nichoach. God loves the smell of the sacrificial smoke!” And many traditional Jews to this very day look forward to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and the restoration of the sacrifices.
I do not. But just as I missed the physicality of being together during the endless zoom gatherings of the Covid lockdown, I miss the physicality of the korbanot. The powerful intimacy that comes from being together, in the presence of fire and smoke and the pleasing fragrance of praying by cooking.
I look forward to the days in our new building when we can gather in the Judy Meisel kitchen, what I truly believe will be the new sacred heart of our synagogue. There we will share the physical experience of plunging our hands into flour, and oil, eggs and water, and breathing deeply together the reiach nichoach, the pleasing aroma of challah baking in the oven. The delicious smells wafting from that kitchen, all week long, will be our column of smoke, an umbilical cord linking heaven and earth.
In Leviticus the Torah transports us back to the earliest phase of our history, when we came close to each other and to God through our senses. Through taste and touch and smell. When we read these passages together, remembering the beginnings of our religion, we may realize at last that we are not so different after all, from our ancient ancestors. Like them, we may draw close to God by cooking. Through food and ritual, we may yet find our way back into the hidden order of intimacy. Shabbat shalom.