Parshah Commentary

As we begin reading Vayikra’s detailed instructions for slaughtering animals, I return to a remark of Mira Balberg’s, from her book about sacrifice in rabbinic thought. Riffing on the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s earthy saying, “Dumplings in a dream are a dream and not dumplings,” she writes, “Ritual in a text is text and not ritual.” In other words, the Book of Leviticus is a book and not a Levite, and, at least for the past several millennia, it has inspired the spilling of much ink, but little blood. Indeed, the rabbis, living after the destruction of the Temple and thus unable to offer up animals, frequently insisted that studying the sacrifices counts as performing them. While Rabbi Asi attributes the traditional practice of starting young learners not with Genesis, but with Leviticus, to the idea that “the children are pure and the offerings are pure—let the pure come and engage in the pure,” I often wonder if the purity in question is really about the absence of pragmatic, real-world content—that is, if a defunct law code was chosen because the point isn’t to teach children anything in particular; it’s to teach them to read.

Appropriately, then, when Jewish Currents began featuring weekly parshah commentaries, the magazine followed the ancient injunction to begin in Leviticus (though JC started with next week’s portion, Tzav). Though coincidental, the choice was nonetheless felicitous, for these little sermons cannot demand that their readers adhere to particular beliefs or rituals; they can only ask that you momentarily entertain a certain structural relation to a sacred text. They were, after all, written for an outlet with a long tradition of antipathy to religion: As a contributor, I still get paid by the “Association for the Promotion of Jewish Secularism,” the name of the nonprofit that publishes the magazine. And sure enough, some readers have responded with bemused skepticism, others with outright hostility. (Okay, yes, many of you have emailed that you like them, thus securing your portions in the world-to-come.) Few Currents subscribers, I imagine, dream of a restored sacrificial cult, and I doubt many even take the Pentateuch to be divinely inspired or normatively binding; all we commentators can reasonably expect is a formal interest in the text, a willingness to indulge its autonomous pleasures.

In this context, however, pure form paradoxically carries a political edge, because it stakes out the left’s side in what George Steiner described as Jewish consciousness’s central tension: “between an unhoused at-homeness in the text, between the dwelling-place of the script on the one hand (wherever in the world a Jew reads and meditates Torah is the true Israel), and the territorial mystery of the native ground, of the promised strip of land.” In this vein, the Jewish scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith argued that the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a rebuilt Temple, which consists of an elaborate array of distinctions, hierarchies, and binaries, established a “system” that “could be transferred” and “decentered.” To be sure, Ezekiel seems to yearn for a sacred place. But Smith was counterintuitively suggesting that, by meticulously delineating the Temple’s laws and precisely describing its spatial organization, the prophet was actually investing authority in the abstract system itself. Indeed, Ezekiel crafted his religious system not from Jerusalem but from the banks of a Babylonian river, living in exile after the destruction of the First Temple. For him, and for the ritual tradition he represents, legal structure predominates over cultic center. This priestly order is thus our blueprint for a transportable Jewishness—that is, for the diaspora. In these parshah commentaries, our homeland is the text; we worship in a moveable sanctuary, which is to say, we are brought together by form, rather than content.

Fittingly, before all the sacrificial instructions, Leviticus itself begins with a formal summons. Our parshah’s opening verse awkwardly displaces the subject of its first verb; translated word for word, it reads: “Called to Moses and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying.” In the final scene in Exodus, the Divine Presence prevents Moses from entering the Tent, which he has just finished constructing. Now God invites him to return. When this verse was in the middle of one continuous Priestly text, its verbs had their subject back in Exodus 40:35, at the end of the previous book. But after Leviticus was detached into its own book, the scholar Jacob Milgrom suggests, an editor added the name of God next to “spoke,” presumably because that is where it usually appears (as in the formula, “And God spoke to Moses saying”)—stranding the first verb as an odd, disembodied call. A midrash interprets this initial phrase through a parable, comparing God to a king who ordered his servant to build him a palace. On whatever the servant built, he wrote the name of the ruler—on the walls, the columns, and the roof. When the king entered the palace, he saw his name everywhere and exclaimed, “All this honor my servant did for me, and I’m inside, and he’s outside!” So he calls the servant to enter. Similarly, when God told Moses to build the Tabernacle, whatever Moses built, he would write on it, “As God commanded Moses”—a phrase found numerous times in the final chapters of Exodus. This, according to the midrash, is what prompted God to notice the injustice of excluding Moses, and thus to invite him in. Two points about the midrash stand out: First, while the servant in the parable inscribes only the king’s name on each feature, Moses adds his own name too; as it turns out, he thus literally writes himself into the Tabernacle. Second, what lies behind this midrash is a pun on that opening verb, “vayikra,” which can mean not only “to call” but also “to read.” For while the king sees his name as he tours his new digs, the divine name isn’t physically written on the Tabernacle. Rather, God only encounters this phrase by reading the final chapters of Exodus.

Like the rabbis (and us), God sees the Tabernacle not as a physical structure, or the site of a bloody ritual, but rather as a passage of scripture, an assemblage not of posts, planks, and cloths, but of words: “posts” (Exodus 36:36), “planks” (36:34), and “cloths” (36:8). And perhaps there is a deeper meaning here for that oddly impersonal address. While the Divine Presence physically fills the Tent as a cloud, there is another aspect to God: a disembodied, readerly summons, transcending not just corporeality but even subjectivity, emerging only in response to human writing. It is, I think, this genius loci who is the presiding spirit of these parshah commentaries, this elusive attentiveness that they solicit. Over the course of reading the past year of these exegeses, I have felt that many of us are desperately attempting, in the face of so much distance and alienation, to invite ourselves into this text. I hope, perhaps with equal desperation, that you, reader, will also find yourself inscribed here.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.