Parshah Commentary

Parshat Tzav

In this week’s parshah, Tzav, God teaches the Israelites how to offer ritual sacrifices. In the parshah’s opening lines, God says to Moses, “Command Aaron and his sons thus: This is the ritual of the burnt offering” (Vayikra 6:2). These are not the first sacrifices Aaron has brought. Just a few parshiyot ago, he led the Israelites in constructing and worshiping the Golden Calf, a blasphemous idol. In light of that transgression, it’s unnerving that Aaron is placed at the head of the new, normative religion.

But perhaps Aaron is given this role specifically to allude to the links between these heretical and divinely sanctioned cultic rituals. Abravanel, a Renaissance-era Portuguese commentator, proposes that had it not been for the Golden Calf, Vayikra’s entire ritual edifice might never have existed. As evidence, he cites a perplexing line from this week’s haftarah (the reading from the Prophets that accompanies each weekly parshah) in which God says, “When I freed your ancestors from the land of Egypt, I did not speak with them or command them concerning burnt offerings or sacrifice” (Jeremiah 7:22). The verse seems to ignore the entire book of Vayikra; Abravanel resolves the apparent contradiction by arguing that when the Israelites first left Egypt, God gave them a simple moral and theological legal code—a revolutionary break with past idolatry. But when they made the Golden Calf, God realized they were addicted to physical ritual. Belatedly and reluctantly, God prescribes the sacrifices as a ritual methadone, a concession to the Israelites’ need for material worship. Abravenel’s reading suggests to me that when each sacrificial instruction starts, “Command Aaron and his sons,” it emphasizes not only that Aaron is chosen to perform these sacred rituals, but also that they were only regrettably necessitated by his backsliding cowardice.

What are we to make of the inclusion of “his sons” in the directive? The 16th-century commentator Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, known as the Kli Yakar, notices that in Vayikra, Aaron is never invoked or addressed without his sons. Building on earlier rabbinic traditions, he suggests that after the Golden Calf, God wanted to prohibit Aaron from performing ritual sacrifice, since it was introduced to rectify his mistake, and assign it only to his sons. But Moses prayed to God on Aaron’s behalf. He drew an analogy to the legal ruling that we do not burn olive wood or grape vines in the Temple, preserving them out of respect for their products, sacrificial oil and wine. Can one hate a well, Moses asked in a second metaphor, and love its waters? God conceded the points, and the compromise produced this awkward pairing—the new, reparative generation, and the disgraced parent, saved on their account.

A shriveled grapevine with prized fruit—the image captured my attention as a figure for the current generational war among American Jews. Over the past decades, many members of my parents’ generation helped construct a Golden Calf, and here we are, figuring out what compensations are necessary, what substitutes might be possible. And yet, as Moses reminds God, best to think carefully before severing the failed past from the hopeful present. The Kli Yakar is recapitulating a motif found already in the Bible; back in Shemot, when the Israelites built the Golden Calf, God wanted to “dissolve the people and elect another,” but Moses fought to preserve communal continuity. In the moment of crisis, the radical and the liberal can seem to be mortal enemies; often enough, they are also siblings, or parent and child. God’s schismatic thinking is always tempting us with fresh beginnings, a history neatly perforated for the cutting, while Moses’s reply reminds us that the price is too high. Indeed, it’s imprudent to grab the grapes and chop down the vines—that’s not how you build broad-based power. Despite the cognitive dissonance and psychic pain, if we want a robust, formidable, and enduring Jewish left, we might need to learn, as God does, to hold together Aaron and his sons.

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