- closeup of inscription on the Liberty Bell, which reads:
"Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," from Leviticus 25:10.
"Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," from Leviticus 25:10.
Introduction
Cozying Up to the Most Avoided Book in the Bible
This is a book about the most avoided book in the Bible, written by a liberal rabbi who finds that book simultaneously inspiring and alienating. No biblical book can match Leviticus in its ability to repel and bore its readers. With its sacrificial offerings, ritual purity laws, sexual prohibitions, and harsh capital offenses, Leviticus really puts the “old” in Old Testament (to use the Christian term for what I, as a Jew, call the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible.)
James W. Watts, writes, “Leviticus has often been treated as a backwater of biblical influence and interpretation . . .”1 It’s true. Rabbis struggle to reassure skeptical bar and bat mitzvah students who have to give a sermon on one of the Levitical Torah portions that, with a lot of help, they really will be able to find something relevant to their twenty-first-century lives within these verses about skin diseases, moldy eruptions on walls, menstruation, and un-kosher organ meats. Similarly, Christian books abound that promise to help pastors find something to preach on in Leviticus.
Opening with a series of detailed ceremonial instructions about ancient Israelite animal sacrifices and grain offerings, Leviticus comes out of the gate sounding very culturally distant to modern Westerners. These opening chapters include instructions for the ritualized handling of the innards of sheep, goats, cattle, and birds, along with graphic images of Israelite priests spattering blood on the horns of an altar in order to secure atonement for the people and preserve the ritual purity of the community.
With Leviticus, part of what’s hard for today’s Western readers—be they religious or secular, conservative or liberal—is that we don’t easily recognize the God it portrays: a deity who is worshiped at an ancient Temple, not through prayer but through a sacrificial cult. Many commentators have described Leviticus’ God as “distant,” especially compared with other Jewish or Christian scriptural presentations of God. Furthermore, for religious liberals who hold progressive values (like me), Leviticus is a book that has us alternating between moments of inspiration and moments of disappointment. After all, Leviticus is the source of the law to “love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18) and of a series of remarkable social justice laws that seek to protect the poor, the stranger, and the vulnerable from cruelty and injustice. But then, within the same book, there are, for progressives, the parts of Leviticus that alienate and disturb.
For starters, while progressives see women and men as spiritual equals, Leviticus decrees that only men can become priests, the ancient Israelites’ religious officiants. It also states that qualified people who happen to have a physical disability or bodily deformity can’t be priests because of the “imperfection” of their bodies. It specifically prohibits many different kinds of incest, but manages to leave father-daughter incest off the list.2 It says that two grown men can’t have anal intercourse, and that if they do the community should execute them; yet, it has no objections to men having multiple wives and concubines, or to grown men marrying girls whom we would deem to be underage, or to fathers selling their daughters into slavery (which might include sexual expectations on the part of the master).3 It states that women are ritually impure when they’re menstruating and after they give birth (and impure for twice as long if the baby is female rather than male).
In addition, Leviticus says that God wants us (or at least, a long time ago, wanted us) to take some of our farm animals up to a central sanctuary, slaughter them, pour their blood out onto the ground, systematically separate their innards, and place certain parts of them onto a sacred fire in order to atone for our sins. Leviticus also insinuates that God has something like a nose, claiming that the smoke from the flesh burning on the altar during the ritual sacrifices creates a ray-akh nee-kho-ach, “a pleasing smell,” for God. And it’s a book that teaches that, in order to help atone for our collective sins as a people, once a year we should bring two goats before the community, kill one and then symbolically place all our sins on the head of the other one, which we should then send out into the deserted wilderness.
By all accounts, as a religious progressive, I should run screaming from this book. Or at least, in my work as a rabbi, you might expect that I would do what many rabbis and Christian clergy have done for a long time with Leviticus—steer around it and reference it only occasionally. For close to a century, this is exactly what the leading minds in American Judaism’s largest denomination, the Reform movement, did. They treated Leviticus as something of an embarrassment. In their efforts to redefine Judaism along modern, rational, and ethical lines, they described Leviticus as pre-modern hocus-pocus that made sense to our “superstitious ancestors” but held little to no relevance to Jews today. And as recently as 2004, the noted Jewish scholar of Leviticus, Jacob Milgrom, claimed that even in Israeli Orthodox academies of advanced Torah study (yeshivot), little attention is given to Leviticus.4
But in the last couple decades, this distancing and even disavowal of Leviticus on the part of liberal Jewish thinkers has shifted. A renewed interest in the non-rational, and especially the ritual, aspects of religious life in the liberal Jewish world has led to a renewed interest in Leviticus, its challenges notwithstanding. And in my interfaith work with Christian leaders of many stripes, from far right fundamentalists to progressive pluralists, I’ve witnessed an attitude of curiosity about and respect for Judaism, including its legal and ritual dimensions—the very aspects of Judaism that often get portrayed negatively in Christian sermons preaching “love over law.” (More on Christian and Jewish understandings of the nature of law, ritual, love, and integrity in chapter 9.)
So to repeat my question of a few paragraphs ago, why would I want to write this book? Why do I think Leviticus can be a valuable book for people today who have—for lack of a more precise way of putting it—a progressive approach to religion? Because when it comes to Leviticus, we really have no idea. No idea of the surprisingly relevant questions and insights it contains, and little idea of how to integrate its strange, authoritarian, and intimidating worldview with our commitment to progressive values.
As with so many other parts of the Bible, we tend to miss a lot of what’s there in Leviticus by not taking the time to explore it and greet it freshly with the question, “What might we learn today from studying this text, from bringing our current problems and struggles into dialog with even this text?” And if, in the course of greeting Leviticus with those questions, we are willing to let our sacred texts be imperfect—let them be a record of our ancestors’ understandings of God, not of God’s literal words beamed down to us never to be challenged—then the potential for what we can learn that’s directly relevant to our moment in human history expands dramatically. In the pages that follow, I hope to show you what I mean.
----------
All outside sources are properly cited in the book.
Cozying Up to the Most Avoided Book in the Bible
This is a book about the most avoided book in the Bible, written by a liberal rabbi who finds that book simultaneously inspiring and alienating. No biblical book can match Leviticus in its ability to repel and bore its readers. With its sacrificial offerings, ritual purity laws, sexual prohibitions, and harsh capital offenses, Leviticus really puts the “old” in Old Testament (to use the Christian term for what I, as a Jew, call the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible.)
James W. Watts, writes, “Leviticus has often been treated as a backwater of biblical influence and interpretation . . .”1 It’s true. Rabbis struggle to reassure skeptical bar and bat mitzvah students who have to give a sermon on one of the Levitical Torah portions that, with a lot of help, they really will be able to find something relevant to their twenty-first-century lives within these verses about skin diseases, moldy eruptions on walls, menstruation, and un-kosher organ meats. Similarly, Christian books abound that promise to help pastors find something to preach on in Leviticus.
Opening with a series of detailed ceremonial instructions about ancient Israelite animal sacrifices and grain offerings, Leviticus comes out of the gate sounding very culturally distant to modern Westerners. These opening chapters include instructions for the ritualized handling of the innards of sheep, goats, cattle, and birds, along with graphic images of Israelite priests spattering blood on the horns of an altar in order to secure atonement for the people and preserve the ritual purity of the community.
With Leviticus, part of what’s hard for today’s Western readers—be they religious or secular, conservative or liberal—is that we don’t easily recognize the God it portrays: a deity who is worshiped at an ancient Temple, not through prayer but through a sacrificial cult. Many commentators have described Leviticus’ God as “distant,” especially compared with other Jewish or Christian scriptural presentations of God. Furthermore, for religious liberals who hold progressive values (like me), Leviticus is a book that has us alternating between moments of inspiration and moments of disappointment. After all, Leviticus is the source of the law to “love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18) and of a series of remarkable social justice laws that seek to protect the poor, the stranger, and the vulnerable from cruelty and injustice. But then, within the same book, there are, for progressives, the parts of Leviticus that alienate and disturb.
For starters, while progressives see women and men as spiritual equals, Leviticus decrees that only men can become priests, the ancient Israelites’ religious officiants. It also states that qualified people who happen to have a physical disability or bodily deformity can’t be priests because of the “imperfection” of their bodies. It specifically prohibits many different kinds of incest, but manages to leave father-daughter incest off the list.2 It says that two grown men can’t have anal intercourse, and that if they do the community should execute them; yet, it has no objections to men having multiple wives and concubines, or to grown men marrying girls whom we would deem to be underage, or to fathers selling their daughters into slavery (which might include sexual expectations on the part of the master).3 It states that women are ritually impure when they’re menstruating and after they give birth (and impure for twice as long if the baby is female rather than male).
In addition, Leviticus says that God wants us (or at least, a long time ago, wanted us) to take some of our farm animals up to a central sanctuary, slaughter them, pour their blood out onto the ground, systematically separate their innards, and place certain parts of them onto a sacred fire in order to atone for our sins. Leviticus also insinuates that God has something like a nose, claiming that the smoke from the flesh burning on the altar during the ritual sacrifices creates a ray-akh nee-kho-ach, “a pleasing smell,” for God. And it’s a book that teaches that, in order to help atone for our collective sins as a people, once a year we should bring two goats before the community, kill one and then symbolically place all our sins on the head of the other one, which we should then send out into the deserted wilderness.
By all accounts, as a religious progressive, I should run screaming from this book. Or at least, in my work as a rabbi, you might expect that I would do what many rabbis and Christian clergy have done for a long time with Leviticus—steer around it and reference it only occasionally. For close to a century, this is exactly what the leading minds in American Judaism’s largest denomination, the Reform movement, did. They treated Leviticus as something of an embarrassment. In their efforts to redefine Judaism along modern, rational, and ethical lines, they described Leviticus as pre-modern hocus-pocus that made sense to our “superstitious ancestors” but held little to no relevance to Jews today. And as recently as 2004, the noted Jewish scholar of Leviticus, Jacob Milgrom, claimed that even in Israeli Orthodox academies of advanced Torah study (yeshivot), little attention is given to Leviticus.4
But in the last couple decades, this distancing and even disavowal of Leviticus on the part of liberal Jewish thinkers has shifted. A renewed interest in the non-rational, and especially the ritual, aspects of religious life in the liberal Jewish world has led to a renewed interest in Leviticus, its challenges notwithstanding. And in my interfaith work with Christian leaders of many stripes, from far right fundamentalists to progressive pluralists, I’ve witnessed an attitude of curiosity about and respect for Judaism, including its legal and ritual dimensions—the very aspects of Judaism that often get portrayed negatively in Christian sermons preaching “love over law.” (More on Christian and Jewish understandings of the nature of law, ritual, love, and integrity in chapter 9.)
So to repeat my question of a few paragraphs ago, why would I want to write this book? Why do I think Leviticus can be a valuable book for people today who have—for lack of a more precise way of putting it—a progressive approach to religion? Because when it comes to Leviticus, we really have no idea. No idea of the surprisingly relevant questions and insights it contains, and little idea of how to integrate its strange, authoritarian, and intimidating worldview with our commitment to progressive values.
As with so many other parts of the Bible, we tend to miss a lot of what’s there in Leviticus by not taking the time to explore it and greet it freshly with the question, “What might we learn today from studying this text, from bringing our current problems and struggles into dialog with even this text?” And if, in the course of greeting Leviticus with those questions, we are willing to let our sacred texts be imperfect—let them be a record of our ancestors’ understandings of God, not of God’s literal words beamed down to us never to be challenged—then the potential for what we can learn that’s directly relevant to our moment in human history expands dramatically. In the pages that follow, I hope to show you what I mean.
----------
All outside sources are properly cited in the book.