Vayikra ויקרא
Vayikra, the third book of the Torah, is markedly different from the others. It contains no journey. It is set entirely at Sinai. It occupies only a brief section of time: a single month. There is almost no narrative. Yet, set at the centre of the Mosaic books, it is the key to understanding Israel’s vocation as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” the first collective mission statement in history.
This parasha, with which the book opens, details the various kinds of sacrifice the Israelites brought to the Tabernacle. There were five: the burnt offering (ola), the grain offering (minḥa), the peace offering (shelamim), the sin offering (ḥatat), and the guilt offering (asham).
The first of the essays is about the name of the book itself, Vayikra, “And He called.” Far from being simply the book’s first word, it prepares us for echoes elsewhere and especially at the end, intimating the vast yet almost imperceptible difference between understanding history as God’s call, or as mere chance.
The second essay looks at the prophetic critique of the sacrifices, the third at Maimonides’ famously controversial analysis. The fourth explores the symbolism of sacrifice in general. The fifth asks what the sin offering tells us about the nature of sin itself. The sixth looks at a nuance in the text that suggests that a leader cannot avoid making mistakes, and explores why this is so.
Between Destiny and Chance
Sometimes in the Torah an entire philosophy is embedded in a single word. That is the case with the word that gives its name not only to the parasha, but also to the book as a whole: Vayikra, “He called.”
This is not a word that seems to promise hidden depths. It is no more than the first word of the book. It seems mere coincidence that it was this word and not another. Yet it turns out that “mere coincidence” is precisely what it is not. Once we uncover the clues and decipher the code, we will find that the beginning and end of Vayikra form a meditative essay on the nature of history as coincidence or call, chance or scripted drama. They are an answer to the question: Is there meaning in history?
Vayikra was not the first name the sages gave the book. They called it Torat Kohanim, “The Law of the Priests,” because much of it is about the Sanctuary and its service, the world of the priests. Hence its English name, Leviticus, from the Greek and Latin meaning “matters concerning the Levites,” the tribe from which the priests came.
Yet there was something about this name that was not quite right. Much of the book is indeed about the work of the priests and the Sanctuary. But the book is larger than that. It opens out into broad vistas of personal morality and social justice. The great code in Leviticus 19 tells us that every Jew, not just a priestly elite, is called on to be holy, “because I the Lord your God am holy.” So tradition eventually settled on the name Vayikra, “He called.”
What might lead us to think that there is more to this word than meets the eye? First is the fact that it is seemingly superfluous. Literally translated, the verse reads, “He called to Moses; the Lord spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying….” There are no less than three verbs for speech here: calling, speaking, and saying. Given the terseness of the Torah, especially in legal contexts, the redundancy cries for attention.
Second, the entire phrase, “He called to Moses,” is clearly a prelude. Once we get to “the Lord spoke to him, saying,” we know we are about to hear substantive details. The opening phrase is a tone-setting one. It creates a mood. God is summoning Moses, and through him the Israelites, but to what?
In English, we use the word “vocation” to describe someone’s occupation: their job, their profession, their career. Originally, though, the word meant “a task to which one is called.” Though it has now been thoroughly secularised, it was at first a deeply religious idea, derived via Latin and Old French from Vayikra, being “called” by God to a sacred task, a mission. So we can already sense in this opening word something quite profound. It is as if God were saying, “What I am about to tell you is not only about what you should do. It is also about what you are called on to be.” We sense already that Vayikra is about Israel’s vocation as a holy people dedicated to God.
Third, there is something strange and conspicuous about the way the word is written in a Torah scroll. Its last letter, an aleph, is written small – almost to the point of invisibility. The standard-size letters spell out the word vayikar, meaning, “He encountered, chanced upon.” Unlike vayikra, which refers to a call, a meeting by request, vayikar suggests the opposite: an accidental meeting, a mere happenstance.
The sages, always alert to intertextuality – the way a word or phrase in one place chimes with one in another – immediately recall that vayikar is the verb the Torah uses for God’s encounter with the pagan prophet Balaam (Num. 23:16). This is how they interpret the contrast:
What is the difference between the prophets of Israel and the prophets of the pagan nations of the world?… R. Ḥama b. Ḥanina said: “The Holy One, Blessed Be He, reveals Himself to the pagan nations by an incomplete form of address, as it is said, ‘And the Lord appeared [vayikar] to Balaam,’ whereas to the prophets of Israel, He appears in a complete form of address, as it is said, ‘And He called [vayikra] to Moses.’”1Leviticus Rabba 1:13.
Rashi, more discursively, explains that the verb “to call” denotes something more than mere speech. It implies affection, intimacy, a relationship of love:
All [God’s] communications [to Moses], whether they use the words “speak” or “say” or “command,” were preceded by a call [keria] which is a term of endearment, used by the angels when they address one another, as it is said, “And one called to the other” [vekara zeh el zeh, Isaiah 6:3]. However, to the prophets of the nations of the world, His appearance is described by an expression signifying a casual encounter and uncleanness, as it says, “And the Lord appeared to Balaam.”2Rashi, Commentary to Leviticus 1:1.
That accounts for the difference between vayikra and vayikar. What about the small aleph? Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (1269–1340) endearingly suggests that it has to do with the character of Moses:
Moses, being both great and humble, wanted only to write Vayikar, signifying “chance,” as if the Holy One, Blessed Be He, did no more than appear to him in a dream, as in the case of Balaam, to whom God appeared by mere chance. However, God told him to write the word with an aleph. Moses then said to Him, because of his extreme humility, that he would only write an aleph that was smaller than the other alephs in the Torah, and he did indeed write it small.3Baal HaTurim, Commentary to Leviticus 1:1.
This, then, is our point of departure. Vayikra is a call uttered in love. It is the opposite of vayikar, mere chance, a fortuitous happening. But to grasp the full significance of what is being said, we have to turn to the end of the book.
One of the key literary devices of the Torah is chiasmus, or mirror-image symmetry: a passage that has the form ABCBA. Sometimes the passage is short, as in Genesis 9:6: “He who sheds/the blood/of man/by man/shall his blood/be shed.” But it can sometimes be very long. The end of the book of Exodus parallels the beginning of Genesis. In Genesis, God creates the universe, a cosmos. At the end of Exodus, the Israelites create the Sanctuary, a microcosmos. There are clear linguistic parallels between the two texts. So it is in the book of Vayikra. The end echoes the beginning. How so?
Just before the end of Parashat Beḥukkotai, there is one of the two terrifying passages known as Tokheḥa, the “warning” or “rebuke”4The other passage is Deuteronomy 28:15–68. telling of the curses that will befall the Israelites if they fail to keep their covenant with God:
As for you who survive, will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall though no one is pursuing them…. The land of your enemies will consume you. (Lev. 26:36–38)
These curses contain a recurring motif: the word keri. It appears seven times, always a sign of significance in the Torah, and it is used nowhere else in the whole Torah. Here are two occurrences by way of example:
“If in spite of this, you still do not listen to Me but continue to behave bekeri towards Me, then in My anger I will behave towards you bekeri, and I Myself will punish you seven times for your sins.” (Lev. 26:27–28)
The commentators disagree as to what the word keri means. The Targum reads it as “if you harden yourselves,” Saadia Gaon as “if you are rebellious,” Rashbam as “if you refuse to follow My way,” and Ibn Ezra as “if you are overconfident.” Maimonides, however, gives it a quite different interpretation, and does so in a halakhic context, in relation to the command to proclaim a public fast when the Jewish people are in distress:
It is a positive scriptural command to pray and sound the alarm with trumpets whenever trouble befalls the community…. This is one of the paths to repentance, for when the community cries out in prayer and sounds an alarm when threatened by trouble, everyone realises that evil has come on them as a result of their own wrongdoing…and repentance will cause the trouble to be removed.
If, however, the people do not cry out in prayer and do not sound an alarm but merely say that it is the way of the world for such a thing to happen to them, and that their trouble is a matter of pure chance, they have chosen a cruel path that will cause them to continue in their wrongdoing and thus bring additional troubles on them. For when Scripture says, “If you continue to be keri towards Me, then in My anger I will be keri towards you” (Lev. 26:27–28), it means: If, when I bring trouble upon you in order to cause you to repent, you say that the trouble is purely accidental, then I will add to your trouble the anger of being left to chance.5Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Taaniyot 1:1–3.
Maimonides understands keri to be related to mikre, meaning “chance,” the way of the world. To regard something as mikre means to see it as if it had no larger significance. It just happened. That, says Maimonides, is not how we as Jews should see our fate. It is not mere chance.
This means that for Maimonides, the curses at the end of Leviticus are not divine retribution as such. It will not be God who makes Israel suffer; it will be other human beings. What will happen is that God will withdraw His protection. Israel will have to face the world without the sheltering presence of God.
This, for Maimonides, is an application of the principle of measure-for-measure (midda keneged midda).6Shabbat 105b.
If Israel believes in divine providence, it will be blessed by divine providence. If it sees history as mere chance – what Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, called “a trash bag of random coincidences blown open by the wind”7Joseph Heller, Good as Gold (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 74.
– then indeed they will be left to chance. And since Israel is a small nation surrounded by large empires, chance will not be kind to them.
We now discern the remarkable idea linking the beginning of Vayikra to the end. It is about the difference between mikra and mikre – between history as God’s call and history as mere chance, a sequence of events with no underlying purpose or meaning.
The difference is vast, but in the Hebrew language it is almost imperceptible. The two words sound the same. The only difference is that the former has an aleph while the latter does not (aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, is also the first letter of the Ten Commandments, the Anokhi, “I am,” of God).
An aleph is almost inaudible. Its appearance in the Torah scroll at the beginning of Vayikra (the “small aleph”) is almost invisible. It is as if the Torah were intimating that the presence of God in history will not always be as clear and unambiguous as it was during the Exodus or the division of the Red Sea. For much of the time, it will depend on our own sensitivity. For those who look, it will be visible. For those who listen, it will be audible. But we will need to look and listen. God does not force His presence on us against our will. We have to search Him out.
If we choose not to see or hear, then Vayikra will become Vayikar. God’s call will be inaudible. History will seem no more than “a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.” There is nothing incoherent about such an idea. It is a self-fulfilling expectation. If you believe that history is chance, then it will become so.
But if you believe otherwise, it will be otherwise. So Jewish history has appeared to great minds, among them Pascal, Rousseau, and Tolstoy.8See Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion (New York: Free Press, 2000), 35–38.
Something about the survival of the Jewish people against all odds seemed to them to testify to the presence of God in their midst. Only thus could such a small, vulnerable, relatively powerless people endure and still be able to say, even after the Holocaust, Am Yisrael ḥai, “the Jewish people lives.”
Jews were the first people to see meaning in history, to recognise it as something other than a succession of events with no connecting thread. The prophets knew that history is the arena within which God calls us, His covenantal partners, to honour one another by honouring Him. The whole of Jewish history is a commentary on the success or failure of the people to honour that covenant, made at Sinai where the entire book of Vayikra is set.9For example, the British historian J.H. Plumb writes: “The concept that within the history of mankind itself a process was at work which would mould his future, and lead man to situations totally different from his past, seems to have found its first expression amongst the Jews. The Greeks had a healthy sense of their own superiority – more, perhaps, than most ancient people – yet they possessed no belief that their history taught them they had a special destiny and a special future.” J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 56.
Having come this far, we can now see the Torah’s masterstroke. For it was the prophets, not the priests, who saw God in history. The prophets lived in the medium of time. They knew the people’s past. They foretold its future. They were the map-readers of events. The priests did not live in the midst of history any more than they lived in the midst of society. They inhabited the domain of the holy, where nothing changes. Time for the priest is a cycle, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, where every offering can be specified in advance. Plato might have been defining the priestly mindset when he called time “the moving image of eternity.”10Plato, Timaeus, 37.
Four of the five books of the Torah are set in history. Genesis is about the pre-history of the Israelites, when they were a family, not yet a nation. Deuteronomy is about their post-history, that is, the time after the wilderness years when they would become a nation in a world of nations. Exodus is about the journey from Egypt to Sinai, Numbers about the journey from Sinai to the brink of the Promised Land. Vayikra is unique. It alone among the five books is not about history. It is about holiness: eternity in the midst of time.
What the word Vayikra at the beginning and the sevenfold keri at the end do is to enfold the priestly book in prophetic time. They tell us that the priestly and prophetic universes belong to one another. It is Israel’s timeless encounters with God that allow it to negotiate safely the currents and rapids of time. Israel’s sacred service, mediated by the priest, is the boat in which it travels down the prophet’s river of destiny. And the choice is one we must all make. Will we live the life of vayikra or keri, mikra or mikre, vocation or accident, destiny or chance?
Just as Jewish history is not mere chance, so it is no mere coincidence that the first word of the Torah’s central book is Vayikra, “He called.” For Vayikra, the priestly book, is God’s call to Israel to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,”11Exodus 19:6. and thereby fulfil the prophetic vision of history as the place where, in the midst of time, we live the truths that are beyond time.