Dimensions of Sin
This parasha, which deals with a variety of sacrifices, devotes an extended section to the ḥatat, the sin offering, as brought by different individuals: first the High Priest (4:3–12), then the community as a whole (13–21), then a leader (22–26), and finally, an ordinary individual (27–35).
The whole passage sounds strange to modern ears, not only because sacrifices have not been offered for almost two millennia since the destruction of the Second Temple, but also because it is hard for us to understand the very concepts of sin and atonement as they are dealt with in the Torah.
The puzzle is that the sins for which an offering had to be brought were those committed inadvertently, beshogeg. The sinner had forgotten either the law or some relevant fact. To give a contemporary example: suppose the phone rings on Shabbat and you answer it. You would only be liable for a sin offering if either you forgot the law that you may not answer a phone on Shabbat, or you forgot the fact that the day was Shabbat. For a moment you thought it was Friday or Sunday.
It is just this kind of act that we do not tend to see as a sin at all. It was a mistake. You forgot. You did not mean to do anything wrong. And when you realise that inadvertently you have broken Shabbat, you are more likely to feel regret than remorse. You feel sorry but not guilty.
We think of a sin as something we did intentionally, yielding to temptation perhaps, or in a moment of rebellion. That is what Jewish law calls bezadon in biblical Hebrew or bemezid in rabbinic Hebrew. That is the kind of act we would have thought calls for a sin offering. In Jewish law, though, such an act cannot be atoned for by an offering at all. So how are we to make sense of the sin offering?
The answer is that there are three dimensions of wrongdoing between us and God. The first is guilt and shame. When we sin deliberately and intentionally, we know inwardly that we have done wrong. Our conscience – the voice of God within the human heart – tells us that we have done wrong. That is what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden after they sinned. They felt shame. They tried to hide.
For that kind of deliberate, conscious, intentional sin, the only adequate moral response is teshuva, repentance. This involves (a) remorse, ḥarata, (b) confession, vidui, and (c) kabbalat he’atid, a resolution never to commit the sin again.1Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 2:2.
The result is seliḥa umeḥila: God pardons and forgives us. A mere sacrifice is not enough.
However, there is a second dimension. Regardless of guilt and responsibility, if we commit a sin we have objectively transgressed a boundary. The word ḥet means to miss the mark, to stray, to deviate from the proper path. We have committed an act that somehow disturbs the moral balance of the world.
To take a secular example, imagine that your car has a faulty speedometer. You are caught driving at fifty miles per hour in a thirty-miles-per-hour zone. You tell the policeman who stops you that you did not know. Your speedometer was only showing thirty miles per hour. He may sympathise, but you have still broken the law, transgressed the limit, and you will still have to pay the penalty.
That is what a sin offering is. According to Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and David Zvi Hoffman, ignorance, whether of the facts or the law, is a form of negligence.2Samson Raphael Hirsch, Commentary to Leviticus 4:2; David Zvi Hoffman, Commentary to Leviticus 4:1–2.
We ought to know the law, especially in the most serious cases. We should also exercise vigilance: we should be mindful about what we are doing. It is not enough to say, “I did not know that today was Shabbat.” You should have known. Not knowing whether today is Tuesday or Wednesday may be understandable. Little of significance may turn on that ignorance. But when a fact has significant consequences, there is a duty to pay attention, to be aware. On this view, the sin offering is a penalty for carelessness.
Abrabanel argues that the sin offering was less a punishment for what had been done than a solemn warning against sin in the future. The bringing of a sacrifice, involving considerable effort and expense, was a vivid reminder to the individual to be more careful in the future.3Abrabanel, Commentary to Leviticus 4:2.
Rabbi Isaac Arama (Spain, fifteenth century) says that the difference between an intentional and an unintentional sin is that in the former case, both body and soul are at fault. In the case of an unintentional sin, only the body is at fault, not the soul. There was physical wrongdoing, but not mental intent. Therefore a physical sacrifice can atone, since it was only the physical act of the body that was in the wrong. Such a sacrifice cannot atone for a deliberate sin, because it cannot rectify a wrong in the soul.4Isaac Arama, Akedat Yitzḥak ad loc.
It is also worth noting that what the sacrifice achieves is kappara, which means not “forgiveness” but a “covering over” or obliteration of the sin. Noah was told to “cover” (vekhafarta) the surface of the ark with pitch (Gen. 6:14). The cover of the Ark in the Tabernacle was called kapporet (Ex. 25:17). Once a sin has been symbolically covered, it is forgiven, but as the Malbim points out, in such cases the verb for forgiveness, s-l-ḥ, is always in the passive (venislaḥ, see Lev. 4:20, 26, 31). The forgiveness is not direct as it is in the case of repentance, but indirect, a consequence of the sacrifice.
A third dimension of sin is that it defiles. It leaves a stain on your character. Isaiah, in the presence of God, feels that he has “unclean lips” (Is. 6:5). King David says to God, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin” (Ps. 51:4). About Yom Kippur the Torah says, “On that day atonement will be made for you, to cleanse [letaher] you. Then, before the Lord, you will be clean from all your sins” (Lev. 16:30).
Nahmanides says that this is the logic of the sin offering. All sins, even those committed inadvertently, “leave a stain on the soul and constitute a blemish on it, and the soul is only fit to meet its Maker when it has been cleansed from all sin.”5Nahmanides, Commentary ad loc.
The result of the sin offering is cleansing, purification.6On sin as defilement see Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
The late Lubavitcher Rebbe, following midrashic tradition, offered a different, if related, interpretation. Even inadvertent sins testify to something wrong on the part of the person concerned. Bad things do not come about through good people.7Taanit 29a.
The sages say that God does not allow even the animals of the righteous to do wrong; how much more so does He protect the righteous themselves from error and mishap.8Yevamot 99b; Ketubbot 28b.
There must therefore have been something wrong with the individual for the mishap to have taken place. Sin may not leave a stain on the soul. It may testify to a stain on the soul.
This view, characteristic of the Chabad approach, with its emphasis on the psychology of the religious life, shares more than a passing similarity with Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, which gave rise to the phrase “a Freudian slip.”9Freud introduced this idea in his The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987).
Remarks or acts that seem unintentional often betray unconscious desires or motives. Indeed, we can often glimpse the unconscious more readily at such moments than when the person is acting in full knowledge and deliberation. Inadvertent sins suggest something amiss in the soul of the sinner. It is this fault, which may lie beneath the threshold of consciousness, which is atoned for by the sin offering.
So the sin offering is not about guilt but about other dimensions of transgression. It is one of the notable features of Western civilisation, due in part to Pauline Christianity, and partly to the influence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that we tend to think about morality and spirituality almost exclusively in terms of the mind and its motives. Only the will, argued Kant, can be good or bad.10Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7.
That, however, turned out to be a dangerous doctrine.11For a critique of Kantian ethics see Bernard Williams, Morality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Is it entirely accidental that the culture most influenced by Kant was also the one that gave rise to the Holocaust? It is not – categorically not – that the sage of Konigsberg had anything to do with that tragedy.12However, see Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994), 271. Fackenheim points out that at his trial, Adolf Eichmann showed himself to be an articulate exponent of Kantian ethics.
Yet it remains the case that many good and decent people did nothing to protest the single greatest crime of man against man while it was taking place. Many of them surely thought that it had nothing to do with them. If they bore the Jews no particular ill will, why should they feel guilty? Yet the result of their action or inaction had real consequences in the physical world. A culture that confines morality to the mind is one that lacks an adequate defence against harmful behaviour.
Our acts leave traces in the world. The very fact that unintentional sins require atonement tells us that we cannot dissociate ourselves from our actions by saying, “I didn’t mean to do it.” Wrong was done – and it was done by us. Therefore we must perform an act that signals our contrition. We cannot just walk away as if the act had nothing to do with us.
The law of the sin offering reminds us that we can do harm unintentionally, and this can have consequences, both physical and psychological. The best way of putting things right is to make a sacrifice: to do something that costs us something. In ancient times, that took the form of a sacrifice offered on the altar at the Temple. Nowadays, the best way of doing so is to give money to charity (tzedaka) or perform an act of kindness to others (ḥesed). The prophet said so long ago: “For I desire loving-kindness, not sacrifice” (Hos. 6:6). Charity and kindness are our substitutes for sacrifice and, like the sin offering of old, they help mend what is broken in the world and in our soul.
The sin offering tells us that the wrong we do, or let happen, even if we did not intend it, still requires atonement. Unfashionable though this is, a morality that speaks about action, not just intention – about what happens through us even if we didn’t mean to do it – is more compelling, more true to the human situation, than one that speaks of intention alone.