Finding America in Leviticus: Reflections on Nation Building in the Twenty-First Century

CHAPTER ONE

Rethinking Leviticus

This is the third of five books we plan on writing together. Our goal with each has been to demonstrate the continued relevance of the Pentateuch, or the Torah as it is referred to in Judaism, for contemporary Americans. This is no easy task, as the Bible is not often read in our times by secular readers. According to a recent poll, 29 percent of American adults never read the bible, 13 percent read it less than once a year, and 8 percent read it once or twice a year. Conversely, only 9 percent of American adults read the bible each week.

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Our analyses of Genesis

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and Exodus

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assumed that even secular readers were somewhat familiar with the overall storyline and themes of both books. Yet, familiarity does not necessarily equate to relevancy, which left us to address a simple question. Why do we think both these biblical works have relevance to modern secular readers?

With regards to Genesis, we believe (and sought to demonstrate) that it continues to speak to its readers as individuals and that it addresses core issues readers often wrestle with in their daily lives. Genesis shows us dysfunctional families, some due to sexual issues, some because of jealousy, and others because of sibling rivalries. The book does not hide the fact that families do not always come out perfect—perhaps the term nuclear family was coined because sometimes they go boom. Nonetheless, and this is key, Genesis teaches us time and again that family is important; it is the cornerstone upon which our community is built. This is an important lesson for America today.

In our second work, we proposed what some might consider a radical re-reading of the Exodus narrative. In Exodus, we see that God charges the Jewish people at Sinai to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

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Nowhere is freedom found in this, only seven weeks prior, the Jews had been freed from slavery. That is because the Jews were not liberated merely to become a free people. God wanted and expected them to evolve into a nation committed to creating a law-abiding society. From this perspective, freedom was a necessary precondition to achieving its goal.

In that book, we brought multiple examples of how and where America’s founders understood this and wove this idea into the basic fabric of the democracy they were creating. What has for centuries set America apart from other nations is its synergistic linking between freedom and the law, which, of course, is something that goes to the heart of the Exodus story. It is also something that makes Exodus relevant to Americans as a whole population, not solely to discrete individuals.

This book, in which we advocate for a redirected reading of Leviticus, is more challenging than its predecessors. It is hard to ignore the stories in the book of Genesis. Some are iconic, such as the seven days of creation, a story that even drives debates about school curricula (i.e., evolution versus creationism). Others have morphed into commonly used metaphors, such as the serpent as a paradigm of evil and temptation or a deluge of forty days and forty nights. Still others, such as the story of Joseph and his brothers, have been turned into highly successful Broadway productions.

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As for the book of Exodus, America’s founders were intimately aware of its narrative, as were the Pilgrims who set sail in search of a place where they could practice their religion free of persecution. It is well established that they saw themselves as the New Israelites, reliving the Exodus saga.

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The South’s enslaved population, in turn, dreamed of an exodus of their own, a hope expressed in the African American spiritual Go Down, Moses.

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And we cannot overlook the impact of Exodus on the world of entertainment. There are few more iconic images in cinematic history than that of Charlton Heston as Moses splitting the sea in Cecil B. Demille’s 1956 movie classic The Ten Commandments. Consider, too, DreamWorks’s 1998 animated musical drama The Prince of Egypt. Its worldwide box office gross exceeded two hundred million dollars, and it still ranks as one of the top-grossing non-Disney animated films of all time.

In comparison, Leviticus contains no moving or celebrated stories, nor does it describe monumental events. Secular readers are likely quite unaware of its contents, and, to the extent that they know a bit about it, they probably perceive it to be a highly ritualistic text that describes an outdated and primitive sacrificial cult. To the extent that secular readers today even turn to the pages of Leviticus, the notion that they would be inspired by the text and pine for a restoration of animal sacrifices is silly.

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It would thus seem that we have taken on an impossible task. Why would we try to demonstrate to contemporary Americans, be they secular or religious, Jews or Christians, that the sacrificial rites found in Leviticus have germaneness to their lives? It is only impossible if one thinks of Leviticus as solely about animal sacrifices. However, we believe that a refocused and redirected reading of the book will indeed show its value for America today. Leviticus, as we will discover, is about more than animal sacrifice. It is also about nation building. Specifically, Leviticus sets forth a template of large, regularly scheduled communal gatherings intended to foster national unity and identity among the Jewish people.

That the Mishkan and its attendant sacrificial rites were a key element in building the Jewish nation and transforming the former slaves into free men and women is obvious. God commands His people: Three times a year—on the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the Feast of Weeks, and on the Feast of Booths—all your males shall appear before your God in the place that [God] will choose. They shall not appear before God empty-handed.

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This commandment to ascend three times a year to the place that God will choose (all agree that’s Jerusalem) goes beyond the animal sacrifices to be offered on each of these holidays. The holidays were meant to be festive times, when the entire nation should come together, not just in worship, but in joy and merriment, as the text makes abundantly clear:

You shall rejoice before your God with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the [family of the] Levite in your communities, and the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your midst, at the place where your God will choose to establish the divine name.

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But how does one rejoice before God? In his great legal code, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides)

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makes clear that rejoicing does not mean unabashed revelry. Yes, meat (from the animal sacrifices) and wine add to the day’s festivities, but a person shouldn’t become overly drawn to drinking wine, mirth, and levity, saying, ‘whoever indulges in these activities more is increasing [his observance of] the mitzvah of rejoicing.’ For drunkenness, profuse mirth, and levity are not rejoicing; they are frivolity and foolishness.

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Importantly, rejoicing on these holidays involves the service of the Creator of all existence.

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Maimonides defines this service as follows:

Although eating and drinking on the holidays are included in the positive commandment [to rejoice], one should not devote the entire day to food and drink. The following is the desired practice: In the morning, the entire people should get up and attend the synagogues and the houses of study where they pray and read a portion of the Torah pertaining to the holiday. Afterwards, they should return home and eat. Then they should go to the house of study, where they read [from the Written Law] and review [the Oral Law] until noon. After noon, they should recite the afternoon service and return home to eat and drink for the remainder of the day until nightfall.

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Rejoicing before the Lord is therefore both an intellectual and existential experience. The intellectual experience is through studying God’s Torah, especially the laws of the festival. The existential experience is by praying and hosting God’s children, the converts, orphans, widow, the destitute and the embittered. When you do this, especially on the festivals, you are essentially in God’s house, standing and rejoicing before God.

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This idea of standing and rejoicing before God on the festivals is inherently an act of nation building, and each of the major pilgrimage holidays has unique elements that foster a national identity. Let’s begin with the first of these festivals: Passover.

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Passover, of course, celebrates the Exodus from Egypt, when the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were liberated from slavery and tasked to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

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The rituals of the holiday are explicitly linked to the Exodus narrative. Take matzah, the unleavened bread that Jews are commanded to eat on the holiday. Matzah is the best-known symbol of the holiday, and God’s commandment to consume it is rationalized simply: And you shall explain to your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the LORD did for me when I went free from Egypt.’

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This is not an answer to be uttered and then forgotten but is meant to be revisited. As the Haggadah, the book that serves as a guide, script, and liturgy to the Passover seder, states: In every generation, an individual is obligated to view himself as if he himself left Egypt, for He redeemed not only our ancestors, but ourselves as well, as it is said, ‘And He took us out of there, in order to bring us to give us the Land that He swore to our fathers.’

Passover was also an important agricultural holiday (as were all the pilgrimage festivals) in biblical times. The festivity, always observed in the spring, originally marked the early harvesting of the barley, which was commemorated by the special offering of the Omer on the second day of the holiday. This is reflected in one of the names the Torah uses for the festival, Chag Ha’aviv, literally, the Springtime Festival. This name hints to the fact that Passover is in a sense, a festival of ripeness, because it always falls in the early spring, when the crops have just begun to ripen.

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Then, of course, there were the sacrificial rites associated with Passover.

During both the first and second commonwealths, when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, every family was expected to pilgrimage there to offer the Passover sacrifice. The sacrificial rite of the paschal lamb and its consumption was the main feature of the ceremonies ushering in the holiday. Unlike the offerings of other holidays, these lambs were slaughtered by individual Jews themselves, privately by each family, and not by the priests who served in the Temple. The priests merely poured the blood from these offerings on the base of the altar.

Another critical difference involved how the pascal lamb was eaten. It was not meant to be eaten alone.

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Instead, people had to register in advance to partake in the offering in fulfillment of the verse, you shall contribute [for the lamb] according to what each household will eat.

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The lamb also had to be consumed by midnight,

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ensuring that the sacrificial meat was eaten hurriedly, thereby invoking their ancestors who anxiously awaited their imminent departure from Egypt.

The next of the pilgrimage festivals is Pentecost (Shavuot in Hebrew). It is unique among the three pilgrimage festivals in that there are no Torah-ordained ritual obligations associated with the holiday. Nothing akin to eating matzah on Passover or sitting in a special booth (called a sukkah in Hebrew) during Sukkot. Pentecost is an exclusively agricultural holiday and is not linked to any historical event. Indeed, the Torah refers to this holiday as the Festival of the Harvest, Chag Hakatzir, because it was observed in early summer and marked the wheat harvest, the last grain harvest of the season. It also marked the beginning of the fruit harvest.

Among its core rituals was an interesting and unique pairing of sacrifices: two sheep offered as a public peace offering, accompanied by two loaves of bread. These loaves could only be baked from the year’s new wheat crop and only from the choicest wheat.

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The Rabbinic tradition explains that these loaves represented an offering of thanksgiving; the nation gathered to thank God for the successful grain harvest. By offering loaves of bread to God as a supplement to the animal sacrifices associated with all the pilgrimage festivals, the nation reminded itself that its sustenance comes from God.

A national day of thanks for all the good He bestows upon us? Sound familiar?

The last of the pilgrimage festivals, Sukkot (Tabernacles in English), is considered to be the most joyous and universal of the three pilgrimage festivals. Sukkot, like Passover and Pentecost, had important agricultural significance in ancient times. It marked the end of the agricultural year and the summer harvest; the Torah explicitly commands the Jewish people to rejoice with their families and communities.

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In contrast to the other pilgrimage holidays, Sukkot expresses a unique universality, and it does so in an unusual manner. The number of communal sacrifices offered during Sukkot far exceeds the number sacrificed at any other time of the year. More striking, on each of the seven days of the holiday, the number of lambs brought to the altar was twice that of other festivals (fourteen rather