Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Purity, Danger, Holiness, Order: A Tzav - Sh'mini Double Header

There are way too many big ideas floating around in my head right now. I was mulling over Tzav for a long time, and when I decided what I wanted to say about that I got food poisoning or stomach flu and I didn’t write any of it down, and then I read Sh’mini and so even though strictly speaking I should have one post for each parsha, I’m combining them. And I don’t even think this is a d’var so much as it is the beginnings of my own personal Zohar. ( Flight of ideas? Check. Grandiosity? Check. )

Tzav is Leviticus Chapters 6 - 8. There are more instructions for sacrifice. I don’t really care about those. This is what interests me:

1) About the grain offering, Leviticus 6:11 “Anything that touches these shall become holy.”
2) Again, about the purification offering, Leviticus 6:20: “Anything that touches its flesh shall become holy...”
3) 7:19-20: “Flesh that touches anything impure shall not be eaten; it shall be consumed in fire. As for other flesh, only he who is pure shall eat such flesh. But the person who, in a state of impurity, eats flesh from the LORD’s sacrifices of well-being, that person shall be cut off from his kin.”

Then we get Sh’mini, Leviticus Chapters 9-11. In Sh’mini the Tabernacle is consecrated for what seems like, seriously, the 18th time. We also get the curious incident of the sons with the alien fire pans, Chapter 10:

Now Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before the LORD alien fire, which He had not enjoined upon them. And fire came forth from the LORD and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of the LORD. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD meant when He said:

‘Through those near to me I show Myself holy, and gain glory before all the people.’”

And Aaron was silent.

And then for much of the rest of the parsha we get kashrut.

So what do I want to say about all this?

First, something strange. My chumash, Etz Hayim, has a note attached to Leviticus 6:11: “The condition of holiness, unlike that of impurity, was not regarded as contagious. Thus it would be better to translate: ‘Anyone who is to touch these must be in a holy state.’ Only consecrated persons may have contact with sacrificial materials.”

Well, okay, but that’s not what it says. It says ‘anything that touches these shall become holy.’ And then, point 2 above, at 6:20: “Anything that touches its flesh shall become holy...” Now, I am aware of the ridiculousness of my arguing with the editors of my chumash about what words that are written in Hebrew I can’t read might mean. But I presume if they could have translated faithfully those words as ‘Anyone who is to touch these must be in a holy state’ that they would have, and since they did not I can only assume that the words in Hebrew are closer to what I read in English than to their explanation of what those words really mean.

So there is impurity (tumah), and there is holiness (kadosh). Sometimes it seems as though holiness and purity are contagious, and sometimes it seems like it is impurity that is contagious. And then there’s the strangeness (to 21st-century me) of holiness and purity somehow being, in all of this, two ends of the same axis. Why should they have anything to do with each other at all? And where is goodness and righteousness in all of this? It seems like in this scheme we can be at the same time righteous and impure, i.e. un-holy. And vice-versa. Like there’s an entire other dimension of goodness and badness that is orthogonal to the holiness-impurity dimension. And again, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

In college I read Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo:

As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment.

[ ...]

In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea. There is nothing fearful or unreasoning in our dirt-avoidance: it is a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience. If this is so with our separating, tidying, and purifying, we should interpret primitive purification and prophylaxis in the same light. (p2)

We can re-concieve the axis of impurity-holiness as disorder-order, and doing so helps it make sense to those of us who have this specialized idea of sanctity in which, frankly, impurity seems beside the point. But this does not mean that holiness then shrinks to being about getting organized or imposing our human ideas of order on the world. (Well, I think a lot of people do worship ‘order’ -- worship an idea that somehow we can get everything under control if we just use the right system or keep our email inboxes empty or have the right kind of calendar or mind hack or whatever.

When we, as humans, turn disorder into order, it’s a small, lower-case kind of order. That’s important, that order. But in itself it is neither truly achievable, nor is it holy. Without a higher-level Order toward which we orient our efforts to make little-0 order, we are just sweeping the outdoors.

So the Torah gives us many rules about little-o order, but it gives them to us as a means to bring big-O order into the world --- in the service of perfecting the material world, in order to bring about Olam Ha-Ba, the world-to-come. The creative movement is toward God, the Source of Order in the universe.

( The prophets were constantly railing against the Israelites for forgetting that the little-o rules set out in the Torah were little-o rules, and behaving abominably but performing perfectly ordered sacrifices in the Temple. God spits on your perfectly-ordered sacrifices, said the prophets, because you are not truly directing your hearts toward the Source of Order in the world. You are worshipping a system for bringing Holiness, that is, God’s Order, to the material world. But to worship the system is misdirected. It is just a system. It does not tell you where it’s meant to lead.
)

Now we are in a position to understand what happened to Nadab and Abihu. They thought that they could make their own little-o order and elevate it to Big-O Order. Like the builders of the Tower of Babel, they forgot Who the Real Source of Order was. The Real Source of Order did not take kindly to that.

But actually, we’re not in a position to understand this at all, just as Job was not in a position to understand why God afflicted him, and we are none of us able to understand death, or love, or music, or even one person’s brain. Big-O Order does not stay in its little categories, in little boxes or little words or our little minds. Big-O Order bursts out all over in a profusion, in a burning fire, in absolute mind-boggling absurdity and grandeur and mystery. Before Big-O Order, we, like Aaron, must be silent.

God wants our little human orders too, don’t get me wrong. We must serve God with what we are, and we are little and we are human, and God loves our little human orders. I would say we should try not to forget that our human orders are just human, but I think in our heart of hearts we hardly need reminding. We are just as likely to flee in terror and confusion from God’s Order as we are to rush toward it as a beloved Home. It is too big for us, and it is everywhere apparent that it is so. We are just as likely to see a forest as a dark and confusing place, full of lions and tigers and bears, as we are to see it as a beautiful and intricately rendered example of a Higher Order. Sometimes we are able to catch a glimpse of that Higher Order, and even to enter into it, to become part of it. And sometimes even seeing it from the corners of our eyes will burn us right up. That is why ahavat hasham and yirat hashem always go together, they are two sides of the same coin: the love of God and the fear/awe of God.

( Incidentally, this helps explain for Christians why Jesus could claim both to be affirming the Law and yet regularly ‘break’ it. Jesus saw himself as being part of the Higher Order, and thus like his father, could not be subject to little o-order as others were. Rather, little-o order was subject to him. That is the meaning of miracles, after all -- they are an explosion of Divine Order into the Natural Order, which is an order greater than our human order. And really, when you think about it, what sense could it make to complain to Jesus that he broke the Sabbath by healing someone? Wouldn’t you rather complain that Jesus healed someone? To complain that little-o order (even that in the service of the Holy, such as the Mitzvot are) is being broken when the Natural Order is also being broken seems remarkably small-minded. Which was after all the point, right? Small-minded Pharisees, small-minded Sadducees, and then Jesus, bursting out all over the place. No, husband, I am not converting to Christianity. I do have Christian readers, though, and I do read Christians, and understanding what Christians think is so important about Jesus is not the same as believing that Jesus was who he said (or is said to have said) he was. It’s just explaining why, in all the stories, he is so spectacularly unconcerned with keeping the Mitzvot while at the same time insisting that they are still to be kept. Also bringing up Jesus reminded me that actually the axis of order should look like this:

disorder - little-o-order (human order) - Natural Order (often looks like disorder, but see chaos theory or something) - Divine Order/Holiness.

But then there is tragedy. Is tragedy just disorder? Or is it just part of the Natural Order (earthquakes) ? Or is it sometimes, like the tragedy of Aaron’s sons, a Divine Order that we cannot understand? Or does it come about when we worship our human order instead of the Divine Order? ( c.f. Nietzche, who figured any order you wanted and could make happen was just the best sort of order there could be, and Godwin’s Law says there’s your Nazi Superman right there.) Or when we attempt to impose our little human order on the Natural Order in ways that will make the Natural Order uncongenial to humans (global warming, nuclear power)?

But there I go again, hoping that my little brain can tidy all this up with some well-chosen words. Derrida would tell me how deluded that is. This life is a terrifying proposition, especially since it is not a proposition but a fact. God speaks out of the whirlwind and what can I say in response? But the odd thing is that God does not want me to remain silent, at least not all of the time. God wants me to respond. God wants my little brain’s attempts at order. If God did not want what order we humans could make, then why would God have bothered with us humans at all? God has given us each a divine spark and we can use it to bootstrap our little order into Holiness, to elevate our offerings. Neither I nor God need Derrida to point out all the cracks and imperfections in the work. Never mind. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

C.S. Lewis: “Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?” (from Mere Christianity).

And Lewis again: “[T]he real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.” (ibid)

I do not know why Lewis thinks this is only a problem for Christians, although perhaps it is because Christians, unlike Jews, do not have a set prayer meant to be said each morning, just upon waking, to remind them of exactly the thing he says they need to be reminded of. (snark.) It’s a human thing, that prayer, a little-o human technology, just some words in an ancient language. It’s called Modeh Ah’nee, and in English it reads: “I thank You, living and eternal King, for giving me back my soul in mercy. Great is your faithfulness.” I would like to say it every morning when I wake, because I’d like to come in out of the wind. I would like to say it, but I don’t. New habits are hard.

But here’s good news about habits: In 2010 our household gave about 3 times more money that the IRS considers to be charitable donations than we did in 2009. Some of that is because we joined a synagogue and synagogues, like churches, are nonprofits. But most of it is because I decided I wanted to become more generous and I worked at it, and because I worked at it my husband worked at it too, just with tiny little human systems, like every thirteen weeks is my generosity week and when organizations I care about ask me for money that week I generally give it to them, and when people ask me for money on the street I give some to them, and at the end of each day I note down how I’ve been generous (or failed to be) and what I could do better, and all these little human things add up, finally, into transformation: I can feel (and the IRS can see at least some evidence), that I have actually become a more generous person. ( Which is not to say that I am particularly generous. I am not. But at least the direction of movement is good.)

That is not the most amazing thing, though. The most amazing thing is that I see that the direction of movement is good. I have a sense that Generosity is Good. It is Good, it is Important, and when I use little human technologies to become a more generous person, I am doing exactly what God wants me to do.

Note: I am not stupid. I do not quite understand what I mean when I talk about God this way, but I certainly don’t mean that God is some guy up there rooting for me to give more money to Tsunami relief because that is God’s Plan For My Life. And about generosity being a Good Thing, (there’s a dissertation for you: Purity, Danger, and Martha Stewart: Good Things as Secular Religion.) -- I know just as well as you do that the evolutionary psychologists and the game theorists have done altruism every-which-way. It’s just that, like my favorite physicist-cum-anglican-priest, John Polkinghorne, I don’t think they’ve been very convincing about it: “Although atheism might seem simpler conceptually, it treats beauty and morals and worship as some form of cultural or social brute facts, which accords ill with the seriousness with which these experiences touch us as persons.” (Faith of a Physicist, page 70). So with generosity. You can tell me about kin-group-reciprocity. Actually, it’d probably be the other way around -- I’d tell you about kin-group-reciprocity. But in the end it seems a more satisfying answer that I feel glad about becoming more generous because becoming more generous is actually Important, because it is moving me closer to Holiness.

Which brings me back to perhaps the original great mystery, which is how impurity and disorder can possibly be related to holiness when holiness should be all about goodness, right? And the answer for Jews is that all our little human orderings, our rituals and mitzvot, add up to More, as long as we keep feeding the divine spark within ourselves, as long as we keep the connection to God. Order and goodness and holiness are all related, in a Divine feedback loop.

Hypergraphia? Check.

No comments:

Post a Comment