Vayikra

Vayikra - Michael Harris

Michael Harris is rabbi of Hampstead (United) Synagogue, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the London School of Jewish Studies and a Visiting Faculty Member at Yeshivat Ma'ale Gilboa, Israel. He is a frequent presenter at Limmud Conferences and Day Limmuds.

This Shabbat marks the beginning of the reading of the third of the five books of the Torah: the Book of Vayikra, Leviticus.

The start of a new book provides an opportunity to reflect, at a very general level, on the structure of the Torah so far. We began our reading of Bereishit (Genesis) in an unmistakeably universalistic vein, with the story of the creation of the world. As we continued through the Book of Genesis, however, the focus narrowed radically - to the first Jewish family, the family of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. Moving on to the Book of Shemot (Exodus), we learned of the singling out of one nation, the Jews, as God's chosen people and as the recipients of His Torah. And in the second half of Exodus, with the construction of the Mishkan or Tabernacle, we reached the climax of this particularistic process: God dwelling, as it were, in the midst of the Jewish people. "And they shall make Me a Tabernacle and I shall dwell in their midst".

Here the contemporary Israeli scholar Rabbi Yehuda Shaviv makes a beautiful suggestion. We might have expected, in light of the conceptual thrust of the Torah so far, that when Vayikra begins, the particularistic trend would deepen. When God calls Moses from the Mishkan in the opening words of Vayikra, we expect a rarefied and exclusivist message. Yet just here the Torah surprises us. God's instruction to Moses in verse 2 concerns "Adam ki yakriv", "a person who offers". As R. Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th century scholar and commentator), preceded by Hizkuni (13th century commentator), emphasise in their commentaries, anyone, Jew or non-Jew, may offer a sacrifice. At precisely the juncture at which we expect the Torah to become yet more particularistic, we are instead transported full circle back to the beginning of Bereishit, a time when there was no chosen people and when everyone equally was invited to draw close to God. The Mishkan, its successor Temples and the sacrificial system, as well as facilitating the intimacy of God and Israel, thus turn out also to encapsulate a potently universalistic ideal. "For My House shall be a House of prayer for all peoples" (Isaiah 56:7).

Unfortunately, it is not difficult to find concrete contemporary instances to which the global concerns of Vayikra urgently need to be applied. For any Jewish person of conscience, the current situation in Darfur is a cause of profound disquiet. The lives of millions of people are at stake. Decent people said 'Never Again' after the Shoah and much more recently after Rwanda. This time action must match the words. All good people and governments must do everything possible to prevent further tragedy, and the Jewish community in particular must help ensure that this issue remains in the public eye.

Only in that way will we be faithful to the message of Vayikra and its glorious challenge to integrate in our Judaism the particularistic and the universalistic, reaching out from the matrix of a proud religious identity to embrace all those created in God's image.