Parashah of the week: Vayikra

This year, Rabbi Miriam is one of 5 rabbis and Jewish educators writing the Jewish Chronicle’s parasha column.

“When a person commits a trespass, being unwittingly remiss about any of God’s sacred things: They shall bring as a penalty to God a ram without blemish from the flock” Leviticus 5:15

Parashah of the week: Vayikra

I’m a rabbi, but I confess to reaching the book of Vayikra and feeling daunted, alienated and a bit queasy, reading chapter upon chapter about sacrifices.

Two windows into Vayikra have helped me in recent years: Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum’s section on korbanot (sacrifices) in his excellent Torah L’Am course, and Dr Aviva Gottleib Zornberg’s book The Hidden Order of Intimacy. The two couldn’t be more different.

Rabbi Zarum has a PhD in quantum physics and thinks scientifically, in categories and through charts. Aviva Zornberg’s PhD is in literature and she thinks in terms of poetry, psychology and the human condition.

I’ll share one example. Both Zornberg and Zarum highlight two categories of sacrifice – asham and chatat. Zarum charts them out, showing how chatat sacrifices were brought for unintentional “slip-ups”, known in Hebrew as b’shogeg. Even a king or Cohen Gadol (High Priest) could bring one of these. Asham sacrifices are part of reparation for what are clearly intentional crimes – b’mezid in Hebrew: robbery, embezzlement and the like.

Meanwhile, Zornberg dives into psychology, asking why unintentional sins need atonement at all. She suggests that even if a sin is committed out of ignorance, once the consciousness shifts and we realise the error, we bear a responsibility, feel a sense of guilt and require absolving of a burden: we can call these our slip-ups.

The flip side of this is those situations when we err yet excuse ourselves, coming up with reasons why we did no wrong: our moral blind-spots.

The dual concept of slip-ups and blindspots feels very contemporary to me, and a more complex take on “intentional” and “unintentional” sins. Some believe they never do wrong, while others feel guilty about everything. Perhaps we all carry both sides within us – Jewish guilt and entitlement intertwined. Korbanot provide accountability without self-flagellation. For those who over analyse every interaction, however b’shogeg, there’s an accessible process for closure and release. For those who never admit fault, even leaders, there’s accountability. In an era where world leaders face court – or try to evade it – Vayikra offers a dignified system of justice at all levels of society.

And for those of us who can lie awake at night over-analysing conversations and wondering if we offended someone, there’s a release for that too.

Vayikra isn’t an easy book to access or relate to, but I encourage us to look beyond the animal anatomy and gore. With a little help from sensitive scholars – from the scientific to the psychological – there is wisdom to be mined.