Acharei Mot Kedoshim
No one would have known it from Lissy’s confident delivery today, but this wasn’t the easiest bit of Torah to read, with sacrifice, blood, and strange goats. Ah well, at least it wasn’t the bodily emissions of last week!
But these ancient Temple rituals, organised around systems of sacrifice and categories of purification, while easily dismissed as ancient and irrelevant, are the roots of so much that is central to our lives today. On Thursday night perhaps you joined me in watching the ritualised announcement of a new Pope, after two tense sightings of smoke, watched by throngs in St Peters square, that told them and us that the Churches leadership had not yet reached consensus. The subtle differences between how the new Pope Leo the 4th and the late Pope Francis conducted these carefully orchestrated moments were already being analysed within minutes, but both continued traditions that have both long long roots, and which have subtly changed and updated over the years, and all rituals do.
Almost 20 years ago, an American journalist, Elizabeth Gilbert, suffered a break down as her marriage collapsed. She decided to undertake a therapeutic journey of her own design, spending 4 months in Italy, eating, and not visiting the Pope, 4 months in India, praying and meditating, and 4 months in Indonesia, where she found love again. The resulting book was called ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and in 2010 a fairly mediocre film with Julia Roberts was made of her autobiographical story.
During the section in India, she finds that the prayer and meditation and silence of the ashram she is staying in allows all the trauma and distress she had supressed with food in Italy to come again to the surface. She heads to the roof of the Ashram in tears, and meets another resident up there, who helps her process some of what she is holding through writing poetry and disposing of it. Describing this episode she writes a passage that I have used several times in my own teaching. She wrote:
“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual or safekeeping.” Elizabeth Gilbert – Eat, Pray, Love
For me this speaks to such a deep truth about why we have religious rituals – whether it is for celebrating joyous moments, like a young woman who is growing up, or a couple about to embark on the next stage of life together, or holding our pain and grief up to the light so that its burden might be shared; like marking yahrzeit or going through the rituals of grief built around a funeral.
Our portion offers us an insight into some of the oldest ideas about how we as humans might use ritual to deal with the guilt we inevitably all carry about with us. Ancient Israelites used to place the burden of their individual guilts, gathered up into a collective, onto the head of a goat which was sent off into the wilderness, creating a physical and visual embodiment of their sins being taken away. We read sections of this in our Yom Kippur afternoon service, remembering that as our ancient ancestors had their ways of assuaging their guilt through ritual, Yom Kippur offers us a similar path through prayer, fasting, and time to reflect so that we can truly change ourselves.
A few days before Yom Kippur we also have the opportunity to send our sins out into the wilderness, but instead of a goat, we use a handful of breadcrumbs, or in our case as an Eco-shul, duck food, with which we throw away our sins, confessed to ourselves, into the water to be washed away. During this ritual, known as Tashlich, we commit to change, though sometimes we may find ourselves coming up short. Well, I do, I’m sure you all do much better with your commitments to change. And so just before Pesach, ritual offers us another chance. We once again collect up crumbs of bread, this time to cleanse the house, but now we burn them. In our house we use this as an opportunity to check in about what we still need to burn out of our lives, having silently named them at tashlich 6 months earlier. Our Judaism is filled with rich gifts of ritual to help us process life, and live it as well as we can.
When we read about sacrifices and goats, we may find ourselves either uninterested, or appalled. But for thousands of years Judaism has been taking the core of these ancient rituals, and transforming them into new ways to live our best lives. One of my passions in the rabbinate has been helping people find the right ritual to mark the unique moments each of them is processing, from celebrating the end of cancer treatment, to milestones in life that aren’t always publicly marked, to processing childhood trauma, our tradition is rich in opportunities to use ancient wisdom and modern creativity to hold these moments in.
Our portion this week is actually a double portion, we read from Acharei Mot, where we focus on ritual and finding holiness in each of our lives as spiritual creatures. As we read on into Kedoshim, we are presented with some of the most famous and important laws explaining how we make our selves holy as a people. From loving your neighbour as yourself to leaving a percentage of your crop for the poor, honouring the elderly and avoiding gossip. Our Judaism creates holiness not just through ritual practice, but through the creation of an ethical code of living as a community, taking care of one another and working towards justice and equity.
As Alyssia embarks on her adult Jewish life today, and Saul and Tory sprint towards the start of their married life together, my hope for the three of you, and for all of us, is that Judaism will always be there as a force in your lives, providing ritual and support that makes life’s journey meaningful. Meanwhile as a community we are all part of ensuring we create a holier, kinder, more just world together, and we know we can do so much more together than alone.
As we find the rituals that will hold us through life’s winding journey, may we also each be part of building holiness in the world through kindness, care, justice and equality. Cain Yehi Ratzon – May this be God’s will, venomar. Amen.
