With this week’s parashah, Vayikra, we enter the culturally foreign world of Leviticus. It’s hard to resist the impulse to tune out. Vayikra takes us into a thicket of rituals and laws about animal sacrifices, skin diseases, moldy eruptions, purity status, and . . . have I lost you? Wait! With a little cultural translation, Leviticus can inspire us in surprising ways. Let me share a story about how my eyes were opened in just this way by a 7th grade Hebrew school student years ago.
I was teaching about the offerings in Vayikra, and, no surprise – many of the students started saying how bizarre and gross they found it all. I tried to get them to empathize with their ancestors, who lived in a very different time and had a different understanding of how to feel close to God. It wasn’t working. Soon students were making fun of the Israelites and their penchant for slaughtering goats and rams, sorting through innards, sprinkling blood, and grilling meat so that God could enjoy the aroma.
That’s when Evan came to my rescue. Evan was an angry, alienated kid who sat in the back and usually spent all of class in surly silence until 5:45 p.m. would arrive and release him from Hebrew School mitzrayim. Anyway, as his classmates overran me with their ridicule, something in Evan snapped. Raising his voice, he announced:
“You think animal sacrifices are gross? Well which do you think is more moral? Doing a sacred ritual and dealing with God every single time you kill an animal for its meat, or anonymously shoving millions of animals into crowded pens and cages so that they’re growing up in their own feces on factory farms, and filling the animals up with drugs that make them sick just to fatten them up some more, and then shipping them out and slaughtering them by the millions without even thinking about how they feel, and then cutting up their body parts, shrink-wrapping them in plastic and lining the walls of grocery store refrigerator cases with a horror show of shrink-wrapped dead animal body parts from factory farms while you and your parents stand there talking about soccer and gas prices in front of this wall of death and animal body parts, acting like there’s nothing wrong? Please people.” And then he said no more.
What Evan reminded me of was one of the core insights of Leviticus: that in the many ways that we humans consume, whether it’s food or clothing or the labor of others, we have an obligation to recognize the ever-present kedusha (holiness) in the seemingly ordinary aspects of life and honor it. Our ancestors did this around the act of slaughtering animals for meat by pairing that act with a priestly encounter with divine mystery. Even when Deuteronomic reforms permitted them to slaughter animals for meat in their home communities, they were still instructed to pour out the blood and recognize the common life force they shared with the animal. While we shouldn’t return to these ancient practices, Leviticus reminds us that denying the kedusha that is present in all moments, creatures, and things leads to a desacralized culture of indifference.
This call to bring sanctity and awareness to the intimate and day-to-day parts of our lives fuels T’ruah’s work on justice in supply chains. The routine decisions we make—that we need to make every day to live our lives—have consequences for the lives of others. In our often desacralized culture, it’s easy to lose track of what’s behind the conveniently packaged things we buy, whether it’s the cruelty of factory farming, the inhumane treatment of the farmworkers who harvest tomatoes, or the modern slavery that can be part of producing so many goods we buy cheaply. Leviticus reminds us of the common life-force we share with the people who produce the goods we rely on.
A final thought: Leviticus contains some very problematic and agonizing verses, no doubt. Between our aversion to these painful passages and our cultural remove from the world it describes, it’s easy for us to shove it aside. My hope is that, with care and fresh questions, we can find within it a call to renew our sensitivity and respect for kedusha as it manifests in every aspect of our lives.
Rabbi Maurice Harris is the author of two books, Moses: A Stranger among Us and Leviticus: You Have No Idea, from Cascade Books. He has a new book forthcoming about the ancient sage, Joshua ben Hananiah.