Divrei Torah

March 21, 2015

PDF:  Va-Yikra D'var.pdf

If you look at page 595 in our Torah book Etz Hayim, Chapters 4 and 5 of today’s parsha Va-Yikra are described with the heading “The Expiatory Sacrifices.” The word expiatory is usually defined as having to do with atoning, or making amends or reparation. But as the note on p. 595 says, the animal sacrifices described in these chapters were performed for acts that were unintentional. Do we need to atone for things we did when we had no intention of wrongdoing? What if we do something with positive intentions, but we end up causing harm?

In preparing for today’s d’var I looked at a book of (Reform) Women’s Commentary on the Torah. (Eds. Eskenazi and Weiss) That book’s heading for Chapters 4 and 5 was “Procedures for Offerings to Restore Order.” The commentary goes on to say:

“The book of Leviticus maintains that God has created a harmonious world and that persons must—and can—restore that harmony when they have…damaged such harmony”. The commentary also says that the reparation offering (the offering that’s described in Chapter 5) “reconstructs or restores the system to its normative, harmonious wholeness.”  (p. 578)

So the sacrifices were rituals that put things back to rights. Presumably people felt better after the rituals were performed.

None of us in 20015 are likely to start sacrificing animals, but something that we probably do have in common with the Israelites is that if we do something wrong but don’t realize it until later, we often do have a kind of yucky feeling—a feeling we would like to go away. We feel out of sorts, out of harmony or equilibrium.

A lot of Dorshei members recently read the book Waking Up White by Debby Irving. She gave a good example of something she did unintentionally that hurt another person, and I’d like to read that:

I’d been enjoying a new friendship with Rebecca, a black woman whose daughter played field hockey with my daughter. We gravitated toward one another on the sidelines at games and talked about everything from our kids to their schools to politics to racism. After the last game of the season, as we were standing in the field house, I asked Rebecca if her daughter was planning to do a winter sport. Instead of using her daughter’s name, however, I used the name of the one other black girl on the team. The second I said it, I questioned myself, wondering, Oh, my god, what is her name? I had known her name before the conversation, but now I was so flustered I couldn’t even straighten myself out. In the moment before she gently corrected me, a look flashed across Rebecca’s face that let me know I’d mixed up the names. Though I continued to chat as if it were no big deal, inside I was horrified. I knew how much mistaken identity means to black people…Mistaken identity…carries unspeakable history….Mistaken identity has caused everything from a “Do my co-workers even know who I am?” feeling of invisibility among people of color to false accusations resulting in retaliation, incarceration, and death.” (pp. 224-5)

I’m not going to finish reading this section of the book, but I do want to let you know that she apologized to her friend and they had a long talk. She ended up feeling they were “on solid ground again.” (p. 226)

I’ll give a couple of examples from my own life. This is something that happened thirty years ago. I was at a party and I made a thoughtless negative comment about another woman, who wasn’t at the party. (Over the past 30 years I’ve done a lot of thinking about the concept of right speech, and I’d like to think that I wouldn’t make the same comment now, but I still sometimes find words slipping out of my mouth that I later regret.) In this party situation, somehow very soon after I made the comment I realized the person I’d spoken about negatively was the therapist of one of the women to whom I’d been talking. It’s hard to remember, but I think I learned this by overhearing a conversation in which the woman who was the client was upset.

Another example: when I was in college my friend Bonnie and I had the great idea of cleaning her father’s prized antique Tiffany lamp. We scrubbed away using Windex, which contained ammonia, not knowing that this could actually cause damage to the lamp. When Bonnie’s father came home from work and found out what we’d done, he tried to be polite because I was a guest, but he was NOT happy.

These examples, mine and Debby Irving’s, are in the category of being “cringe-worthy.” The social worker Brene Brown says that when we make these kinds of mistakes the experience we have is a feeling of shame, which she calls “the swampland of the soul.” (p. 36, The Gifts of Imperfection—the phrase was originally from Carl Jung)

She describes the physical reactions that go along with shame. We might turn red and feel what she calls “the warm wash of shame.” Our heart might race, we could feel dizzy or nauseous. Brown says that her mouth gets dry, time slows down, and she gets tunnel vision. In the example Debby Irving gave in her book, she said she felt sick and humiliated. When people feel this way, they often withdraw from other people and isolate themselves, or another typical reaction is to feel angry and annoyed and have the impulse to snap at or blame other people.

So, what can we do to feel better, to make things right, to regain equilibrium? Sometimes it’s feasible to talk directly to a person we’ve hurt, but it’s not always possible—the person may not want to or be capable of talking to us, or they may no longer be alive. Or maybe the impact of our wrongdoing is diffuse—say we realize we’ve wasted a lot of electricity or fuel. Or maybe the person we’re hurting the most is ourselves—through ingesting too much food or alcohol, or playing too many computer games.

Brene Brown suggests we share stories like these with each other, bringing them out into the light. When we keep them quiet and secret and judge ourselves, our shame about these human mistakes grows exponentially. But, she says, it is human nature to want to feel worthy of love and belonging, and true belonging only happens when we can present our authentic, imperfect selves.

In Va-Yikra, the offering of sacrifices is not an act of hiding, it is an act that happens within community. In our modern times the animal sacrifice ritual is not going to work. But are there perhaps new rituals we can create? One fabulous resource I just learned about is a project connected with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, a website called Ritualwell.org. I haven’t found a substitute on the website for the sacrifices we read about today, but there are all kinds of other rituals for healing and for hard times.

In Rabbi Shefa Gold’s book Torah Journeys, she writes that the chatat animal sacrifice celebrates the moment of clarity when you realize that you’ve gone astray. It’s like when you are meditating and you notice that your mind has wandered, and you return to your breath. Shefa Gold writes that “when awareness reveals that we have acted unconsciously, and thus have unintentionally done damage…our remorse can be transformed to resolve,”…we can be empowered to turn toward reconciliation and wholeness.

In ending, I’m interested in whether people resonated with the examples I gave of realizing your mistakes, and what people think it would be helpful to do after we have the moment of clarity and perhaps find ourselves in that “swampland” of shame.

(A discussion followed, and I ended with the poem below.)

A poem I found on the Ritualwell website, by Rabbi Jill Hausman:

Where are we now?
Not in Babylon
Or Spain;
Not in Germany
Or even Russia.
We are back in Jerusalem Not to rebuild
A past we can never recreate
Or to yearn for a time when
Animal sacrifice still had meaning.
What shall we build now?
Not a structure of stone
Cut with the implements of war;
Not a city where divisions tear us apart
And hatred burns away all the softness,
But a temple of justice
A tent of peace
A diversity of belonging
A  home.