Thoughts on Parashat Tzav
Menachem Mirski
At this moment there are 7.9 billion people living in the world. Those people speak different languages and they practice different religious and various customs and traditions. In short: they are representatives of many different cultures. Each of these cultures has its specific values, its ethos and teachings, telling people what they should do and what they shouldn’t do in their lives. Sometimes they overlap with moral concepts, since many of these cultural norms can be ascribed moral significance, and especially if the effects of acting according to these norms are somehow impacting other people.
There is no sharp, easily established line between strictly moral norms and “purely cultural” norms. There is a whole bunch of norms that fall in the gray zone between them and we are not really able to state if we should look at a given cultural/religious norm from a moral point of view or not. One such norm in Judaism is the prohibition against eating blood, which is stated in our Torah portion for this week:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]And you must not consume any blood, either of bird or of animal, in any of your settlements. Anyone who eats blood shall be cut off from his kin. (Wajikra/Leviticus 7:26-27)[/perfectpullquote]
But this prohibition relates to the consumption of blood and it doesn’t make it a complete taboo for us:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Then he brought forward the ram of burnt offering. Aaron and his sons laid their hands upon the ram’s head, and it was slaughtered. Moses dashed the blood against all sides of the altar.
He brought forward the second ram, the ram of ordination. Aaron and his sons laid their hands upon the ram’s head, and it was slaughtered. Moses took some of its blood and put it on the ridge of Aaron’s right ear, and on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot. (Wajikra/Leviticus 8:18-19;22-23) [/perfectpullquote]
The punishment for eating blood was the expulsion from Israel’s community and this is an eternal law, which is supposed to distinguish us, Jews, from all the other nations and religious groups across the world. According to Maimonides ancient pagans believed that by consuming blood one was consuming the soul of the creature they were eating. Blood was also eaten and spilled around in order to meet with the spirits which allowed to foretell the future – spilled blood allowed these spirits to participate in the feast along with people.
And thus the prohibition against eating blood was supposed to eliminate spiritualistic practices, although, as we can see from the Torah text, blood was actually used for certain purposes – it was sprinkled over the altar and it was smeared on the bodily parts mentioned in the text. Similarly, the idea that the souls of live creatures are present in their blood has not been eliminated from Judaism through this prohibition; on the contrary – it was exactly the reason why its consumption was prohibited – since all the souls belong to God and humans cannot eat souls. Blood also has a certain other, fundamental function – an expiatory function, about which we learn in another chapter of Leviticus:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have assigned it to you for making expiation for your lives upon the altar; it is the blood, as life, that effects expiation. (Wajikra/Leviticus 17:11)[/perfectpullquote]
And therefore an appropriate (i.e. done according to the rules of Divine law) “releasing the soul” from an animal and the appropriate “using of this soul” had the power to absolve of sins. So it’s not true that the Israelites were not spilling blood by offering sacrifices and consuming them. They were spilling blood, but they were doing it in a very special way. But it’s very likely that the purpose of this special usage of blood in the longer perspective was to fully “phase out” ritual usage of blood, which would be consistent with the concept offered by Maimonides, who offers exactly such a theory – that the ultimate goal was to eliminate animal sacrifices as such, and thus also blood “from the liturgy”.
But an opposite concept also exists in our tradition. Nachmanides claims, in line with the letter of Torat kochanim (the law regulating the ritual duties of priests, originating in Leviticus – Vajikra), that not only does blood possess expiatory characteristics, but also that absolving humans of sins is the purpose of the existence of the blood of (specific) animals, and thus the goal of the existence of these animals as such. Presumably this was not the only purpose of their existence, and it was not indispensable and eternal, since the subsequent reflections of Nachmanides regarding this topic move in the direction of the notion that the prohibition against eating blood, as well as the law of kosher slaughtering of only kosher animals was ultimately aimed at restoring the primary vegetarianism of humanity, and thus the state from very ancient times before the Flood – the beginnings of human existence (of course understood in the Biblical way), as expressed in the verse from Genesis:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]And to all the animals on land, to all the birds of the sky, and to everything that creeps on earth, in which there is the breath of life, [I give] all the green plants for food.” And it was so. (Bereshit/Genesis 1:30)[/perfectpullquote]
This concept was fully expressed by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Cook, called simply Rav Cook, who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
So here we undoubtedly have a theory of humanity’s cultural development: the goal of a developing (religious) culture is the gradual elimination of suffering inflicted by human hands. The purpose of this is for people to gradually get rid of the habit of “needing to inflict suffering on others” – the gradual elimination of this need. And thus this development is also aimed at eliminating moral evil, since from a psychological standpoint that’s exactly how (moral) evil should be defined: as deliberate actions aimed at inflicting pain and suffering on other living creatures which arise from the very realization of the fact that we ourselves are sensitive to the experience of pain and suffering. This is the exact opposite logic of Hillel’s rule: Daalach s’nei le’chavrach la taaveid, i.e. That which is hateful to you do not do to another; (Talmud Shabbat 31a, a rule which exists in many cultures across the world). The logic of absolute evil says: do to another exactly that which would cause yourself suffering.
This cultural development often doesn’t go hand in hand with civilizational development, for a very simple reason: civilizational development is not actually the development of “human spirit”, but rather of various human tools. These, if used well, can contribute and do in fact contribute to cultural development. But of course they can be used for goals which have nothing to do with the development of “human spirit” or for goals which are absolutely contrary to this development. Civilizational developments can serve both human good as well as oppressing people, exploiting or killing them. Civilizational developments (e.g. the Internet) expand the human potential for doing both good and evil. Their “Messianic” character boils down only to the fact that they can bring closer the end of the world (as we know it) in one way or another: or they can help bring about the Messianic era, in which people will universally stop doing evil to one another, but they could also help bring about terrible tragedies and suffering to humanity, which we would never have experienced if it weren’t for those tools, especially if the whole thing is supported by cynical, hateful or nihilistic philosophies and ideologies. That’s why we should always use these tools reasonably, with prudence and while focusing on true values, such as justice, love, freedom, health and life itself.
The approaching Pesach festival requires that we comply with various additional rules and that we make various “food-related sacrifices”. So may this festival always be a good training for us in acting and behaving with appropriate deliberation, a training that consistently strengthens our ability to choose that which is good – which is what we really want and what makes up the essence of our freedom – and in our ability to reject that which is bad for us, which doesn’t serve us well or that someone else has arbitrarily imposed on us.
Shabbat shalom,
Chag Kasher v’Sameach.
Translated from Polish by: Marzena Szymańska-Błotnicka
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