Come Close

Vayikra: Leviticus 1:1 - 5:26

“Come close, come close, it’s time for the STorah of the week,” they beckoned with a stage-whispered invocation and continued “it’s a story of a family where some are born, and some come join, and this STorah belongs to all of us.”

Sometimes it was Shira Kline of Lab/Shul ​​, sometimes it was Steve Guedalia, and occasionally it was someone else offering the invitation, but no matter what we were invited. Every week. Quoted in an article about Shabbat ShaMorning by Stephanie Fink, Shira said, “Our goal is a . . . dimensional experience where what we do on one side of the screen is solely to activate something on the other side of the screen.” 

Liddy and I felt it. Every week. We felt it when our tallitot became magic portals into the Garden. We felt it when we bowed toward the “light in each and everyone, the light in everyone” . . . exactly, in the space of the Barechu, and looked into one another’s eyes screen to screen to screen. We felt it when it was time to dance (with Ellen Allard). We felt it when we ended the Shema with echad - one - by extending our number-one-finger toward everyone else’s number-one-finger and connected with our children and our grandchildren and our grown-ups across space and time. We experienced an everybody-friendly, God-optional community in which God was an actual option and where, since God is an option I choose, I felt God in everything.  

Then the pandemic shifted.
Like all ephemeral art subject to time's transience, those sweet Shabbat ShaMorning gatherings ended.
At least, they ended as gatherings.
Once experienced, exceptional art changes us and we carry it with us. 
This week, I’m carrying it into Vayikra.

When God says to Moses:

Speak to the Israelite people, and say to them: When any of you presents an offering of cattle to Adonai: You shall choose your offering from the herd or from the flock. Leviticus 1:2

When God says that in the text, I hear, “Come close.”

קׇרְבָּן - korban - has the root kuf, bet, reish. Technically, it’s any variety of offering described and commanded in the Torah. The plural form is korbanot. Most of the time, it refers to offerings given from humans to God to honor, win favor, or ask for forgiveness. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, such offerings were prohibited because the only place allowed to make them no longer existed. Briefly reinstated during the Jewish-Roman wars in the second century and continued in a few communities after that, for the most part making burnt offerings of animals - something we usually see translated as “sacrifices” - made way for prayer or gifts of tzedakah to accomplish similar intentions.

This moment in Leviticus in Vayikra 1:2 is the first time it shows up in the Torah. We will see it again 39 more times in Leviticus, 38 in Numbers, and twice in Ezekiel. According to Maimonides, about 100 of the 613 commandments directly concern sacrifices, excluding those that concern the actual Temple and the priests themselves of which there are about another fifty.

Some hold the view that korbanot were remedies for sins, and sure, some were. They were also brought in thanks, gratitude, and love. Because while we could read this parsha, Leviticus 1:1 - 5:26, as a very long rendition of a bloody Temple service no longer relevant to us - particularly those of us who are vegetarians - we need to read it as a response to an invitation.

As interesting as all of that may be, Rashi has questions about why אָדָם - Adam - is brought into the conversation in our verse which is the actual Hebrew rather than what is translated as “any of you”. It could be “any man” but Rashi asks what was the significant characteristic of the first man - adam harishon - a.k.a. Adam, and basically concludes that anything Adam offered was his since everything was his so nothing was acquired by robbery or deceit. Therefore, teaches Rashi, so too we should not offer anything we’ve acquired nefariously. (Leviticus Rabbah 2:7). Or, we might say, anything that isn’t fully ours to offer.

Of course, that makes me think of a story.

Once upon a time, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was walking with his student Rabbi Yehoshua near Jerusalem. The Temple was in ruins and Rabbi Yehoshua despaired. “Alas for us!” he said sorrowfully. “The place that atoned for the since of the people of Israel lies in ruins!” “Be not grieved, my child,” comforted Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai. “We can gain atonement through deeds of chesed . . . of kindness and love for it is written (in Hosea 6:6), ‘Loving kindness I desire, not sacrifice.” (Avot of Rabbi Nathan 4:5)

Here’s the thing, though. The root for korban, קרב actually means ‘be near.’
It shows up in places like the word for “relatives” קְרוֹבֵי מִשְׁפָּחָה - korvei mishpacha.

And what is atonement? We can find a lot of translations like reconciliation or restitution, but basically what we seek in atonement is bringing back together whatever has been split apart and distanced. Which means, atonement is also about coming close. 

Maybe Rabbi Yehoshua was thinking of Vayikra and the whole system of korbanot when he looked at the ruined Temple and was distraught because the people no longer had their own Temple, he didn’t have a Temple. And the absence of a Temple felt like a barrier, bear with me for a minute or two while I call it a screen, between him and God. Hold up, says Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai. What do we still have? What is always completely and fully ours to offer? Our love, our kindness, and the actions we take that are motivated by our love and our kindness. 

Abraham might have had another suggestion. Abraham built a number of altars throughout his time in the Torah, but the text doesn’t mention that he offered animals on them. What did he do? He “called out in the name of God.” He prayed. Rabbi Samuel Lebens of the University of Haifa interpreted this as a theological statement that God does not need animal offerings. (See “Abraham’s Empty Altars” in the European Journal for Philosophy and Religion (2021).) I think we can also see it as a theological statement of what God in our tradition does need, the same statement we get over and over in Vayikra. Because what does “vayikra” mean anyway? וַיִּקְרָא אֶל־משֶׁה - vayikra el-Moshe it reads in the first verse of the parsha - and God called to Moses. Yeah. Sweet, isn’t it? This parsha with instruction after instruction about how to come close to God begins with God calling out to us.

“God is calling us all the time,” I can imagine Abraham saying to us. “Just call back.”

In Vayikra, it’s almost as if God’s goal, on God’s side of the screen, is to create a dimensional experience where what God does is intended to activate something on our side of the screen, right?  Maybe when we pray, maybe when we take our love and our kindness and breathe life into it so it can live in the world, maybe when we come together and care for one another, maybe we are creating a dimensional experience where we activate something on God’s side of the screen.

Or, stay with me now, maybe the screen is an illusion. 

Back in those Shabbat ShaMorning days, it was Shira and Ellen and Steve and Jeffrey and Stephanie and all of the people making it happen and all of us who accepted their invitation who created sparks with words in the chat and outloud and music and song and facial expressions and dancing and playing and drawing and those sparks knew the screens were an illusion, that actually we were in the Garden together, in Gan Eden, in this place outside of space. We weren’t just in offering-distance of the Sacred House, as Rabbi Richard Levy puts it in On Wings of Awe, we were in it. Together. 

Most mornings these days, I join my IKAR minyan family. My minyan is a gathering of people who come close. Really close. You might be thinking, ‘Isn’t a minyan just a group of ten or more Jewish people who meet to pray.’ And, I mean, yeah. I guess. Technically. I hear you. I’ve been to those minyanim. But not my minyan. My minyan is a group of folks who have gathered together for more than three years, online, every weekday, to be close to one another. We are there to be close across states and oceans. We are there to be close across time zones. We are there to be close across denominations and davening styles. And since God is an option I choose, I feel certain that what we create together activates something in God.

“Come close, come close,” we say.
Not just God to us or us to God or us to us, but all of us - God and us - together.

Because this is our STorah.
Because we are a family where some are born and some come join.
Because the screens, the destroyed Temples, the barriers are illusions.

Because we are in the Garden.

So this year as I read Vayikra, I’m reflecting on the ways we - each of us . . . all of us . . . might get closer to whatever our most expansive idea of Connection is, and how else I might extend the invitation.