Bringing Our Full Selves

On Love, Pain, and the Torah's Narrative and Spiritual Genius

This is Life as a Sacred Text, an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. We’re generally working our way through Leviticus these days. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here.

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Hello! After a few weeks poking around other shores, we return back to our investigations of our old buddy the Book of Leviticus. Remember that one?

Well, today it’s bringing a lil’ textual mystery—or puzzle, maybe—and then it’s bringing some lessons that might hit close to home.

In any case, we will need something of a refresher:

God spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of God. God said to Moses:
”Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come at will into the Holy of Holies behind the curtain, in front of the cover that is upon the Ark, lest he die; for I appear in the cloud over the cover. Thus only shall Aaron enter the Holy of Holies:… to [offer all sorts of goat and bull sacrifices in order to] make atonement for himself, and for his house… for the people…and to make atonement for the Holy of Holies, because of the tumah of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins: and so shall [the High Priest] do for the Tent of Meeting, that remains among them in the midst of their tumah. (Leviticus 16:1-16, very abridged; lotta animal sacrifice taken out)

Leviticus 16 begins by referencing events that happened a full six chapters and three weekly Torah portions

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ago. (Obviously the original version of the Torah wasn’t divided into chapters and Torah portions, but there were still a lot of commandments about tzaraat and tumah generally and other stuff between then and now.)

A lot has happened, in other words, since Aaron’s sons Nadav and Abihu offered “strange fire” before God and somehow wound up dead as a result. 

• So why do we start here by launching in with “After the deaths..?”

• Why would the detailed instructions regarding the Yom Kippur ritual begin, “And God said to Moses, after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near before God and died—and God said to Moses, “Speak to Aaron, your brother….’”? 

• Why are we suddenly jumping all the way back to Leviticus 10 in order to understand how the resident High Priest should conduct himself on the holiest day of the year?

There are a couple of popular explanations offered by various commentators. 

One is that, given Nadav and Abihu’s ritual mistakes, Aaron needs to pay close attention to the intricate details of the year’s most austere day of worship. The Torah reminds us what can happen, in other words, to people who cut corners.

Another explanation is that Aaron, to some degree, bears the burden of his sons’ sin with the strange fire. If this is the case, some of Aaron’s work of confession and repentance is to atone for their actions.

But… I don’t think that’s it at all.

And I don’t think those intervening chapters are accidental, actually.

The ritual that God begins setting up in Leviticus 16 is the Yom Kippur ritual—the work of the High Priest on what often gets translated as our Day of Atonement. (There are some serious theological problems with translating “Kippur” as “Atonement,” but it’s become pretty much universal.)

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Really, kapparah is more of a purification. A purgation. Wiping clean. Hitting the soul’s refresh button. Spiritual disinfectant.

The word is related to the biblical words “kopher,” the cover of Noah’s Ark, and “kaporet,” aka the thing that covers of the aron/Ark. To kpr is also a kind of covering over what has been. Turning the page doesn’t unwrite the page before, but it makes for the possibility of something new.

There are a lot of steps (bathing, wardrobe changes, incense, fire and the like), as well as a whole number of different sacrifices happening in a bunch of places, plus a whole business about sending a goat into the wilderness (we’ll get there another week, promise), but the main goals of this exercise are, at various points of the process, for the High Priest:

• To effect kpr/purgation for himself, and for his household.

• To effect kpr/purgation for all of he Israelites.

• To effect kpr/purgation for the Holy of Holies.

Got it? The High Priest, through all of these sacrifices and blood-sprinklings and confessions and stuff, is trying to effect kpr/purgation for himself, his household, all the Israelites, and the holy place itself.

And what’s the cause of all this need for a nice (ammonia-free) kpr?

…to make atonement for the Holy of Holies, because of the tumah of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins: and so shall [the High Priest] do for the Tent of Meeting, that remains among them in the midst of their tumah.

That’s right, kids:

I managed to use this twice! Bwahahahaaaa. Maybe this’ll start being a regular meme from now on.

Wait, why does the holy place need cleaning from tumah?

Ohhhhh….

Right.

One source of tumah is coming into contact with a dead body (or even just being in the tent where a dead body is.)

God spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of God.

Riiight.

So we have to cleanse the holiest of places, the place that must be tahor, must never be tameh, so that it can continue to function in the elevated state of connection to the Divine.

That’s what this ritual is about. Righting this cosmic imbalance: The one that happened once, quite visibly, with the death of Nadav and Avihu, and the one that might happen at any time, if a priest/kohen contracts tumah without his knowledge, and thus accidentally and unknowingly brings it into the space.Nothing connected with death, illness, loss of potential life must be here; there must be a resetting of the table, energetically, before one can enter the most sacred of spaces.

So the High Priest is performing a ritual to reboot the taharah of the space, because people died there and now we have tumat met/tumah related to death in our most sacred of places, and something has to be done.

Given that, suddenly the intervening chapters between Leviticus 10 and Leviticus 16 don’t seem so random, eh?

It’s actually kind of amazing storytelling.

We get to a certain point in the narrative, and then the author realizes that you don’t have enough information to be able to process what comes next in the story yet, so the next chapter opens with ten pages on the House of Medici or the growth patterns of Sequoia trees so that by the time we get to [the relevant moment in the book] our reader will actually understand what’s happening.

The Torah paused after Nadav and Avihu to explain the laws of tumah to us so that we will understand what’s happening when we get to the Yom Kippur Ritual.

Sometimes a textual mystery is just proof of Torah’s narrative genius.

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But I wonder if there isn’t something else going on here, as well—something beyond the technical. 

Aaron spends most of Leviticus 16 preparing to enter the Holy of Holies–the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle in which God dwelt. 

He’s going to come flush up with the Transcendent, in the rawest form humans can access, and he needs to be ready for it—ready not just logistically, but with his whole self. 

So the Torah reminds us who he is at that moment. 

God spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of God.

He’s not just the High Priest—he’s a grieving father.  His mind isn’t just on the work of atoning for the people Israel and clearing the Tabernacle of tumah. 

Or, rather—that may be where his mind is, but his heart and perhaps soul are still back, six chapters earlier, with his children. 

And this isn’t a problem; rather, maybe, it’s exactly as it should be.

Our spirituality, our service to God, our connection with the Big Bigness (whatever language resonates for you) is never divorced from the rest of who we are. 

Our pain, our suffering, our love and our joy enter and inform our prayers and our ritual practices—and our spiritual lives are all the deeper for it. 

When we try to compartmentalize, when we try to hide parts of ourselves away—violence is done to an experience that is supposed to be one of unity, wholeness.

(In rare cases that may be truly about safety—right now, for example, it’s not safe for every trans person to be out everywhere in the United States. (Trans friends: You are seen, and cherished, for who you are, certainly in these quadrants. Have some extra love from our friend Bear.)

But that’s not why most of us resist showing ourselves in our fullness—even to ourselves, even in moments of spiritual connection, to God, certainly to others. Rather, it’s just because we are afraid. Because vulnerability is hard. Because it’s easier to just “be professional” or push through it, whatever it is, or to just plug in to everything else besides that gentle tap tap tap behind our hearts that keeps asking for a little bit of attention.

Our connections to the holy must include the fear and the doubts and the insecurity and the uncertainty and the vulnerability and the love and the pain. All of it.

But even more than that—

our love and our pain is the way in. 

It’s not only that, as the Talmud (Brachot 32b) notes, that the gates of weeping are never closed—though that's true.

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 It's that the real entrance to the Holy of Holies is through love itself, even with all the heartbreak it sometimes causes us. 

Maimonides taught:

What is the way to love and be in awe of God? Whenever a person contemplates the great wonders of God's works and creations, and one sees that they are a product of a wisdom that has no bounds or limits, one will immediately love, laud and glorify [God] with an immense passion to know the Great Name…as the Sages said regarding love, through this you know the One who spoke and [created] the Universe.  (Maimonides, Laws of the Foundations of Torah, 2:2)

I started really working with this text when I wrote Nurture the Wow, my book on parenting as a spiritual practice. Before that, I had always assumed that “the great wonders of God’s works and creations,” referred to, like, trees and ants and mountains and stuff. Which—sure, absolutely, though the last line doesn’t totally make sense with that reading.

And then I had kids, and suddenly “the great wonders of God’s works and creations…as the Sages said regarding love, it is through this that you know the One who spoke and [created] the Universe”… resonated in a different way.  

How do we know God?  Through love. With all the joy and pain that it brings us.

When Aaron, on that very first Yom Kippur, stood at the entrance to the Holy of Holies, he was also at the entrance to the gate of weeping. 

He was a whole person—not just doing his job, but connected to his pain, his regrets, his warm memories, his grief, his hopes, his other relationships.

He did not compartmentalize.

He offered up his whole self in his speech, in his actions, in his ritual connections to the Holy.

He was at the entrance to the gate of love. 

When we bring our full selves into our spiritual lives, we stand there, too. 

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1. Jews read a chunk of the Torah each week (the parsha, we call it), so that we can have read the whole thing in the span of a year, and then we start again after the New Year-related holy days (specifically Simchat Torah, the last of the last of them.)

2. In the 16^th century, William Tyndale did the first translation of the Christian Bible into English directly from Hebrew and Greek texts—including, of course, this passage from Leviticus, since naturally some Hebrew Bible texts are also in the Christian Bible. He chose to translate the words with the root of kpr to “atonement,” implying a sense of at-one-ment—a reconciliation or unification between human beings and the divine from whom they were estranged.  This language choice may have been informed by his own Lutheran-influenced theology, and his belief on what Jesus is meant to effect—transcending the sin which leads to separation from God, Jesus as sacrifice, etc. But kapparah, in Leviticus, isn’t about unification. It’s a spiritual purification/purgation. Many thanks to Rev. Dr. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski for his help with this.

3. Anyone who’s ever read my stuff on prayer or been in the same minyan/synagogue community with me knows that I have, uh, ever been seen ugly-crying with a prayerbook in my hand. As well as on the meditation cushion. Let yourself cry at services when the tears start to come up. Really. Cry, unblock, and then you’ll find you’re connecting emotionally and spiritually from a totally different place.