An Introduction to the Book of Leviticus

Vayikra: God’s Call

Of all the Mosaic books, Vayikra, Leviticus, is the one most out of step with contemporary culture. Many find it difficult to relate to its concerns. It opens with an account of sacrifices, something we have not experienced for close to two millennia. Its preoccupation with ritual purity and defilement seems to come from another age, and with the exception of the menstrual cycle, has little contemporary application. The long account of tzara'at, usually translated as leprosy, is a good example of the difficulties the text poses. Are we talking about a disease, a defilement, or a punishment, and how, in any case, is it relevant to a spiritual life and our relationship with God?

Little happens in Leviticus. There is not much narrative and the little that does exist is troubling. Two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, die on the day of the consecration of the Tabernacle simply, it seems, because of an act of misplaced enthusiasm. Even when Leviticus speaks about ethics, it does so in a perplexing way. The great chapter 19, with its majestic summons – “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” – mixes moral imperatives with ritual and seemingly irrational commands, like the prohibition against wearing clothes of mixed wool and linen, in a way that challenges conventional ideas of logic and coherence. The mindset of Leviticus is far removed from that of secular culture in the West in the twenty-first century.

Yet Leviticus is a – perhaps even the – key text of Judaism. It is here that we read for the first time the command to “Love your neighbour as yourself.” It is the source of the even greater moral principle, “You shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt.” It is Leviticus that forbids us to take vengeance or bear a grudge, taking a stand against the psychopathology of hatred and violence. It contains one of the most remarkable of all religious ideas, that we are summoned to be holy because God is holy. Not only are we created in God’s image. We are called on to act in God’s ways.

At a more practical but no less profound level, Leviticus sets out an entire infrastructure for justice and equity in political and economic life. It is Leviticus that sets out the parameters for employer-employee relationships. It humanises slavery and sets in motion a process that must end in its abolition, however long it takes. It speaks about debt relief and the return of ancestral land in the Jubilee year. This is the text that inspired the modern-day programme of international debt relief known as Jubilee 2000.

When the Americans rang out the message of freedom in 1776 by sounding the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, they were expressing the mood of the verse engraved on the bell, Leviticus 25:10, in the translation of the King James Bible: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Leviticus is the central book of the Pentateuch, the Torah. This makes it the most important of the five. Biblical literature often works on the principle of mirror-image symmetry (chiasmus), structured in the form of ABCBA. In any work so patterned, the climax is not at the beginning or the end but in the middle. At the centre of the five Mosaic books, Leviticus is the axis on which they turn.

It is also the purest expression of one of the most important voices in the Torah, the priestly voice, the sensibility the sages call (it is their original name for the book) Torat Kohanim, “The Law of the Priests.” We hear this voice elsewhere at key points in the Torah. One is the first chapter of Genesis 1 – “In the beginning God created” – which describes creation in the language of the priest. Another is Exodus 19:6, just before the revelation at Mount Sinai, with its mission statement of the Jewish people: “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This is a priestly vocation. Despite the importance of the prophets to the religion of Israel, it is to the role of priest, not prophet, that God summoned our ancestors and summons us. The very name given by tradition to the Mosaic books – Torah – is a priestly word.

Leviticus was the book with which Jewish education traditionally began. For many centuries, as far back as Talmudic times, it was the first text Jewish children studied, their introduction to the word and will of God. “Let the pure come and study purity,” say the sages. They want this above others to be the book first engraved on Jewish minds and inscribed in Jewish hearts. Again this is odd when we consider the rabbis’ view of their own provenance, the opening line of Mishna Avot: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and handed it on to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets.” The rabbis see themselves as heirs not to the priests but to the prophets. In truth, they were a creative synthesis of both.

It will be my argument that you cannot understand Judaism without the priestly voice. Judaism, from the Torah onward, is a conversation scored for many voices. Why this is so I will explain below, but that it is so is undeniable. It is this internal diversity, this complex harmony and occasional discord, that gives Judaism its dynamism, its ability to defeat entropy, the rule that says that all systems lose energy over time. Among the Torah’s voices, the priestly sensibility is the dominant one, despite the fact that Moses, the dominant figure from Exodus to Deuteronomy, was not a priest.

It is this sensibility that communicated the absolute and austere monotheism that made Judaism unique in the ancient world and singular even today. It insists on the total difference between humans and God, but it also knows how to bridge it by aligning our will with His. It is the priestly voice that tells us that human beings are created in the image of God. It speaks of the integrity of difference and the importance of respecting it. It takes abstract ideals and turns them into codes of behaviour that transform lives. The book of Leviticus is a sustained meditation on what holiness is and how it can be translated into life. Indeed it is the priestly voice that identifies God with life and refuses to consecrate death.

Torat Kohanim wrestles with some of the deepest questions of religion. How, in a finite world, can we relate to an infinite God who cannot be identified with any natural phenomenon, who can neither be seen nor visually represented? At a quite different level, how can we take the fire of religious inspiration and turn it into an everlasting flame? How can we recapture “peak experiences” on a regular basis? And how can we take a way of life for the few and make it the possession of the many?

Leviticus is a precisely structured book, divided into three parts. The first is about the holy. Specifically, it is about sacrifices, and more generally, about how to come close to God in the house of God. The second part is set at the boundary between the holy and the world. It is about the things that prevent us from entering sacred space. The third is about taking the holy into the world. The book begins with an elite, the priests, sons of Aaron, a minority within a minority, one specific family within the tribe of Levi. It culminates in a call from God to the entire nation. It begins in the Sanctuary but ends in society. It democratises kedusha, holiness, the sign of God’s presence, so that it becomes part of the ongoing life of the people as a whole.

Historically, this was taken further still after the destruction of the Second Temple, when prayer replaced sacrifice, repentance substituted for the service of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, and Torah knowledge, originally a speciality of the priest, became a normative expectation of the people as a whole. Torat Kohanim, the Law of the Priests, became what Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik called ish hahalacha, the halachic personality.

Because of the difficulty we have in relating to Leviticus, I have made the introduction longer than for the other volumes of this series. In the pages that follow, I explain the key concepts of the book: holiness, purity, and sacrifice. I explain the concept of a “voice” within Torah, and why there is more than one. I analyse what makes the priestly voice different from those of kings and prophets. I also explain why the priestly voice, transmuted through time, is essential to Judaism and why without it neither Jews nor Judaism would have survived.

Names matter, and I have for the most part preferred to call the book by its traditional name, Vayikra. Leviticus, which means “matters pertaining to the Levites,” was the Latin-equivalent translation of Torat Kohanim, “the law of the priests.” But tradition eventually came to call it by its first word, Vayikra, meaning, “He [God] called.” Rashi explains that this is a term of endearment. Many of God’s messages in the Torah are prefaced by the words “He said” (Vayomer), “He spoke” (Vayedaber), or “He commanded” (Vayetzav). All three belong to the language of authority. God issues an order that we must obey. But Vayikra, “He called, summoned, beckoned,” is the language of invitation, friendship, love. In love God called Abraham to follow him. In love God led the way for the wandering Israelites in a pillar of cloud by day, fire by night. In love God calls the people Israel to come close to Him, to be regular visitors at His house, to share His quality of holiness, difference, apartness: to become, as it were, mediators of His presence to the world.

Vayikra is about why love needs law and law needs love. It is about the quotidian acts of devotion that bring two beings close, even when one of them is vaster than the universe and the other is a mortal of flesh and blood. It is about being human, sinning, falling short, always conscious of our fragile hold on life, yet seeking to come close to God and – what is sometimes harder – allowing Him to come close to us.

To understand Vayikra, though, we first have to solve a puzzle. Following clues present in the biblical text itself, we will discover, just beneath the surface of the text, an unexpected and quite moving story that emerged in the wake of one of the great crises in Jewish history. That, in the next section, is where we begin.

The Story Beneath the Story

There is an intricate literary device in the Torah, much used but rarely noticed, that I call the concealed counter-narrative.

The text reads one way on the surface but another way when listened to closely and deeply. The Torah signals this by giving us clues, discrepancies in the text, not obvious enough to be noticed at first glance but sufficient to make the thoughtful reader go back and read the text again and discover that the real story the Torah is telling us is richer and more complex than we first thought.

This is true about the book of Vayikra as a whole. Read on the surface it is about ritual: the Sanctuary, the priesthood, sacrifices, purity, and holiness. But if we follow the clues we discover an intense drama, at once human and metaphysical, taking place beneath the surface. To uncover it we need first to find the clues. There are several and they appear only towards the end of the book. The first is the opening verse of Leviticus 25. It looks entirely innocent. It reads, “The Lord said to Moses at Mount Sinai.” This is not a sentence that shouts for attention. But on reflection it turns out to be very odd indeed.

The reason is that the book of Vayikra does not take place at Mount Sinai. It takes place in the wilderness of Sinai, at the foot of the mountain, not the top. The last time Mount Sinai figured in the narrative was when Moses came down carrying the second set of tablets, the sign that God had re-established His covenant with the people after the sin of the Golden Calf (Ex. 34). From then on, the focus is not on the mountain but in the valley below where the Israelites are constructing the ­Sanctuary. There is a serious discrepancy here. This passage should have been in the book of Exodus.

If we look at the substance of the chapter we discover the same thing. It is about principles of social justice: the Jubilee year, the release of debts, and the liberation of slaves. Social justice is not a subject we associate with Leviticus, which is about the relationship between humans and God. It is, though, precisely the subject we associate with the book of Exodus. The obvious place for these laws is immediately after the civil legislation contained in Exodus 21–23, which deals with justice in the relationships between humans.

Turning to the next chapter, Leviticus 26, the incongruity ­continues. This section is about the blessings and curses that come with the covenant: blessings if the people obey, curses if they do not. We now know, thanks to intensive study by scholars of the ancient Near East, that the covenant the Israelites made with God at Sinai was similar in form if not in substance to the suzerainty treaties of the time – peace agreements between two states, one strong, the other weak. These covenants had a highly formalised structure: preamble, historical prologue, then the terms and conditions, first in general terms and then in specific details. Witnesses are named. Provision is made for the deposition of the treaty and for regular public readings.

An essential element of these treaties was the reward for compliance and the punishment that would follow any breach. Even if we did not know this from the historical record we would know it from the book of Deuteronomy, which is structured as a covenant on a massive scale and which, near the end, details the rewards and punishments in a passage parallel to Leviticus 26. So this chapter too should have been in the book of Exodus, just before Exodus 24 which describes the formal acceptance of the covenant by the Israelites.

Even the closing words of Vayikra, “These are the commands the Lord gave Moses at Mount Sinai for the Israelites,” are out of place. Vayikra is set not on the mountain but in the Tent of Meeting. Again these words belong at the end of the covenant ceremony in Exodus 24.

What we have, in other words, between Exodus 24 and Leviticus 25 is a massive parenthesis, some forty chapters long, by far the largest of its kind in the Hebrew Bible. This was already noticed by the classical commentators, notably Ibn Ezra and Nahmanides. It is a huge digression. What caused it?

There is only one plausible candidate: the episode of the Golden Calf. Coming so soon after the revelation at Sinai, it marks the single greatest crisis during the wilderness years. So to understand Vayikra, we need to go back and examine closely the story of the Golden Calf.

The story in broad outlines is straightforward. Moses ascended Mount Sinai after the great revelation in which God spoke to the entire people. He had been absent for several weeks. The people, unsure of when and if he would return, panicked. Without Moses how would they receive the will and word of God? That, according to many commentators, is what the calf was: not an idol but an oracle, a point at which divine communication was received.

The people turned into a mob and crowded around Aaron, the leader in Moses’ absence. Unused to such pressure, Aaron made what turned out to be a disastrous decision. He asked the people to give him their gold ornaments, melted them down, and then shaped, “with an engraving tool,” a calf. It was a low point in the history of Israel.

Moses was unaware of all this until God told him, “Go down. Your people is destroying itself.” He immediately prayed to God to forgive the people. He then went down, saw the scene, smashed the tablets, burned the calf, mixed its ashes with water, had everyone drink it, gathered the Levites, and had them execute punishment against the main wrongdoers. Then he returned to God, asking again for forgiveness. God agreed, but only partially. The guilty would suffer but the people as a whole would survive.

Thus far, the story is clear. What happens next in Exodus 33 is not. This is one of the most obscure passages in the Torah. Its individual episodes are intelligible but the sequence of events is very hard to understand.

It begins with God saying that the people must move on and continue their journey to the Promised Land. In fact, they did so, but not until fifty chapters later, in Numbers 10. God then said that He would not be “in the midst of the people.” Instead, He would send “an angel.” It would be too dangerous for God to be close to the people, given their tendency to provoke Him to anger. When the people heard this, they were very distressed, despite the fact that God had already said something similar ten chapters earlier (Ex. 23:20). At that time, it occasioned no distress.

Next we read that Moses moved his tent outside the camp. There then follows a bewildering series of conversations between Moses and God. Moses urges God to reconsider His decision not to go with the people: “If Your presence does not go with us, do not let us leave this place” (Ex. 33:15). Then the subject changes to what seem to be metaphysical enquiries about the nature of God. Moses speaks about the “face,” the “ways,” and the “glory” of God. Then in chapter 34 comes the famous scene in which God places Moses in a crevice in a rock and passes before him, reciting the words that became known as God’s Thirteen Attributes of Mercy.

Much is unclear about this passage, two things in particular. What is Moses doing discussing fine points of theology when the people are facing a major crisis in their relationship with God? And why, just before this, did he move his tent outside the camp? This seems precisely the wrong thing to do. The entire episode of the Golden Calf happened because Moses was absent. Now was not the time to set a distance between him and the people. In addition, they had just been shocked and grieved to hear that God would no longer be in their midst. For Moses to do likewise would turn an already painful situation into a double blow. That is what I mean by a concealed counter-narrative. It is as if the text were saying: there is a deeper story beneath the surface that needs to be excavated.

What we sense is that once the immediate crisis of the Golden Calf was over, Moses turned to the fundamental problem that had given rise to it in the first place. In this encounter, Moses was praying his most audacious prayer, so audacious that the Torah gives us only fragments, glimpses, forcing us to complete the narrative ourselves. It went something like this:

“Sovereign of the universe, I have moved my tent outside the camp to signal that it is not my distance from the people that is the problem. It is Yours. How have the Israelites experienced You thus far? As a terrifying, overwhelming force. They have seen You bring the mightiest empire in the world to its knees. They have witnessed You turn the sea into dry land, send food from heaven and water from a rock. They know that no one can see you and live. But they also fear that no one can hear you and live. When You revealed Yourself to them at the mountain, they came to me and said, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen, but do not have God speak to us or we will die’ (Ex. 20:19). When they made the calf, wrongheaded though they were, they were seeking a way of encountering God without terror. They need You to be close.”

What Moses was exploring in his questions about the “face,” the “ways,” and the “glory” of God were the fundamental parameters of the relationship between God and humanity. The God of Abraham was transcendent. Could He also be immanent? Could He relate to humans not only from heaven or the mountain top, but down in the valley in the midst of the camp? Can an infinite God be close to finite human beings? If not, what hope is there for humanity?

Nor was it simply distance that had become problematic. So was predictability. It was as if Moses had said, “We know that sometimes You are angry, and sometimes You are moved by compassion. There are occasions when You execute justice, others when You forgive. Precisely because You are free, we cannot predict which will prevail: punishment or forgiveness. But we are the people who have staked our entire existence on You. How can we live, not knowing when You will next be angry with us, and whether our prayers for forgiveness will succeed?

“You, God, have been gracious to me. You asked me to lead this people and I have striven to do so. I have prayed for Your forgiveness and You have heeded my prayer. But I am mortal. You alone are eternal. What will happen in the future if the people sin and there is no Moses to pray for them? There must be some sustainable order in the life of the spirit. There must be a structure of leadership that does not depend on chance.”

If this is what happened in Exodus 33, it is one of the most decisive moments in Judaism. It is difficult at this distance of time to realise how radical a break with the civilisations of the day monotheism was. The God of Abraham differed in two ways from the religions of the ancient world. First, He is transcendent. He is beyond the universe because He created the universe. None of the gods worshipped by the ancients was remotely like this. Even Akhnaton, the pharaoh whom some – most famously Sigmund Freud – identify as the first monotheist, thought that god was the sun. The sun is within the universe, not beyond it. How do you relate to a God who is infinite and unknowable?

Second, God acted in history. That too had never been conceived before. For the ancients, the gods were in nature. They were the rain, the river, the sun, the storm. In nature, time is cyclical. Things are born, grow, reproduce, and die, but nothing really changes. Things are as they are because that is how they were and always will be. With the Exodus, God changed history. More precisely, with the Exodus, God created history.

These two facts – creation and history – were profoundly liberating but also deeply alienating. God had now become almost impossibly remote. How can someone within the universe even begin to understand One beyond the universe? And the idea of history as an arena of change is also profoundly destabilising. Cyclical time is reassuring. Yes, there are floods, droughts, famines, natural disasters, but in nature, life eventually returns to normal. It was the anthropologist Mircea Eliade who drew attention to how terrifying the idea of history was at first.

What was it like to be the first people to set out on a journey not knowing where it would lead?

At the deepest level, that was what the crisis of the Golden Calf was about. At that moment, Moses was the sole connection between heaven and earth. Absent him, and there was terror. Yet why did the problem surface then and not in the days of Noah or Abraham or the Israelites before now? The answer is that Judaism’s fundamental solution to the distance between God and man is language. Words alone have the power to cross the abyss between finite humans and the infinite God. God spoke to Adam, Cain, Noah, the patriarchs and matriarchs, and to Moses.

That is a solution that worked for individuals. What happens when the Israelites become a nation? When God spoke to the nation as a whole at Sinai the people found it unbearable and they asked Moses to listen on their behalf. That was why his prolonged absence was devastating. The making of the Golden Calf was a mistake, a sin. But the crisis that led to it was real and enduring. What would become of the people in the absence of Moses or someone like him? How could a nation take the risk of depending entirely on God when God was so distant, overpowering, and unpredictable? That is when God gave the answer that led to the forty-chapter digression in the story of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to the Promised Land.

God answered Moses’ request with these words: “Let them make for Me a sanctuary and I will dwell [veshakhanti] in their midst” (Ex. 25:8). This is the start of an entirely new relationship between God and the people. The verb “to dwell” had never before been used in relation to God. The root sh-kh-n means a neighbour, someone who lives next door. God was about to become not just the force that moves the stars and changes the course of history, but also one who is close, a neighbour. It was from this root that the rabbis coined their name for the divine indwelling, God’s presence that was always with the Jewish people, even in exile. They called it the Shechina.

This relationship between God and the people would be mediated by a new kind of religious leader, not Moses the prophet but Aaron the priest. You cannot predict the appearance of a new prophet. There never was another Moses, and after Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, prophecy ceased altogether. But the priesthood is predictable. It is dynastic, not charismatic. The priests were the male descendants of Aaron. We still have priests today. The priesthood represents continuity immune to the vicissitudes of time.

Likewise the sense of the Divine Presence: The people could not see God’s “face” or understand His “ways,” but they could experience His “glory.” It was this phenomenon, cloud-like yet radiant, that would dwell in the Sanctuary, the symbolic home of God. There would be a series of regular encounters by bringing “sacrifices,” though the Hebrew word korban is better translated as “coming close by bringing close.” The entire system of korbanot and all that went with them was a response to the crisis of the distance of God. That is the story behind the story of Vayikra.

The long digression between Exodus 23 and Leviticus 25 is, as Nahmanides saw, entirely taken up with the consequences of the Golden Calf and the new relationship it inaugurated between God and the people. All of it – the construction of the Sanctuary, the offerings to be made there, the special demands of purity for all who entered its precincts, the holiness demanded of a people with God in its midst – is about bringing God close, living in the constant presence of the Divine. It is also about bringing cyclical time into Judaism, about turning the peak experiences of history into daily routines, the “never again” into the “ever again.” This is the choreography of grace, the intricate rituals of sacred space. The King was about to invite His people to enter the palace they had just built for Him out of their gifts of love. This was something altogether new in Jewish experience.

But the risks were obvious. Introducing immanence into ­Judaism – a God who has a “home” on earth – carried with it the danger that it would bring the people close to the other religions of the ancient world. They too had temples, priests, and sacrificial orders. Besides which, how do you introduce infinity into space and eternity into time without blurring the boundaries of reality? It is like bringing particles of matter and antimatter together. If the two collide, the result is annihilation. It becomes very important to keep them apart.

Hence the unique task and mindset of the priest. His role was to protect and maintain boundaries. The fundamental act of the priest is lehavdil: “to distinguish, separate, know where things belong and where they don’t.” The priest knows that this is how God created the world. First, He separated domains: light and dark, upper and lower waters, sea and dry land. Only then could stars, planets, and life emerge. The priest is the guardian of order in a world in which humans are always creating chaos. Only in an ordered universe can holiness survive. Only in an ordered universe can humanity survive. That is the singular message of the priest. It is the basic principle of Torat Kohanim.

Leviticus is written almost entirely in the priestly voice. It uses a vocabulary we encounter only rarely in the wisdom or prophetic voices. Alongside lehavdil, the other key verb for the priest is lehorot, “to teach, instruct, deliver a judgement, make a ruling, guide.” It is from this verb that we get the noun Torah. The most important adjectives are kodesh and chol, holy and common, and tahor and tamei, pure and impure, that is to say, a state that allows access to the holy and one that debars it.

These are difficult terms because they belong to areas of existence that stand outside our normal categories for engaging with the world. The idea that God can enter space and time is as paradoxical as relativity, quantum physics, black holes, strange attractors, Higgs bosons, and other counterintuitive phenomena of the very large or very small. The holy is not straightforward or prosaic. Where infinity meets finitude there is danger. Safety comes in the form of law.

In biblical times, the priest was master and teacher of the law. His task was to keep the Divine Presence in the heart of the Israelite camp. The people were to remember constantly that God was in their midst. The priestly universe – Sanctuary, sacrifices, the need for purity – came into being as a result of the sin of the Golden Calf. Moses successfully persuaded God that the people needed to feel Him close, not distant. This had less to do with God than with the Israelites. God is everywhere at every time but not always are we conscious of Him. Adam and Eve in Eden believed that they could hide. The continuing drama in the Hebrew Bible is of God’s attention and human inattention. God is there but we forget that He is there. Holiness is consciousness of the Shekhina in the midst of life.

The creation of the priesthood is what Max Weber called “the ­routinisation of charisma.”

The priest takes the fire of God, the high drama of sacrificial love, and awe of the Divine Presence – life-changing experiences – and turns them into daily rituals so that they become not rare, exceptional events but routines that shape the character of a nation and transform individual lives. Looked at one way, the priest takes poetry and turns it into prose. Looked at from another perspective, knowing how thin is the veneer of civilisation and how dark the undercurrents of the unconscious mind, the priest takes prose and etches it with poetry. Every day is an encounter with the Divine.

To get inside the mindset of the priest we need to understand the meaning, first of the holy, then of the pure, then of the institution of sacrifice: what they meant then and what they mean now. We need also to see what is distinctive about the priestly conception of the moral life. We will then be able to understand what happened to these institutions when the Temple was destroyed and the sacrificial system came to an end.

Holy: The Space We Make for God

Holiness – kedusha – is a key concept of the book of Vayikra. The root k-d-sh appears 152 times. It appears only once in Genesis, sixteen times in the non-priestly parts of Exodus (chapters 1–24), and fifteen times in Deuteronomy. Its use is overwhelmingly concentrated in those parts of the Mosaic books that speak in the priestly voice. The priest is a holy person performing holy acts in the holy place. But what does the word mean?

At the most prosaic level, k-d-sh means “to dedicate, to set aside, to designate for a particular purpose.” Thus, for example, a marriage is called kiddushin in Hebrew, meaning that a woman has been dedicated to this particular man in an exclusive relationship. When God sanctifies the Jewish people to become “a holy nation” it has the same connotation as in marriage; that is, the people are designated by God to be exclusively His, to worship Him alone. In this sense monotheism is like monogamy, a one-to-one relationship between a people and God.

However, the term clearly means more than this. In his famous book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto called holiness the “mysterium tremendans et fascinans,” the sense at once frightening and enthralling of the great mystery of the infinite.

The holy is that in the presence of which one feels awe. By contrast, Eliezer Berkovits argued that in ­Judaism, the holiness of God means also the closeness of God. God the infinite is also God the intimate.

In an early article, “Sacred and Profane,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik spoke of holiness as ‘at-homeness’ in space and time. The Jew who is at home in sacred space (kedushat makom) finds God everywhere. The one who is at home in sacred time (kedushat zeman) finds God in all times, in the distant past and dimly glimpsed future.

For Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the holy was that dimension within which all things found their unity within the unity of God and His infinite light. The secular is the world of separation, division, and conflict. To ascend to the holy is to see each object, person, discipline, and perspective as a part of the whole, with its own integrity in the scheme of things. Therefore, all things secular can in principle be sanctified once we place them in the service of God, the unity that gives light and life to all.

None of these, however, quite explains the precision and paradox of the concept of holiness as we find it in the Mosaic books. Our starting point must be the two focal points of holiness in the Torah. The first is Shabbat, the seventh day of creation:

Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. (Gen. 2:1–3)

The essence of Shabbat is that it is a day of not doing, a cessation, a stopping point, a pause, an absence of activity. In the Exodus version of the Ten Commandments, this is the reason given for the Israelites to do likewise: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy…. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it” (Ex. 20:8–11). Shabbat is empty time.

The second key instance of the holy is the Mikdash, the Tabernacle or Sanctuary. The primary nature of the Mikdash is that it defined a certain space. It was a structure of poles and drapes that marked out certain areas with different degrees of holiness. Although the Tabernacle had furnishings, it was a defined space that contained little, especially the Holy of Holies that contained only the Ark holding the tablets of stone, and the covering, on which were the figures of the cherubim. The Sanctuary was, predominantly, empty space.

Holiness is emptiness: empty space and empty time. What does this mean? By far the most suggestive answer is to be found in Jewish mysticism, specifically the kabbalistic doctrine associated with the school of Rabbi Yitzḥak Luria. For the mystic, the invisible is real, the visible unreal, a mere mask hiding the Divine. The rationalist sees the universe and wonders whether God really exists. The mystic sees God and wonders whether the universe really exists. How are we to reconcile the existence of an infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent God and a finite universe in which humans have physical existence and free will? Surely at every point the Infinite must crowd out the finite. How is it that the universe exists at all?

The answer given by the kabbalists is that it exists because of divine self-effacement, tzimtzum. God conceals Himself, as it were, to allow the emergence of a universe in the space left by His self-limitation. “Truly,” says Isaiah, “You are a God who hides Himself” (Is. 45:15). And though Jewish mysticism is almost wholly a post-biblical phenomenon, there is a basic insight here that accurately describes what is happening in the Torah’s account of creation. Human freedom especially exists because of divine self-limitation. So Adam and Eve found that they were able to sin, and Cain even to commit murder, without God stepping in to intervene. Through voluntary self-restraint, God makes space for man.

But there is a problem here, and it haunts the Bible’s narrative. What is the difference between a hidden God and no God? The very existence of the universe testifies to a concealment on the part of God. The word olam, “universe,” is semantically linked to ne’elam, “hidden.” That is the divine dilemma. If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. “No one can see Me and live,” says God. “If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die,” say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there.

The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred.

We can now understand what makes them holy. Shabbat is the time when humans cease, for a day, to be creators and become conscious of themselves as creations. The Tabernacle is the space in which humans cease to be masters – “fill the earth and subdue it” – and become servants. Just as God had to practise self-restraint to make space for the finite, so human beings have to practise self-restraint to make space for the infinite. The holy, in short, is where human beings renounce their independence and self-sufficiency, the very things that are the mark of their humanity, and for a moment acknowledge their utter dependence on He who spoke and brought the universe into being.

The universe is the space God makes for man. The holy is the space man makes for God. The secular is the emptiness created by God to be filled by a finite universe. The holy is the emptiness in time and space vacated by humans so that it can be filled by the infinite presence of God.

In biblical Hebrew, the opposite of kodesh, the holy, is chol. Ḥol means “empty.” Ḥillel means “to violate, desecrate, profane.” Challal means “hollow, a void, empty space.” It also means “dead, slain, bereft of life.” Hence the paradox: space or time that is unholy is full of finitude and therefore empty of the Divine. Space or time that is holy is empty of human devices and desires, an emptiness filled with the Divine Presence, the glory of God. We make space for God in the same way that God makes space for us, by tzimtzum, self-effacement, self-renunciation.

The most precious thing people can offer to God is their freedom, their will. God does not ask this of everyone, all the time, for were He to do so, He would frustrate the very purpose of the creation of humankind. Instead He asks it of some of the people, some of the time. He asks it of one people, the Israelites; one land, the land of Israel; one day, Shabbat; and one place, the Sanctuary. These constitute breaks in the fabric of finitude, windows through which an infinite light flows into the world.

That light can be dangerous. Stare too long at sunlight and you go blind. The energy pent up in the holy is like antimatter in relation to matter. Without careful guarding it is destructive, as shown by the deaths of Nadav and Avihu on the day the Tabernacle was consecrated. The holy needs to be protected, guarded, insulated, almost like nuclear energy. The priests are the guardians of the sacred, and must themselves be kept as far as possible from the ordinary, the mundane, the mortal – above all, from death.

That is the holy, the point at which humans temporarily renounce their creativity and freedom in order to allow the creativity and freedom of God to be sensed. The holy is where God’s glory casts off its cloak of concealment and becomes palpable, tangible. The priests inhabit this liminal space – this boundary between the infinite and finite, the holy and the everyday. They are to Israel what Israel is to humanity, a signal of transcendence, representatives of God to humanity and humanity to God.

The holy, then, is a time or space that in itself testifies to the existence of something beyond itself. Shabbat points to a time beyond time: to creation. The Tabernacle points to a space beyond space. As King Solomon said at the dedication of the Temple: “But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain You. How much less this Temple I have built!” (I Kings 8:27).

The Israelites point, by their very history, to a power more than merely human:

Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of?…Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?

Deut. 4:32–34

Israel is the people that in itself testifies to something beyond itself. Otherwise, it would not have survived. It is the tiny nation that outlived empires.

The holy is where transcendence becomes immanence, where within the universe we encounter the presence of the One beyond the universe. Holiness is the space we make for God.

Sacrifice

It follows that fundamental activity in relation to the holy is sacrifice, in the broadest sense. God sacrifices something of Himself to make space for us. We sacrifice something of ourselves to make space for Him.

I have argued that we can only understand Vayikra in terms of the spiritual crisis that led to the Golden Calf. In the absence of Moses, the people proved incapable of constituting themselves as a self-­disciplined community. They became a mob. Hence the question was not only how could God come close to the people, but also how could the people come close to God? How could they mature, grow, develop, and thus become worthy of the responsibilities of freedom?

What had infantilised the people until now was their total dependency on God. He liberated them from Egypt, led them across the sea, guided them through the desert, gave them food from heaven and water from a rock. They had received. They had not yet given back. The Jewish mystics called the manna nahama dekisufa, “the bread of shame,” because they had not worked for it. In Judaism, when you enjoy what you have not earned, that is a source of shame.

The one thing God had not yet done for the Israelites was to give them the chance of giving back something to Him. The very idea sounds absurd. How can we, God’s creations, give back to the God who made us? All we have is His. As David said when initiating the project of the Temple:

“Who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from You, and we have given You only what comes from Your hand.”

I Chr. 29:14

God’s greatest gift to us is the ability to give to Him. Clearly, from a Judaic perspective, this idea is fraught with risk. The idea that God might be in need of gifts is a hair’s breadth from paganism and heresy. Yet, knowing the risk, God allowed Himself to allow the Israelites the opportunity to give something back to God.

Central to sacrifice is what Lewis Hyde in his classic study, The Gift, beautifully described as “the labour of gratitude.” The construction of the Sanctuary out of the voluntary contributions of the people, together with the sacrificial order it initiated, was important because it gave the Israelites the chance to give back to God. Later, Jewish law recognised giving as an integral part of human dignity when it ruled that even a poor person completely dependent on charity is still obliged to give charity.

Giving is essential to self-respect. To be in a situation where you can only receive, not give, is to lack human dignity.

During the biblical era, the sacrifices were primarily of animals. There is no doubt that this is connected with two propositions in Genesis. The first is the concession, after the Flood, allowing humans to kill animals for food. Prior to the Flood this had been forbidden. The result was a world “filled with violence,” which began with Cain’s murder of Abel. Thus the permission to kill animals for food, accompanied by a solemn warning against murder, was intended as a way of channelling violence out of the human condition.

The second is the story of the binding of Isaac, in which God stops Abraham from sacrificing his child, and provides in his place a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. Animal sacrifice is the way in which the Torah directs the Israelites away from human – especially child – ­sacrifice, which was widely practised in the ancient world. According to the evidence of the prophets and historical books, at times it was even performed in Israel, where it was regarded as the most heinous of sins.

However, the form of the sacrifice is secondary to its essential principle. The fundamental sacrifice in Judaism is that of the will. Since freedom of the will is the highest gift of God to man, the way we acknowledge that it is a gift is periodically to give some of it back. That is why the service of God is called avoda in Hebrew – the very word that is used to describe the slavery of the Israelites to the Egyptians.

We see here the intimate connection between a religious vision and a political one. Just as it is idolatry to worship human beings rather than God, so it is slavery to sacrifice our freedom to other human beings rather than God. “For the Israelites belong to Me as servants. They are My servants” (Lev. 25:55), says God, which the rabbis interpret to mean, “They are not the servants of other servants [i.e., other human beings].”

The fact that sacrifice in Judaism has nothing intrinsically to do with the offerings of animals on the altar is the reason Judaism was able to survive the loss of the Temple, its rites, and sacrifices with its religious life largely intact. What matters in sacrifice is the act of renunciation. We give up something of ourselves, offering it to God in recognition of the gifts He has given us. It is remarkable how readily the sages found substitutes for sacrifices, most notably in the form of prayer, but also in Torah study (learning about the sacrifices is equivalent to bringing them, say the rabbis), charity, and hospitality.

The Hebrew word for sacrifice – the verb lehakriv and the noun korban – both mean “bringing close.” The meaning is: we are brought close by what we bring close. We come close to the Other by bringing a gift. A gift means I take something of me and dedicate to it you. A gift can be a way of maintaining a relationship. It can be a form of apology and a desire to be forgiven. It can also be a token of thanks. One way or another, a sacrifice in Judaism is always the token of an I-Thou relationship between us and God. It is a gesture of love.

Hence the striking feature of Leviticus and of priestly ritual generally. It always uses the four-letter name of God, Hashem, as opposed to the priestly creation narrative which uses the word Elokim. Hashem is God as person. Elokim is God as the force of forces, the totality of powers in the universe. In the moral life, Hashem represents compassion, Elokim strict justice. A sacrifice to Elokim would be a pagan act, an attempt to appease the forces of nature. A sacrifice is always to Hashem, an act of turning our face to His, an inherently personal gesture.

The only way of understanding sacrifice in Judaism is to remember that this is a religion built on love. Recall that the two great co­mmands of interpersonal love – love of the neighbour and the stranger – both appear in the book of Leviticus, in the great “holiness code” of c­hapter 19. Neither abstract reason nor the pursuit of self-interest can make sense of the act of sacrifice. Yet the willingness to sacrifice is essential to families, communities, and the nation. There is no love without the willingness to sacrifice. That is the truth at the heart of Leviticus. When people find the book remote and incomprehensible, that is what they forget: that priestly ritual is the choreography of love.

The logic of the sacrifices has to do with holiness, not morality as such – though, as we will see below, there was a distinctive priestly ethic. Holiness has to do with our relationship with God. Morality has to do with our relationships with human beings. Two of the most striking features of the Torah are that (1) morality is universal whereas holiness is particular, and that (2) morality takes precedence over holiness where the two conflict. Thus holiness is no excuse for a failure of morality.

There are sins for which we bring a sacrifice: chatat, asham, me’ila and so on. But the sin always represents an offence against God. This may have a moral dimension, but that dimension is not addressed by a sacrifice. That is the theme of the great prophetic denunciations of ­sacrifice – that people were bringing sacrifices as if they trumped or neutralised moral offences, as if one could bribe God to turn a blind eye to the ways in which he was defrauding or oppressing his fellow human beings. This critique is sustained and devastating. The prophets did not oppose sacrifice but they saw very clearly how the entire structure of temple worship could be misused to anaesthetise consciences that should not be anaesthetised.

Sacrifice is what God allows us to give Him to show our love and gratitude for what He has given us. The converse side of this, as the code of holiness insists, is that we let our love of God be turned into our love of the neighbour and stranger. Just as we give to God, so should we give to them.

Purity

There is a famous midrash in which a Roman challenges Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai on the ritual of the red heifer, one of the laws of purification that does not appear in Vayikra but which belongs to the same territory as the laws set out in chapters 11 to 16. The Roman finds the law incomprehensible, irrational, and superstitious. Yoḥanan b. Zakkai asks the Roman whether he believes in exorcism. The Roman says he does. Well then, says Yoḥanan, that is what the rite of the red heifer is, a kind of exorcism. It expels unclean spirits. The Roman, satisfied, leaves.

There then follows a remarkable scene. The students turn to Rabban Yochanan and say, “You gave him an answer to satisfy a Roman, but what will you answer us?” Yoḥanan then says, “Know that it is not death that defiles or the ritual that purifies. Rather, God is saying: ‘I have established a statute and instituted a decree, and you have no permission to transgress them.’”

The passage is telling us that not only do we find the laws of purity hard to understand. So do the sages, or at least the disciples of the sages. However, we should not misunderstand Rabban Yoḥanan’s reply to his students. It has often been taken to mean that the laws we call chukim, “statutes,” have no reason, or at least none we can understand. Rav ­Saadia Gaon says that statutes are commands given to us by God simply to reward us for obeying them, not because they had any intrinsic logic. The great countervoice is Maimonides, who holds that every command has a reason, even the chukim.

What I believe Rabban Yoḥanan was doing was making a sharp distinction – made in our time by philosopher John Rawls – between two kinds of rules: regulatory and constitutive. Regulatory rules, as their name implies, regulate something that exists independently of the rules. There were employers and employees before there was employment law. A practice exists and then come the laws to ensure fairness, justice, and so on. In Judaism, mishpatim, social legislation, is of this kind.

Constitutive laws create a practice. The laws of chess create the game called chess. Without the laws, there is no game. Rabban Yoḥanan was saying that the laws of purity are like this. They are not like medicine because impurity is not like disease, which existed before there were healers, doctors, diagnoses, and cures. Before there were laws of purity, death did not defile and the waters did not purify. The laws created a new reality, but that does not mean that they are irrational or incomprehensible.

Vayikra’s purity laws are set out in chapters 11–16 and follow a distinct order. First there is the impurity incurred by contact with repulsive animals, then that brought about by childbirth. Next comes the mysterious phenomenon known as tzara'at, often translated as leprosy, but which in fact, as Maimonides pointed out, is a generic name for a series of conditions that have no medical connection: skin disease in humans, discolouration in garments, and mildew on the walls of houses. Then there is the impurity of various flows of bodily fluid – menstrual blood in the case of women, and various discharges that affect men.

These laws are followed by chapter 16, which specifies the rites of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement. The connection between this and the purity laws is that in this chapter, sin is described in terms of defilement, and atonement (among other things) is described as a process of purification. Chapters 18 and 20, framing the great “holiness code” of chapter 19, are about forbidden sexual relationships – forbidden specifically to the Israelites because they are a holy people in a holy land.

How are we to understand the laws of purity?

They exist because of the extreme paradox of the Sanctuary. Recall that until the sin of the Golden Calf, God had been transcendent not immanent, distant not close, creator of the universe, shaper of history, and liberator of slaves. Other than this, His connection with human beings had been confined to speech. God speaks and man listens. Man speaks and God listens. The entire world of sanctuary, priesthood, and daily sacrifices did not exist. God was encountered in the exceptional, not the everyday.

The Sanctuary and its service put all this potentially at risk. They were easily mistakable for their pagan counterparts. Other nations had temples, shrines, priests, and sacrifices, but that is because the gods they worshipped were immanent. They lived within the world of nature. They could be appeased, bribed, fed, manipulated. All of this was and is anathema to Judaism. The difference between God and nature, God and human nature, is total. To speak of God having a “home” on earth, or of “smelling the sweet savour” of burnt offerings is, from a theo­logical perspective, very dangerous indeed.

Yet God listened to Moses’ prayer. He understood that the Israelites needed to feel that God was “in their midst.” The answer, therefore, lay in boundaries, clearly demarcated lines rigorously supervised by the priests and fastidiously observed by all. If “the holy” is the space we make for God, then purity is what allows us to enter that space and impurity is what prevents us from doing so.

The major common factor in the various forms of impurity is that they have to do with mortality, with the fact that we are embodied beings in a physical world, exposed to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” To enter sacred space, the space in which we feel close to the presence of infinity and eternity, we must divest ourselves of any consciousness of mortality, disease, and decay.

Hence the supreme source of impurity is death: contact with or proximity to a dead body. Paradoxically, childbirth defiles, even though it represents new life. The reason may be that until quite recently, it was a hazard fraught with the risk of death. Babies were stillborn, many died young, and many mothers died giving birth. The very loss of blood was dangerous. So childbirth may defile because it is an encounter with the risk of death. Alternatively, it may simply be that it defiles because it is a reminder of our mortality and the passing of the generations.

Likewise, the flow of menstrual blood and the reproductive cycle is a sign of human mortality. It may be that the appearance of menstrual blood was a sign that the woman was not pregnant, so it represented a kind of death: the death of the unfertilised egg and of the possibility that month of new life. Seminal and other discharges likewise defiled because they too were a sign of the body functioning in non-normal ways.

Skin disease is the most publicly visible reminder of our ­physicality. The skin condition called tzaraat, leprosy, was regarded as another particularly acute sign of mortality, of disease and decay. “A ­leprous individual is like one who is dead,” say the sages. What connects the different types of tzaraat – garments, the walls of houses, and skin – is that they themselves are boundaries between inside and outside, and holiness depends on the health and strength of boundaries.

Holiness and purity depend on the ability to distinguish, separate, and know what belongs where. That is the logic of the dietary laws in chapter 11. Recall that God created the universe in the first chapter of Genesis by bringing order to chaos through the act of separating domains – light and dark, upper and lower waters, sea and dry land. God then filled each with its appropriate objects or life forms. The dietary laws have the same logic. Clean animals, fish, and birds are those that most conspicuously represent order. Lobsters are impure because, though they live in the water, they walk as on land. Amphibians are impure because they lack a definite place. Most fish have fins and scales: therefore those that lack one or the other blur the line that separates fish from other life forms. Ruminants are permitted because they eat what God first ordained animals to eat: “green plants” (Gen. 1:30). By the same token, carnivorous animals and birds of prey are impure because they eat flesh, something forbidden at the dawn of time. And so on. Whatever blurs boundaries is unclean.

The same logic applies to sexual ethics, in a more profound way. Nothing is more disruptive of social order in the long run than sexual anomie. Human offspring have by far the longest period of dependency of any life form and therefore depend on strong and caring families. The relationships within the family – husband and wife, parent and child – are the most common metaphors throughout Tanach for the relationship between God and the people. This goes to the heart of Judaism as a religion of fidelity, loyalty, and the love that brings new life into being. Judaism is neither hedonistic nor ascetic. It is about the consecration of desire. That is what is at the heart of the two codes of forbidden sexual relations in chapters 18 and 20.

God does not ask of us to sacrifice or devalue our physicality. To the contrary, we are part of the physical world He created, and this is where He wants us to serve Him. Nonetheless, lines have to be drawn and boundaries maintained between God’s domain and ours. Failure to observe the boundary between permitted and forbidden caused Adam and Eve to be exiled from Eden. Within a generation the first murder had taken place, and before long “the earth was filled with violence.”

This is the Torah’s form of chaos theory: as the beating of a butterfly’s wing can cause a typhoon on the other side of the earth, so small breaches in boundaries can lead, in time, to anarchy and tyranny. Knowing how rapid the descent can be from civilisation to barbarism, the priestly sensibility is vigilant in maintaining what Wallace Stevens called the “blessed rage for order.”

Purity, Rabban Yoḥanan was saying, is not some independent condition that exists in the world independently of Torah. It is the mode of being called for by proximity to the holy. The purity laws exist only because Israel was called on to become a holy nation and only because, through the Tabernacle, God caused His presence to dwell in the midst of the camp. That is why the purity laws are specific to Israel – the people and the land – unlike the moral laws that apply, in broad outline, to everyone. It is always wrong to murder, rob, steal, and commit adultery. The laws of purity are God’s special request of the Israelites, the condition of their coming close to eternity in the midst of life.

Ritual

Holiness, sacrifice, purity: these are the subjects of Vayikra, the mark of a people that has the Divine Presence in its midst. But Torat Kohanim, the priestly sensibility, has other features that make its voice distinctive. It has its own view of what constitutes the religious life, the moral life, and time.

There is an astonishing midrashic passage in which the sages are discussing the question: What is the one sentence that summarises Judaism? The most famous of these passages is the one in the Talmud in which a would-be proselyte asks Hillel to teach him the whole of Torah while he is standing on one leg. Hillel replies, “What is hateful to you do not do to others. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and learn.” The next passage continues, as it were, where Hillel ends. Other sages offer other opinions:

Ben Zoma said, “There is a more all-embracing verse, namely, ‘Hear O Israel’” (Deut. 6:4). Ben Nannas said, “There is a more all-embracing verse still: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’” (Lev. 19:18). Ben Pazzi said, “There is a more embracing verse still: ‘Prepare one lamb in the morning and the other towards evening’” (Num. 28:4). A certain rabbi stood up and declared: “The law is in accordance with Ben Pazzi.”

Ben Zoma holds that the foundation of Judaism is its faith in the One God. Hence the key text is the declaration of faith, “Hear O Israel.” Ben Nannas says that the most distinctive feature of Judaism is its ethics, founded as it is not just on fairness and reciprocity but on love. But Ben Pazzi, whose answer is saved until last, offers a wholly unexpected reply. His quote is the verse in Numbers about the daily sacrifice. What is special about Judaism, says Ben Pazzi, is its ritual, its daily acts of dedication, its choreography of small steps and everyday deeds. The passage ends by suggesting that he may have come closer to the heart of Judaism than any of the others.

Judaism, suggests Ben Pazzi, is not just poetry but also prose, not just the fire of romantic love but the daily kindnesses of a successful marriage, not just an exalted faith in the transcendent God but the way it takes faith and translates it into everyday life. Judaism is, in the language of James Joyce, a series of epiphanies of the ordinary. We encounter God not just in the thunder and lightning of Sinai but every morning and evening in ritual and routine. That is what life is and what faith transfigures.

Thoreau said that most people lead lives of quiet desperation. Judaism, argues Ben Pazzi, is a way of living life in quiet celebration. We bring our days to God. Morning and evening, we turn towards Him, offering Him something of ourselves. For that is what faith and love have to become if they are to transform our lives. God is not just a terrifying presence at the top of the mountain. He lives among us in the valley if we place Him at the centre of our lives. God lives not just in drama but in continuity. That is the priestly ethic.

Kings shape history. Prophets capture the moral imagination. But it is the devotion of the priest, the endlessly repeated, precisely prescribed rites, the humble, unspectacular acts of devotion that translate faith into the lives of its followers. We can see the difference it makes in the biblical contrast between Moses and Aaron. Moses is the hero of the Torah. The Pentateuch is made up of the Mosaic books. Aaron is cast in a secondary role. Nor does the Torah paint him in a favourable light. It was Aaron who failed to stop the people from making a golden calf. Yet we hear almost nothing about Moses’ children, Gershom and Eliezer, who disappear into obscurity. To this day, by contrast, priests are the descendants of Aaron. The Temple may no longer exist but Aaron’s children continue to carry the burden of exemplary holiness. Moses’ leadership lasted as long as his lifetime. Aaron’s leadership persisted through the generations. Ritual creates continuity. The priests lit an everlasting flame.

Ritual has fared badly in the West, and that is one of the reasons Vayikra seems to us so strange and remote a book. Many see ritual as part of the mindset of myth and magic. We now know that you cannot bring rain by a rainmaking ceremony. You cannot bring prosperity by attempting to bribe or placate the gods. Battles are not won by prayer alone. Fate is in our hands, not under the control of mythical forces.

All this is true, but such beliefs are alien to Judaism. Faith is not magic or a pre-technological technology. More than any other group in ancient Israel, the priests envisaged God in the most austere terms, shorn of any anthropomorphic language or anything that might be mistaken for myth. God is wholly other, and it is one of the tasks of the priest to ensure that the worship of God remains wholly other. We serve God not to bring success, but to stay close to Him because He is clarity in a world of confusion, life in a world too often obsessed with death, the enduring presence in the midst of change. Ritual for Torat Kohanim has nothing to do with its role in primitive societies.

In Judaism, it is something else entirely. Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology and a man whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all rabbis, showed how ritual creates and sustains the group.

It creates a collective identity. It is one thing to worship God and confess our sins in the privacy of the soul, quite another to do so at the Temple in ancient times, or in the synagogue now. We are social animals: “It is not good for man to be alone.” The depth and breadth of that sociality depends on our ability to pray together, confess together, and celebrate together. That is why it was needed at that point in the history of Israel. Throughout Genesis, the relationship between God and the patriarchs and matriarchs was I-Thou. Now, predicated of a nation, it had to become We-Thou. That needs the coordinated action of ritual.

When we make the transition from childhood to adulthood, becoming responsible citizens in the community of faith, we enter the world of the commands, participate in its life of worship, and learn to make other people’s joy and grief our joy and grief. Ritual binds us to Jews in other places, other times. More than anything else, the shared life of ritual sustained Jews as a nation through two thousand years of exile and dispersion. Ritual turns us from lonely individuals into members of the people of the covenant.

The American anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport went further, arguing that ritual is the enactment of meaning. Human beings are meaning-seeking animals, and one way of achieving meaning is through language. But language also allows us to tell lies. Ritual does not speak; it enacts.

It communicates meaning not by saying, but by doing. Ritual inducts us into a world of shared values. We may sometimes betray those values, but by taking part in the ritual we enter the world they define. Rappaport sees this as fundamental:

In enunciating, accepting, and making conventions moral, ritual contains within itself not simply a symbolic representation of social contract, but tacit social contract itself. As such, ritual, which also establishes, guards, and bridges boundaries between public systems and private processes, is the basic social act.

So, without ritual, no community, no continuity, no shared structure of meanings. Judaism gives great prominence to individuals. Its texts do not stereotype. Even rejected figures like Ishmael and Esau, failures like Saul, gentiles like Pharaoh’s daughter or the Syrian general Naaman, stand out with an individuality of their own. Even when it comes to revealing God’s word, “No two prophets prophesy with the same style,” say the sages. But there is a difference between individuality and ­individualism. The latter ultimately defeats and destroys community. So a nation of strong individuals needs, all the more, to be held together by ritual.

Torat Kohanim sees the religious life as built on the foundation of its rituals that, barring catastrophe, never change. Even though we no longer have a Temple or sacrifices or a functioning priesthood, Judaism continues to be a religion of rituals and it is this that sustains its continuity through time, etching its days with the charisma of grace, more like a marriage than a romance but no less moving for the quietness of its beauty.

A personal memory: the first time I visited Auschwitz, I was numb with grief and shock. There are no words you can say in the presence of a tragedy so vast, an event so unprecedented. You feel overwhelmed by emotion but have no way of expressing it. Then I entered Block 27 in Stammlager Auschwitz. In the almost empty room a recording was playing of Kel Malei Rachamim, the centuries-old Jewish memorial prayer for the dead, sung in the traditional melody. That is when I broke down in tears.

The words made grief articulate. Precisely because they were a ritual – like blowing the shofar or lighting a memorial candle – they sustained meaning in the face of the most determined effort ever undertaken to destroy it. Because we can still say Kel Malei Rachamim, it means that though Jews died, Judaism did not. And because J­udaism did not die, neither will the memories of those who did. Ritual is the defeat of nihilism, the failure of meaning when there is nothing to contain it.

Three Voices: Priest, Prophet, King

Viktor Frankl, the great psychotherapist, once described a thought experi­ment. You see two shapes, both of them shadows cast by an object on a screen. You can only see the shadow, not the object. One is a rectangle, the other a circle. There is only one object. What is it?

The answer is a cylinder, lit first from the side, then from above. Frankl’s point is that in two dimensions, a rectangle cannot be a circle. To say that one thing is both is a contradiction. Add a third dimension, though, and the contradiction vanishes. A cylinder viewed from one perspective looks like a rectangle, and from another a circle. What looks like a contradiction, said Frankl, can sometimes be resolved by simply adding a dimension. That applies to Torah, both as a text and as a way of life.

Torah, the five Mosaic books, is unlike any other text in Tanach. Tanach, the Hebrew Bible as a whole, contains books of many types and genres. There are historical works, prophetic ones, books of wisdom, liturgical collections like the book of Psalms, short stories like those of Jonah and Ruth, laments, love poems, and so on. Sometimes two books tell the same story from different vantage points in time, like the books of Samuel and Kings on the one hand, Chronicles on the other. But almost all of them are one thing: one book, one subject, one genre, one voice.

Torah is not like that at all. It is the only work in Tanakh that contains law: not only one law, but multiple codes that add up, according to tradition, to 613 commands, a vast legal structure covering all aspects of life, from the structuring of a society to the innermost contours of the emotional and cognitive life. But it is much more than that. It contains cosmology: a story, two stories in fact, of how the universe and humanity came to be. It includes history, poetry, genealogy, and prophecy. No other work is quite like it, and this puzzled many great minds. Most famously, Rashi began his commentary with the question posed by R. Yitzchak: If the Torah is a book of law, why does it not begin with the first law? Why include an account of creation at all? A book of law should stick to law.

Hence the significance of Frankl’s point about circles and squares. What looks like several objects can actually be one. A contradiction in two dimensions can make sense in three. That is precisely what the Torah is: many kinds of text, spoken in several voices, which make sense as a coherent whole only if we add an extra dimension: the infinite eternal we call God. The Torah is God’s word to humankind, specifically God’s word to the particular people He asked to be His witness to humankind.

Jewish tradition divided the books of the Bible into three ­categories: Torah; Neviim, the prophets; and Ketuvim, the writings. What makes them different is not their subject matter but their relative holiness, their relationship to God. To put it at its simplest: Torah is the word of God to man. The prophetic books are the words of God through man. The other writings are the words of man to God.

Throughout this introduction, we have spoken about Vayikra as a book written in the priestly voice. What does that mean, and what are the other voices? It does not mean that Vayikra was written by priests or for priests, but rather that it expresses the sensibility, the special mindset, the distinctive mode of consciousness of the priest. There are at least two other major voices in the Torah: the prophetic voice and the wisdom voice. This does not mean that the Torah is a composite work composed by multiple authors. What it means is that the Torah is a precise literary expression of the fact that there are at least three ways of seeing the world in relation to God.

These voices are as different as rectangles and circles. But as Frankl said, sometimes a contradiction disappears when you add another dimension. That is why the Torah is written the way it is. It forces us to think our way through to a new dimension. The question answered by the literary structure of the Torah is: How do you convey in language intelligible to humans something that is beyond the human? This is of course a philosophical problem, but it is also a literary problem. What kind of text would give humans a sense of the divine?

The Torah’s solution is the device of multiple perspectives. God discloses Himself in three ways: creation, redemption, and revelation. Creation means the world that is: the wonders of nature, the ­vicissitudes of history, and the conflict within the human heart between duty and desire. Redemption is the world that ought to be: a world of ­justice, compassion, the dignity of the individual, and the sanctity of life, the world God had in mind when He created humankind and to which we are still travelling. Revelation is the word that decodes the world. It is the set of instructions – mitzvot – God has given us for reaching Him. Revelation is what happens when we put the world aside and listen to the will of God. It is the world as seen from the Sanctuary, the Temple, and the synagogue. God is where the three meet and become one.

Each of the three disclosures has its own voice. The one associated with creation is called chochma, “wisdom.” This is the voice we hear in books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, but we also hear it in the Torah, such as in the story of Joseph. It is the most universal of Judaism’s voices and was later associated with kings and their courts.

The voice of redemption is prophetic. The prophet sees God in history and sees history itself as the ongoing drama between God and the people with whom He entered into a covenant. For the prophets, time is not a mere series of events, the random collisions of people in pursuit of power. It is the story of God’s love for Abraham and his descendants, and how they often abused and betrayed that love.

The voice of revelation is priestly. Unlike the prophet and the king, the priest does not live in the world of everyday. He is the guardian of sacred space and time, the points at which we withdraw from the world to remind ourselves how small we are and how brief are our lives, microseconds in the history of the cosmos, yet how great they can be when we allow ourselves to be brushed by the wings of eternity.

Put these three voices together and you have a literary expression of the fact that God, as He speaks to us through Torah, cannot be confined to a single perspective or vantage point. He is the One within the many, the unity beneath the diversity, the whole that makes the parts cohere. The God of creation, the God of redemption, and the God of revelation are one and the same. It is we on earth who cannot see all three aspects or hear all three voices simultaneously. By weaving them together in a single work, the Torah points us towards that dimension beyond space and time where the many are one. The Torah is the primal literary expression of the monotheistic mind.

The unity of the Torah is the unity of God. This has huge consequences for the spiritual-political-ethical project we call Judaism. Every civilisation since the dawn of history has been struck by the diversity of the natural world with its multiple life forms and the human world with its multiple cultures. The question has always been how to make sense of that diversity. Polytheism sees it as evidence of multiple gods. Atheism sees it as the play of multiple forces, all of which are blind. Judaism sees it as the creation of a loving God who delights in diversity and asks us to respect that diversity.

That is why Torah, and Judaism generally, is a conversation scored for many voices. It is also why there was never a single figure in Judaism who embodied the totality of faith. There were prophets, priests, and kings. Sometimes one person held two roles. Moses was a prophet and the functional equivalent of a king. But he was not a priest. For that, he had to turn to Aaron. It is precisely this complexity that makes Judaism the unique faith it is. None of us, even the greatest, is spiritually self-sufficient. We are all God-like – in His image, after His likeness – but none of us is God. The priest may not have been the most dramatic figure in the drama of the Hebrew Bible, but without his rituals and continuities, his daily encounters with the Divine, Judaism would not have survived.

Three Forms of the Moral Life

Not only did kings, priests, and prophets see God differently. They saw the moral life differently as well. This makes Jewish ethics both dynamic and multifaceted. That, surely, is how it should be.

From Plato onward, philosophers have given us elegant simplifications of morality. For Plato, it consisted of knowledge, for Aristotle of virtue. David Hume thought it was about emotions, Kant about duty and reason, Bentham about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. John Stuart Mill spoke of “one very simple principle”: never interfere with anyone else unless he is harming others. These are all important insights, but the good life does not reduce to one very simple principle. Judaism gives the subject the complexity it deserves.

There is a wisdom morality, set out in the book of Proverbs. It tells us to be humble: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18). Be generous: “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink” (25:21). Act with integrity: “The digger of a pit falls into it, and the one rolling a stone, on him it will turn” (26:27). Listen much, speak little: “Whoever watches his mouth, guards his life” (13:3). Be content with what you have: “A heart at peace gives life to the body” (14:30). Learn from experience, keep company with the sages, avoid conflict wherever possible, and be ever mindful of God.

That is the voice of chochma, wisdom, as we hear it in Proverbs. Ecclesiastes and Job, two other wisdom works, are more tense and searching. Ecclesiastes is a sustained lament about the pointlessness of life in face of the fact that we are all going to die. Job is a powerful challenge to the entire idea that there is justice on earth. No faith that canonises works as challenging as these could ever be called unquestioning or naïve.

Wisdom is about “creation,” that is, the here-and-now, the real, empirical, everyday world in which most people find themselves most of the time. Its ideal type is the ḥakham, the wise man, or better still, the wise woman: Proverbs 1–9 sees wisdom as a female attribute, and the book ends with the famous hymn of praise to the eshet ḥayil, the woman of moral strength. Its approach to morality, while deeply religious, is also prudential, pragmatic, and experience-based. It is more oriented to virtue than to the rule-based morality we associate with Torah and Halakha. Its basic assumption is that the universe is the work of divine wisdom. Therefore, embedded within it are moral as well as scientific laws. Those who keep them flourish; those who flout them eventually fail. The best way of acquiring a moral sense is to live constantly with yirat Hashem, awe in the conscious presence of God.

Judaism’s wisdom literature is the closest it comes to other wisdom traditions, like those of ancient Egypt and the philosophical world of ancient Greece. The reason is that wisdom is the universal heritage of humankind, part of what it means to be created in the image of God. We are all born and will all die. Humans face similar conflicts and temptations throughout the world. That is why wisdom is universal and perennial.

The prophet’s moral voice is very different. He or she (there were prophetesses as well as prophets) is passionate, visionary, challenging, urgent. The prophet is a disturber of the peace, ready to chide a king, a priest, a fellow prophet, or the people as a whole with their moral failings. Continue to behave as you do, says the prophet, and you will bring destruction. A prophet sees tomorrow implicit in today. He warns of what will happen if we do not change. He also inspires with a vision of the ideal society that we can, with God’s help, create. The prophet is often the voice of impending doom, but also of inextinguishable hope. When others see peace, the prophet sees the coming catastrophe. When others are weeping, the prophet sees the consolation. If the voice of wisdom lives in the present, the prophet lives in the future.

The prophet is also bearer of the word. He or she speaks, not as wisdom does, on the basis of observation and experience, but rather on the basis of the word God has planted in his mouth, the message He has charged him with delivering. The prophets were often deeply conflicted people, feeling inadequate to the task they had been given by God, knowing that what they had to say would be unpopular and almost certainly unheeded. Isaiah said he had unclean lips. Jeremiah attempted to be silent. Jonah tried to run away. Yet in the end they delivered God’s word, and though at the time people were unresponsive, their wisdom became clear in retrospect and their visions remain among the most powerful ever recorded.

The keywords of the prophet are tzedek and mishpat, social and legal justice; chessed and rachamim, kindness and compassion. A prophet thinks in terms of relationships: between rich and poor, powerful and powerless. He or she always sees society with a human face. Politics for the prophet is not about power or interests but about the way we honour human beings, especially those who have less power than we do. Above all, the prophet is always passionately concerned about the relationship between the people and God.

The prophet speaks truth to power, but he or she also speaks truth to the religious establishment, the priesthood, the Temple, and its rituals. The prophets were critical of the sacrificial service, not because they opposed it, but rather, they opposed any dissociation between ritual and ethics. You cannot love God and hate human beings. You cannot bring sacrifices at the Temple and then oppress your fellows. God will not hear your prayers if you fail to hear the cries of those around you. The prophet lives in the cognitive dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be. His or hers is the voice summoning us to the work of redemption, making society a place of justice and grace.

The priest has a third approach to morality. His template was the world of Genesis 1 before Adam and Eve committed their sin. It is a place of structure and order, harmony and plenitude, the universe God made and seven times pronounced “good.” For the priest, there is a moral ecology in the universe as well as a biological one. Ethics is about ­respecting the integrity of each person, place, and time. Love is an alignment of the human deed and the divine will. Love your neighbour as yourself because your neighbour too is in the image of God. Love the stranger because we are all ultimately strangers and temporary residents on earth. Never give way to the emotions that disturb the order of society: hate, resentment, revenge.

What the priest understands more profoundly than either the king or the prophet is that there is a sacred ontology. Just as the universe has a basic physical and biological structure, so it has a basic moral structure created by the word and will of God. When we obey God’s commands, we align ourselves with that structure and the result is blessing. When we disobey the commands, the result is curse. If for the sage, the key virtue is wisdom, and for the prophet justice and compassion, for the priest it is obedience. “Noah did everything just as God commanded him” (Gen. 6:22). “The Israelites had done all the work just as the Lord had commanded Moses” (Ex. 39:42). “So Aaron and his sons did everything the Lord commanded through Moses” (Lev. 8:36). For the priest, these verses tell us how the world should be. When human act coincides with divine will, order is safeguarded against the ever-present threat of chaos.

The keyword of priestly ethics is “holy” and its key text is the remarkable chapter 19 of Vayikra with its commands to love the neighbour and the stranger, not to hate one’s brother in his heart, and not to harbour vengeance or take revenge, and its prohibitions of sowing seeds of mixed kinds, wearing clothes of mixed wool and linen, eating fruit from a tree in its first three years, and cutting the hair at the sides of one’s head. The provisions of Leviticus 19 can seem at first glance like a random assembly of laws that have nothing in common. That is because we fail to understand the idea of holiness, which means honouring the divine order in creation, whether it concerns plant or animal life or the relations between human beings.

The priest is trained to see and protect boundaries. He thinks in terms of polar oppositions: light and dark, day and night, holy and common, pure and impure, permitted and forbidden, neighbour and stranger, kin and non-kin, and the rest. Everything has its place in the scheme of things. An act in place sustains order. An act out of place – a transgression, a sin – ­creates disorder and calls for a sacrificial act of ­restoration. There is nothing cold or bloodless about this. The priest cares for order in the universe the way a composer cares about the precise order of notes in a symphony, or an architect the precise arrangement of elements in the design of a building.

For the priest, the moral life is not something we learn by observation (the wisdom ethic) or by empathy and the passion for justice (the prophetic ethic), but by honouring the distinctions God has taught us to see in the structure of reality. There is milk, a sign of life, and meat, a sign of death. There is plant life and there is animal life. There are brothers and others. That is sacred ontology and it creates an ethic of holiness. “Be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

The priest knows that there is nothing inevitable about the maintenance of order in the human sphere. He knows the spiritual equivalent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy that says all systems lose energy over time. In the course of time, for example, inequalities grow between rich and poor. Therefore Leviticus prescribes periodic redistributions: the corner of the field, the forgotten sheaf, the tithe for the poor, the sabbatical and Jubilee years. Over time, the accumulated weight of transgressions grows. So there is the annual rite of the Day of Atonement when the High Priest atones for the sins of the people. The priest never forgets the periodic interventions necessary to avoid national entropy, the growth of chaos and disorder in society.

It is a wonderful system, this threefold approach to the moral life. It has generated an ongoing conversation about the right and the good that has continued from the days of Moses to today. The result has been what Paul Johnson calls “a moral philosophy both solid and subtle, which has changed remarkably little over the millennia.”

That is what emerges when we combine the wisdom of the sage, the passion of the prophet, and the sense of sacred of the priest.

Crisis and the Return of the Holy

The priestly voice we hear in Vayikra does not dominate Tanach as a whole. For centuries it occupied the background, not the foreground, of Jewish life.

The great dramas of the post-Mosaic historical books from Joshua to II Kings are about wars, threats, enemies, alliances, victories, defeats, the distribution of power, and the administration of justice. The key figures were kings and their courts, prophets and their visions. These were the shapers of history. The priest, by virtue of his office, did not live in history. He represented the things that do not change precisely because they are intimations of eternity.

It was in exile, in Babylon, that Torah rose to a prominence in the life of the nation that it rarely had before, because it was now the very basis of the nation’s identity. A people in exile have by definition lost all the other things that made them a nation – their land, home, language, landscape, independence, and sovereignty. That is why they almost invariably assimilate to the dominant culture and, whether voluntarily or under pressure, adopt the dominant faith.

It was then that the priestly voice came into its own. For mono­theism makes possible something impossible otherwise: a living relationship with God away from home. The gods of the ancient world, especially the national ones like Ra for Egypt, Baal for the Canaanites, and Chemosh for the Moabites, were gods of place. Their rule existed within a geographically and politically circumscribed territory. Hence exile meant not only the loss of home but also the loss of potency of the gods of home. That is what the exiles initially felt when they asked, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a strange land?” (Ps. 137:4).

But the religion of Israel was different. The God of Israel – the One God, creator of the universe – was the God of everywhere who could be reached anywhere. That was the message of a remarkable man who went with the captives to Babylon. His name was Ezekiel and he was both a prophet and a priest. His message to the exiles was one of hope:

This is what the Sovereign Lord says: “Although I have removed them far among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet have I become to them a little sanctuary in the countries where they have gone.” (Ezek. 11:16)

You could still pray to God in exile. You could even build “a little sanctuary” there.

In exile, there was no role for Judean kings, nor, other than as voices of hope, was there one for prophets. But ironically, for priests there was. The Temple and its sacrifices were lost, but the faith they represented was still alive and a source of identity. Prayer, study of Torah, and the fulfilment of the commands became a kind of exilic home. That was the first act of the spiritual drama that was to unfold in the coming centuries.

The second came with the return from Babylon, especially in the mid-fifth century BCE with the arrival of two key figures: Ezra and Nehemiah. What they found was that the Jews who had remained in Israel had suffered a massive loss of identity. They desecrated the Sabbath, they had out-married, and many of them could no longer speak Hebrew.

That was the situation the two men sought to reverse, beginning with a massive public gathering at the gates of Jerusalem on the New Year, when Ezra (also a priest) read the Torah in public, having stationed Levites throughout the crowd to explain what was being said.

This was a turning point in Jewish history. After the experience of exile, Ezra and Nehemiah understood that the battle for national survival was about to become one less of armies than ideas, a test not of military but of spiritual strength. The prophets had always known this, but only rarely had they won the argument. Now, under the sway of great empires, the terms of Jewish existence had changed.

The third act unfolded in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE. The battle we commemorate on Chanukah was as much against the Hellenised Jews as the Greeks themselves. When the Maccabees won and began ruling as the Hasmonean kings, they too became Hellenised, at which point a new phase began in the search for a strong religious identity. The fate of the Hasmonean kings showed that you could win a military battle while losing the cultural war.

It is at this point that we begin to hear of new groups like the perushim (separatists) and chaverim (members of fellowships), who had begun voluntarily to adopt new religious stringencies, among them rules that had hitherto applied only to priests. For the time being, these were small sects, not yet a mass movement. But they were the start of what would eventually become a significant feature of Jewish life: the spread of priestly practices among the people as a whole.

The fourth act was the disastrous rebellion against Rome in 66. Many Jews, among them the historian Josephus and the great political realist among the sages, Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai, sensed that it was doomed to failure and so it was. In 70, the Temple was destroyed and in 73, the last group of rebels committed suicide at Massada rather than be taken captive.

The destruction of the Second Temple – feared, expected, ­foreseen – was a crisis almost without precedent in the history of Israel. The First Temple had been destroyed six centuries earlier, but the prophets, especially Jeremiah, were sure that the Jews would return and that Babylon’s power would come to an end. Few believed this of the Romans. What would Israel do without a Temple, sacrifices, a functioning priesthood, and the great rite of the High Priest on Yom Kippur? How could their spiritual life be continued and their sins atoned? It is out of this historic crisis that rabbinic Judaism was born, carrying to its logical conclusion the work begun centuries before by Ezekiel and then Ezra.

Essentially, the rabbis democratised the priesthood. Without Temple or sacrifices, the entire system of avoda, divine service, was translated into the everyday life of ordinary Jews. In prayer, every Jew became a priest offering a sacrifice. In repentance, he became a High Priest, atoning for his sins and those of his people. Every synagogue, in Israel or elsewhere, became a fragment of the Temple in Jerusalem. Every table became an altar, every act of charity or hospitality, a kind of sacrifice.

Torah study, once the speciality of the priesthood, became the right and obligation of everyone. Not everyone could wear the crown of priesthood, but everyone could wear the crown of Torah. A mamzer talmid ḥakham, a Torah scholar of illegitimate birth, was higher than an am haaretz Kohen Gadol, an ignorant High Priest. In rabbinic Judaism, Jews finally realised the vision intimated more than a thousand years earlier of becoming “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” It was a remarkable triumph over tragedy.

During this centuries-long process, extraordinary changes took place in Jewish life. The synagogue was born. So was the idea of ­thrice-daily prayer. Torah study became central to the life of the nation. ­Holiness, once centred on the Temple, was now diffused into the life of the commandments. Every time someone performed a mitzva, they said, “Blessed are You… who has made us holy by His commands.” Vast intellectual energy was directed to clarifying the Oral Tradition in relation to every detail of life. Judaism had always been a religion of law, but never so intimately and overwhelmingly.

So in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, what had been until then just one of three voices became the dominant one. Torat Kohanim, the priestly sensibility that sees Jewish identity in terms of ritual and law, survived. The other two great institutions, kingship and prophecy, did not. Kings are by definition conditional on Israel having independence as a sovereign state. This they had only for a relatively short period, in Second Temple times, between the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Greeks (165–162 BCE), and 63 BCE when Pompey invaded Jerusalem and Israel came under Roman rule.

As for prophecy – the hearing of the divine word within ­history – that only truly functions when Jews are actors on the historical stage, which they no longer were. The last of the biblical prophets were Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi in early Second Temple times. In the rabbinic literature we hear only of a Bat Kol, a heavenly “echo,” as if the voice of heaven had grown faint.

Ezra represented the birth of a new type of leader: the teacher as hero, something the Jewish world had not seen since the days of Moses. Jews still had God’s word, but by now it had been canonised. ­Applying it to the present no longer required revelation – God’s word to the prophet – but rather, interpretation.

This is part of what the rabbis mean when they say, “A sage is greater than a prophet.”

It was those fraught, formative centuries prior to and following the destruction of the Second Temple that posed one of the most ­fundamental questions of all in Judaism: How do you remain in touch with God when you have lost your land, your home, your independence, your freedom, your presence on the historical stage, your kings, ­prophets, and priests, your Temple, and the entire sacrificial order? When all is lost, what remains?

The answer was Torat Kohanim, the world of the priest, democratised, set free from its dependence on the Temple, and transfigured. For sacrifice, read prayer. For revelation, read Torah study. For redemption, read tzedaka. In place of the land, read law. Halakha, Jewish law, became the arena in which Jews met God and sanctified their lives, and its scholars became the new priesthood. The very non-­historicity of the priestly mind – its image of time as eternity – was ideally suited to the existential condition of Jews in exile, in which nothing truly significant could happen until the redemption, which would be brought about by God, not political action, and which it was forbidden to hasten in any way.

The sage became the functional equivalent of the priest as described by Malachi: “For the lips of a priest should keep knowledge, and people should seek the law from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts” (Mal. 2:7). The Judaism of law and boundary maintenance, of differentiation between permitted and forbidden, sacred and profane, of study and teaching, and of time experienced as a daily, weekly, and yearly cycle – in short, the mindset of the priests – became what Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik called ish hahalacha, “the halachic personality.” The priestly voice emerged as the dominant one in Jewish life until modern times.

What is the priestly voice? It is a voice of order and harmony. It is timeless, not time-bound. It sees the presence of God in law, physical, moral, and spiritual. It speaks of a world in which everything has its time and place. When people blur boundaries – when cultures become Dionysian, Nietzschean – the priest knows that there is danger ahead. The priest is the one who says, “Good fences make good neighbours.” Order and integrity are the essentials of the peaceable kingdom. Hillel summed up the driving force of this vision when he defined the “disciples of Aaron” as those who “seek peace, pursue peace, love people, and bring them close to the Torah.”

Leviticus Today

So what is the message of Leviticus to us today?

First, it says that the Jewish people is a nation with God in its midst. That is who we are and why. It is an immense challenge. Vayikra does not imply that the Divine Presence is easy to live with. The book reverberates with the tragedy of the deaths of Nadav and Avihu on the day the Tabernacle was consecrated, because they brought an offering God had not commanded. Holiness calls for purity, sacrifice, obedience. But we are called on to be a holy people. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook in 1931, “Amongst Jews, ‘genius’ is found only in the holy man.”

If the Jewish genius is indeed holiness, then it is because of the vision set forth in Vayikra.

It tells us that morality is based at least in part on a sacred ontology, meaning that good and evil are objective facts about the universe, not norms of our own devising. There is an ethic of holiness, and it consists of making distinctions, keeping separate things that are unalike, recognising the integrity of creation and the diversity of life, maintaining boundaries, honouring order and restoring it whenever it is damaged, and seeing sin as something that does real harm in the real world as well as staining the soul. For sin, there must be atonement, collective and individual. Yet despite its apparent austerity, the priestly ethic set out in Leviticus 19 speaks in the language of love.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has recently shown that the secular West has tended to focus on two dimensions of the moral life: care and the avoidance of harm, and fairness.

These are, incidentally, the core of the prophetic ethic: chesed and rachamim, kindness and compassion, alongside tzedek and mishpat, fairness and justice. But there are, he argues, three other dimensions and they exist in other cultures: loyalty, respect, and a sense of the sacred. Loyalty runs through the whole of Judaism. It might even be the best way of translating the word emunah, normally read as “faith.” But respect and the sense of the sacred are sustained in the world of the priest. Without priests, it is difficult to maintain a sense of identity, strong institutions, or non-negotiable values. If Haidt is correct, it would go a long way towards explaining why Judaism was so successful a synergy between prophet and priest.

Neuroscience also allows us to reconsider the role of ritual in the life of the mind and its emotions. A whole series of studies in recent years has shown how outstanding achievement in any field depends on many years (the magic number is ten thousand hours) of “deep practice,” another name for ritual.

Repeated behaviour reconfigures the brain, wrapping neural pathways with myelin, thereby turning reflective behaviour into instinctive response. That is what the thirteenth-century rabbinic work, Sefer HaChinuch, meant by the axiom, “The heart is drawn after the deed.”

All great creative artists develop rituals.

If we want to change, develop willpower, and defeat bad habits, ritual is the most effective way. That is what the priestly mind understands better than any of Judaism’s other voices. The soul needs exercise as much as the body, and ritual is what creates habits of the heart.

Vayikra tells us that a sexual ethic is fundamental to the health of the nation as well as to the lives of its citizens. It is difficult to hear this in an age in which the very concept of a sexual ethic and a code of self-restraint are counter-cultural. Yet history has shown this to be true. The ethic of Vayikra represents a deep commitment to marriage and the family, to sexual fidelity and respect between parents and children. Today’s Dionysiac culture with its sexual free-for-all, far from being modern, is exactly where ancient Greece and Rome were before their decline and fall.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is Vayikra’s code of holiness that is most deeply rooted in economic and social realities. The laws of the sabbatical and Jubilee years still have much to teach us about the periodic ­adjustments that must be made if we are to free people from the burden of poverty and the indignity of dependence. The free market, as Thomas Piketty has argued in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is better at creating wealth than distributing it equitably. The priestly solution is not to abandon the free market, but rather to make periodic adjustments to ensure the dignity of all. The laws against crossbreeding of animals, planting mixed seeds in a vineyard, even the law against eating meat and milk together, have suddenly become intelligible in an age when we have discovered how easy it is to destroy the delicate ecology on which life depends.

Even the strange mathematical precision of the priestly mindset, its interest in patterns of three, five, and seven that structure its prose, most clearly in the priestly blessings, have had a recent echo of what scientists call the Anthropic principle: the extreme precision with which the universe is fine-tuned for the emergence of life. The universe has a mathematical structure as the priests in Judaism, and Pythagoras in ancient Greece, knew.

For all this, however, the glory of the Torah is the way it is scored for a multiplicity of voices. The biblical scholar Israel Knohl once made the striking observation that the Temple Scroll, one of the documents of the Dead Sea sect, is what the Torah might have looked like had it been written entirely in the priestly voice. No one can read the Temple Scroll without noting how flat it is, how two-dimensional its imagination and inert its prose. The glory of the Torah is its constant juxtaposition of perspectives, styles, and sensibilities. It is these that give it life and dynamism and richness. It is also this that gives the Torah its unparalleled capacity to represent the complexity of the moral and spiritual life, as well as allow us to sense ever deeper dimensions in its message as we ourselves grow and mature and deepen our understanding.

Torat Kohanim, the priestly mindset, is an indispensable part of the music of Judaism. If the prophet is Beethoven, the priest is Bach, the sound of order, grace, proportion, balance, and harmony. Never was this more beautifully expressed than in the priestly blessings:

May God bless you and protect you.
May God make His face shine on you and be gracious to you.
May God turn His face towards you and grant you peace.

Num. 6:24–26

Those are the blessings to which the holy life aspires.

So in the end we come back to the beginning, and to the word Vayikra itself, which Rashi defines as a call uttered in love. In Vayikra, God sets out the mystery and majesty of holiness, summoning the people with whom He covenanted to a life driven by its energy, lit by its radiance, transformed by its alignment with the will and word of its Creator. One who lives a life of holiness will – so is the priestly promise – know what it is to feel God’s face turned towards him or her, and in that sacred meeting discover the true depth of peace.