It’s a Cover-Up – Parshiot Achrei Mot/Kedoshim

**Rav Kook (Based on Ein Ayah, Gemara Shabbat 22a)**

And if any Israelite or any stranger who resides among them hunts down a wild animal or a bird that may be eaten, he shall pour out its blood and cover it with earth. (Vayikra 17:13)

“He shall spill its blood and cover it with dust”. This means that with what one spills, he shall cover. [Just as a person spills the blood of a slaughtered animal with his hand, so too, he is obligated to cover the blood with this hand and not cover it with his foot.] The reason is so that mitzvot will not be contemptible to him. (Gemara Shabbat 22a)

There is a mitzvah to cover the blood of a shechted bird or non-domesticated animal. Various explanations have been offered for this mitzvah, known as kisui ha’dam. Some explain that the mitzvah is intended to distance us from the prohibited consumption of blood. Others explain it as a protective measure against ancient pagan practices involving blood.

But these explanations seem simplistic. Can it be that this G-dly mitzvah is nothing more than a guardrail against lowly paganism or consumption of blood, both practices that most of humanity has evolved beyond? These kind of flimsy, contingent explanations cannot possibly exhaust the depths of this – or any – G-dly mitzvah. The mitzvah must be relevant to every stage of humanity’s development.

We should note that although humanity has made great strides in its ethical and moral development, there are still many rungs to climb. We still have not reached the highest levels of holiness and elevation that are our destiny. Granted, we cannot speak in detail about the moral code or ideals that will govern at the end of history, in the Messianic era and subsequent to the revival of the dead (lit. תחיית המתים). These matters are simply beyond our ability to comprehend. But we can point to aspects of humanity’s current state of being – things that we take for granted as normal – and identify them as flawed practices that will be discarded when humanity eventually rises to a perfected state. The spilling of animal blood is one such practice. It cannot possibly be reconciled with man’s ultimate state of ethical and spiritual perfection. It is not a mere coincidence that according to the Torah, humanity was originally prohibited to consume meat and only the vegetable world was permitted.

Although we will eventually return to this lofty state, it is improper for humanity to leap impulsively to levels of extreme piety and forgo the consumption of meat. That would be neither suitable nor sustainable for our current state of being. Such inappropriate piety would breach the boundaries of what the Torah permits, and its end will be catastrophic failure. Much work remains to be done in the interpersonal and social domains of existence before man can rightfully extend a loving hand to the denizens of the animal world. How can we, in good conscience, divert our spiritual energies and resources to the animal kingdom as long as our fellow human beings are afflicted with poverty, disease, war, persecution and suffering?

This places humanity’s moral development into a difficult paradox. On one hand, consumption of meat is permitted to us in our current state, and it is both rash and impudent for us to leap to Messianic levels of piety by forgoing meat. But on the other hand, we cannot become so habituated to our imperfect state that we become struck in it, that we forget that there are more rungs to climb, that we stop becoming and content ourselves with being.

The mitzvah of kisui ha’dam is G-d’s divinely legislated means of navigating this paradox. The animal world is permitted to man for his needs, and he is allowed to spill animal blood. But G-d demands that this be done with hesitation, with a certain sense of shame. Man may spill blood, but he must cover it up. He thus reminds himself that in the light of the ultimate and most perfect truth, spilling animal blood is cause for contrition and a measure of shame.

This also explains why the mitzvah of kisui ha’dam is limited to birds and non-domesticated animals, a question that has bothered many commentators. Based on our analysis, we can explain that slaughtering birds and wild animals is particularly shameful because they are generally self-sufficient and do not rely on people to provide their needs. By contrast, humans provide for and take care of domesticated animals, and their slaughter thus has a semblance of a fair exchange. In this way, the Divine lawgiver ensures a proper balance between humanity’s current moral state and the ultimate heights to which it is destined to ascend.

For this reason, our Sages teach that kisui ha’dam should not be performed with one’s feet as it would be disrespectful to the mitzvah (lit. ביזוי מצוה). The feet are the lowest part of the body, and using them for this mitzvah would express that it is oriented towards the lowest stages of humanity’s moral development (like weaning us from consuming blood or paganism). For this mitzvah is Divinely engineered to bring about nothing less than the highest and brightest future, and it should thus be performed with the hands. The hands can be raised higher than any part of the body, higher than even the head, which is the seat of the intellect. The message is that kisui ha’dam connects us to a level of spiritual reality that is beyond our current comprehension, to levels of holiness that await us at the end of history.

In this regard, kisui ha’dam serves as a paradigm for all of the Torah’s mitzvot. No mitzvah is consigned to a distant past or to the inferior stages of humanity’s development. Every mitzvah advances humanity and history to its ultimate conclusion, to the light of G-d and His splendor, to the day when G-d will pour out his spirit upon all flesh and remove the spirit of impurity for the earth. On that day, animals will become human-like in their spiritual capabilities and humanity will attain levels that we cannot even comprehend. Humanity will revert to its Edenic diet and animal slaughter for food will be a vestige of the past.

And on the 8th Day, Everything Was Good – Parshat Tazria/Metzora

Printable PDF available here. Previous piece on this parshah is available here.

Rav Kook (Based on Shemonah Kevatzim, 1:497)

“And G-d spoke to Moses, saying… “If a woman conceives and gives birth to a boy…on the eighth day, the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.” (Vayikra 12:1-3)

The classical explanation for the mitzvah of milah[1] is that it tempers sexual desire. This explanation encompasses within it broad and fundamental principles regarding man’s place in the world and his role as a servant of G-d. We must note that the term “milah” is not fully accurate, as the correct term is brit milah – literally the “covenant of circumcision.” This mitzvah was given to Avraham as the foundation of a unique Divine covenant, part of which was G-d’s promise to him “to be a G-d to you and your descendants.”[2] By engraving the sign of this covenant into our flesh, we express that this covenant is not an peripheral, superficial part of our existence, but intrinsic to and inseparable from our very being. As Iyov (19:26) declared, מבשרי אחזה אלוק – “From my flesh, I perceive G-d.”

However, brit milah is far more than a symbolic declaration. One who understands the message of this mitzvah, who defines his essential identify by his relationship with the Divine, will exert himself to unify all of his drives and desires. He will use them to further the enlightened and righteous goals established by the Creator of those very drives and desires, who implanted them in His creations for the ultimate goodness of the world that He created. Such an individual will experience a sense of unity in his own inner world, and as a result, he will acutely perceive the inner Divine unity of the world around him.

However, not everyone reaches this lofty level. For many people, their various drives and desires pull them in different directions. Their inner world is ruptured and unharmonious, and they cannot fathom the notion of directing their desires toward a higher, overarching purpose. They gaze at the world through the lenses of their fractured and divided inner world, and thus conclude that the world itself lacks any unity or greater purpose.

Sexual desire – and the various branches of physical, imaginative, and spiritual yearnings that are encompassed within it – is the most basic and foundational of all human desires. And even this stormy, turbulent drive is one that an upright person can encompass with a spirit of nobility (lit. רוח אצילי) and harness, alongside other layers of his spiritual and physical persona, to supernal and elevated ethical purposes.

The opposite is also true. Through an obsession with the impure, unrefined dimensions of sexual desire, humanity can fall – and has fallen – into the lowest levels of iniquity. In this lowly state, one’s ability to perceive any ethical, idealistic or purposeful dimension of reality is blocked and clogged up (lit. אטום). In this sad and pathological state, humanity is savagely pessimistic and blinded to the Divine goodness that permeates existence. The notion that procreation, that bringing children into this sad and fallen world, could serve any higher ideal is not merely foreign, but seen as irrational and senseless. If existence itself is not good, how can it be ideal to bring (through procreation) additional creations into such a miserable state of being? Humanity’s sexual desires, thus estranged from any higher purpose, are left unchecked and uninhibited, resulting in devastating and brutal consequences.

But this pessimistic vision is a false one. Our Torah declares that “G-d saw all that He had created, and behold, it was exceedingly good.”[3] This perspective extends to all levels of reality, including sexual desire. This is the deeper lesson of brit milah, the removal of the foreskin, which embodies the false vision of unrestrained sexual desire. The excision of the foreskin in physical reality, through the mitzvah of brit milah, is meant to reverberate in a corresponding excision of the impure spiritual reality of unrestrained sexuality.

Tempering sexual desire through brit milah is thus neither a sign of asceticism nor an intrinsic value of its own. It is rather a Divinely prescribed corrective, so that those party to this covenant can broaden the noble dimensions of life and allow G-dly light to shine forth not only in the highest heavens, but even the ‘lowly’ fleshly levels of reality.

“From my flesh, I perceive G-d….”

[1] This explanation appears in Moreh Nevuchim of the Rambam.

[2] Bereishit 17:7.

[3] Bereishit 1:31.

Food For Thought

Rav Soloveitchik (And From There You Shall Seek, pg. 115-116): Neither Greek philosophy nor Christianity grasped the moral and metaphysical aspects of sexual intercourse. Only the Halakhah gives this act a solid basis in religious life; the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) is the ﬁrst one in the Torah. Marital life is pure and blessed. The life of a bachelor, even if he has never sinned, runs contrary to the View of the Halakhah. One who is not married has no joy, no blessing, and no Torah (Yevamot 62b). The Holy One, Blessed Be He, Himself engages in matchmaking (Gen. Rabbah 68:3—4). The joy of the bride and groom is very important, and anyone who participates in it receives a great reward. A husband is required to have relations with his wife at regular intervals, according to his physical ability and the conditions of his work… The Halakhah’s laws of sexual intercourse, which are based on psychological principles and sexual hygiene, are marvelous for their clear-headedness and “modernity.” How much concern, along with delicate and intimate understanding, is found in these laws! The same iron-clad Halakhah that forbids sexual intercourse when the wife is menstruating and establishes preventive measures around this restriction, also imposes an absolute duty upon man to have intercourse with his wife periodically out of love and affection…

Man worships his Creator with his body, his eating, and his sexual activity, and this worship is preferable to worship through prayer. Look and see how much is written in the Torah and the Talmud about the laws of forbidden sexual relations and forbidden foods, and how little is written about the laws of prayer. Many people who gorge themselves on food like a predatory animal in its lair and deﬁle their sexual love life are able to pray to G-d on bent knee, but not many can eat in the presence of G-d and sanctify themselves while under attack by the sexual drive. Wherever there is a possibility of sexual activity, the Torah enjoins sanctity.

Maimonides calls his compilation of the laws of forbidden sexual relations and forbidden foods by the name “The Book of Holiness.” Sexual relations reﬂect the image of the human being as differentiating himself from the beasts and (while still in his body) soaring to the heights. Socratic/Platonic metaphysics, which has had such a great inﬂuence on Christianity, insists that the spirit rises upward while the body goes downward, that man is crowned with a garland of reason and has the power to soar up to the world of the Logos by devoting himself to a spiritual and intellectual calling that does not involve his real animal existence. Judaism declares [in contrast] that man earns eternal life by transforming his purposeless, animalistic, temporal existence into the holy life of the man of G-d. The former speaks about the continuing existence of the general [collective] soul, while the latter insists on individual immortality and the reawakening of the dead. The body will emerge from its grave in all its glory. Physiological drives are sanctiﬁed through the moral commandments, which are not intended to subdue this world, but rather to place upon it the crown of royalty. The Halakhah allows the creature of nature to break through to pellucid radiant expanses and new skies. It is not only the spirit but also the beast in man that worships the Creator. The Shechinah hovers over the abyss of lust and man’s animalistic, instinctual essence, and sanctifies them.

Circumcision (Neil Menussi): Western civilization, it seems, has always been trapped in the movement of an intense emotional pendulum. It travels back and forth between a worship of material nature, on the one hand, and a longing for a purely spiritual world, on the other. On the one end, Nature is depicted as a kind of incarnated divinity, a perfect, harmonious, self-balancing whole. Our purpose, according to this image, is merely to incorporate ourselves into the natural order. On the opposite end of the pendulum, Nature is depicted as an evil and threatening element, man’s purpose being to subjugate it to the rule of the rational mind, and eventually release himself from its hold and join the world of pure souls. The history of the Occident is largely a chronicle of the periodic motion, back and forth, between these two poles.

The pendulum movement is clearly evident in the history of sexuality. The West seems to be veering sharply between hedonist worldviews that sanctify the sexual impulse, and ascetic worldviews that demand a complete abnegation of sex. It was against the Greek aristocracy’s hedonism that Plato and his followers arose, claiming that the soul is trapped in the body “as in a tomb” (to this day, physically unconsummated love is named for Plato); Rome countered with its uninhibited, orgiastic lifestyle; the barbarian tribes, after the ecstasy of destroying the empire, suddenly accepted Christianity and were hurled headlong into the opposite extreme, the Catholic torment of self-flagellation; when the Catholic church sank into corruption and debauchery, the even more puritan Protestantism emerged; and when Christianity altogether lost its vitality, there arose from within her, with equal and opposite force, modern secularism, which introduced the sexual revolution of the 20th century. The West is characterized neither by total hedonism nor total asceticism; totality itself is the true leitmotif. Between one revolution and the next, in spite of all changes of shade, it appears that – inasmuch as the corporeal and the spiritual are concerned – the West is unable to break free of its either-or paradigm. Hither and thither swings the pendulum; the somber smile that it draws in the air forever remains.

Questions for Discussion

Rav Kook finds a basis for his insights on brit milah in a verse in Iyov – “From my flesh, I perceive G-d.” What else might this verse mean?
Why is brit milah such an important mitzvah?
Do Jews perform brit milah because of the commandment to Avraham or because of the verse in this week’s parshah cited at the top of the previous page?
In light of Rav Kook’s insights, why is the effort by radical secularists to abolish brit milah misguided?
Rav Kook writes about “Sexual desire – and the various branches of physical, imaginative, and spiritual yearnings that are encompassed within it…” What do you think he means by other yearnings being encompassed with it?

Idolatry and Intoxication – Parshat Shemini

Printable PDF available here. Previous piece on Shemini available here.

**Rav Kook (Based on Ein Ayah, Gemara Berachot 32a)**

Do not drink intoxicating wine, neither you nor your sons with you, when you go into the Tent of Meeting, so that you shall not die. [This is] an eternal statute for your generations, to distinguish between holy and profane and between unclean and clean… (Vayikra 10:8-10)

Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard. So Eli thought she was drunk. Eli said to her, “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Sober up!” And Hannah replied, “Oh no, my lord! I am a very unhappy woman. I have drunk no wine or other strong drink, but I have been pouring out my heart to the Lord. Do not take your maidservant for a wicked woman (lit. בת בליעל); I have only been speaking all this time out of my great anguish and distress.” (Shmuel Aleph, 1:13-16)

[Hannah told Eli that she was not a wicked woman (lit. בת בליעל). Rabbi Elazar said we derive from here that when a drunk person prays, it is as if he engaged in idol worship. For the word בליעל also appears with regard to a city that has been instigated to engage in idol worship: “Benei beliya’al have gone out from your midst and have lured the inhabitants of their city, saying let us go and serve other gods which we have not known” (Deuteronomy 13:14). Just like that context deals with idolatry, so too Hanna referring to one who prays drunk as a בליעל indicates idol worship. (Gemara Berachot 31b)

All forms of idolatry share two essential characteristics. The first is an emphasis on man’s emotional and imaginative faculties, untethered from the intellect. Indeed, the idolatrous impulse is based on a superficial, unthinking perspective on reality. Idolatry deifies the powerful and inescapable forces of nature, but fails to see their underlying Divine unity.

Intoxication also enfeebles one’s intellect and ability to perceive clearly. This is what our Sages had in mind when they compared one who prays while drunk to an idolater, based on a verse in Sefer Shmuel. This is more than just exaggeration or a homiletical flight of fancy. Our Sages are identifying the very essence of idolatry, and teaching us that intoxicated prayer shares the same essential characteristic.

This is not to imply that moderate drinking has no role to play in religious life. Indeed, there are times when we are allowed (or perhaps even encouraged) to transcend the world of rationality and tread in the realm of holy emotion and sentiment. But prayer is not such a time. Jewish prayer demands a clear mind, and a razor-sharp focus on the Divine ideals expressed in the world of tefilah. And thus intoxication and prayer are a contemptible combination, barred by the inner truth of aggadah and the world of halacha as well.

A second – and related – characteristic of idolatry is a fissure between the realms of action and thought/ideals. Paganism sees the world as fragmented and divided among warring gods. Some of these gods are (or can be bribed into being) favorably disposed to humanity, and others are full of wrath and vengeance. There is no underlying Divine unity to all of reality. Idolatry’s fragmented perspective on reality results in a similarly fragmented religious personality. There is no need to harmonize what one believes with how one behaves. Paganism’s religious ideas provide no guidance to the individual on how to act, and no guidance to the collective on how to construct a just society. On the contrary, the world of action is abandoned to the stormy and unreliable influence of imagination and raw emotion – which, as we have seen, are the dominant characteristics of idolatry. For this reason, idolatry always results in degenerate and horrible ethical failures – such as child sacrifice, ritual murder, and sexual deviance.

This is what our Sages have in mind when they associate idolatry with the world beliya’al, which has a connotation of ‘bli ol’, without a yoke. Idolatry is untethered from the ‘yoke’ of true ideals and clear thinking. This yoke can only be found in the perfected and holy Divine Torah, which teaches us how to harmonize the world of action with the highest G-dly ideals.

Food For Thought

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (Chorev, pg. 7-8): Nor is this idolatry merely an error, a mistaking of falsehood for truth. In that case, it would be simply an intellectual mistake, a delusion, deplorable indeed, but, even at the worst, not the worst that might happen. For there would still be left human dignity and the purity and uprightness of human action. But this is not the case. As soon as you set anything else beside G-d as G-d, and still more as your G-d, forthwith human dignity, purity and uprightness fall to the ground, the fabric of your life goes to pieces.

If a man follows after any being as G-d except G-d, he necessarily sinks to a lower level. As soon as a man thinks of any being as independent and as belonging only to itself, it must appear to him as tyrannical, intent only on self-aggrandizement and producing only for self gratification. Hence the man who reveres such beings as gods must of necessity regard unbridled violence and self-indulgence not as something bestial and so beneath man but as something Divine and so above man, and pursue them as such. Nay, more; when the law of Unity has vanished from his conception of the world and the universe breaks apart for him into isolated deities which serve only themselves, he will soon count himself among the gods, and, recognizing no law in his own life either, he will break out into all kinds of excesses and abandon himself to arrogance and dissoluteness.

Dr. Hylton I. Lightman (Ou.org): Judaism has a not uncomplicated relationship with alcohol. We Jews start drinking young, real young. There is the wine at the Bris when the baby is only eight days old. Then there is wine at the Pidyon HaBen. The two sips at the Chuppah. The focal point of our week is the Friday night Shabbos meal when typically Abba or another post-Bar Mitzvah male will sanctify the wine. Havdallah. Yom Tov Kiddush. The famous Four Cups at the Seder. Is there a Jewish simcha that is without the raising a glass of schnapps and proclaiming, “L’Chaim”?

No shul or yeshiva would want its members or students to become alcoholics. But let’s be honest. Many shuls and others create a social life around alcohol and to be cool and in (are those words current?), you have to partake. Think Kiddush Club when men, typically at some point during the layning and definitely before the rabbi’s speech, exit the sanctuary and call to order their own private gathering of booze and food.

Our Torah is filled with references to wine so clearly wine is important and plays a major role in Judaism. Sefer Shoftim describes wine as “bringing joy to G-d and man.” Every sacrifice brought to the Mikdash was accompanied by a wine libation. Likewise, there are times in our Torah when wine has been mishandled – actually, let’s call it accurately – abused. Our Torah does not sanitize those times and their consequences. Noach was disgraced by excessive wine consumption. Ahron’s sons’ faux pas stemmed in part from intoxication. And these are only two examples. Then there’s Purim. This day suffers such a bad name because of the drinking. Let’s not forget Simchas Torah. A nurse on staff in an area emergency room once told me that she and her colleagues call it “The Other Jewish Halloween.”

Like anything else in life, balance is a good thing. Alcohol, when imbibed appropriately, can enhance our Ruchniyus. By the same token, when treated inappropriately, it can make for a Chillul HaShem, G-d forbid. Kohanim were not allowed to serve in the Beis HaMikdash while drunk. We are forbidden to daven while drunk. A kohen is not allowed to “duchen” after having even a single glass of wine. The Tree of Knowledge in Gan Eden, according to one opinion, is both “good and bad.” When utilized properly, its potential for good is infinite. By the same token, if not used for good, the negative consequences are of equal proportion. It is up to each of us to choose how it should be used. Hopefully, we will choose to choose to make a Kiddush HaShem.

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch: (Collected Writings Vol. II, pg. 143-144): Not “belief’’ but “knowledge,” not “sentiment” but “determination and accomplishment;” these are the energies through which the “Jewish religion” becomes manifest. And for that very reason Judaism is not a “religion.” It has no part with any of the facets that other “religions” emphasize as the “essence of religion.” He who would drag Judaism down to the level of “belief’’ divorced from knowledge, who would place also at the head of the “Jewish faith” all the nebulous subjectivism which indulges in “devout impulses” and have these notions constitute the basic requirements of the Jewish “religion,” cannot be one of the “priests of the Lord.” He is in reality one of the priestlings of paganism who exploit vague sentiment and sensibilities for the worship of their own delusions, whose harvest, therefore, has mostly been grief and mourning, misery and distress…. This is probably the reason why [non-Jewish clergy] are called כמרים, “hierophants of sentimentalism” or, more accurately, “fishermen of sentimentalism” (In Tanach, the root כמר denotes both stirrings of sentiment and the fisherman’s net.) They prey upon the “feelings” of the people and catch their fish in the muddied waters of sentimentalism. By contrast, G-d requires of His priests that “the lips of the priest shall preserve knowledge and they should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of G-d” (Malachi 2:7). And similarly, “Our G-d did not speak from amidst mystical murkiness, “not in the darkness of night. I did not say to the sons of Jacob: Seek Me in the waste places. I am G-d, speaking of right; proclaiming that which is straightforward and clear” (Isaiah 45:19).

Questions for Discussion

Rav Kook writes that idolatry inevitably results in ethical failures because it severs the world of action from the intellect. Do you agree? Could there be other explanations for the ethical failures of paganism?
What distinguishes an appropriate level of drinking from the kind of intoxication that Torah Judaism dispproves of or prohibits?
See the excerpts from Rav Hirsch above in “Food for Thought.” Is he saying the same thing as Rav Kook? If not, how is his analysis of idolatry different?
What are some events on the Jewish calendar or life-cycle events where alcohol plays a role? Why is it given a role?
Were Nadav and Avihu drunk when they brought their offering to the Mishkan?
Why do people leave davening to go to kiddush club?