Leviticus 16; Hebrews 9

© Rabbi Paul L. Saal

Much has been made of the sacrifice of atonement discussed in today's Torah and Brit Hadashah portions, which comprised the liturgy of the Great Temple when it stood. We are always reminded of the blood of the two bulls poured out as a substitutionary death to alleviate our culpability and our bloodguilt before God and man. And why shouldn't we be reminded? After all, it was the blood of our Messiah, we are told, that replaces the blood of the atonement sacrifice, repairing the cosmos once and for all. It is not a powerful bull, but rather a slaughtered lamb that has overturned the powers and principalities and will eventually right all that is wrong in this world.

But what of the one that got away? Little is said of the Azazel, the scapegoat spoken of in Vayikra 16. The Azazel does not come to this liturgical story alone. He or She is attended by a friend. In fact they don't quite know which of them is going to pull off the great escape. A lot is cast to determine which will be sacrificed to HaShem and which will be set loose. Perhaps if goats were more altruistic, they would each volunteer to replace the other just as Tony Curtis did in Spartacus. But the text suggests nothing of the sort and in fact I would imagine that after seeing a bull for the Cohanim, a bull for the nation, and thousands of individual sacrifices made, the winning goat would have counted himself all too fortunate to be chosen Azazel, the one who is dismissed.

But he would have counted his good fortune too soon, since the Cohen Gadol would place his hands upon him and ritually transpose the sins of the nation. The Azazel would carry these sins into the wilderness for a tragic episode of Goat Survivor: The Sinai Wilderness. On other occasions, we are told by history, archeology, and Talmud, the Azazel might be pushed off a cliff.

So what is the point? It was clearly not the sparing of a goat. Rather it is the ritual enactment of the community participation in redemption. The kapparah covers the sins of the nation, but it is throughy the Azazel that the community sends off and dismisses sinful activity in their midst.  From a new covenant perspective, Yeshua's sacrifice has initiated the cosmic repair, but it is through the interaction of the expanding community of faith that this new cosmic perspective is actualized in this world.

If the drama and liturgy of this day should teach us anything it is that humans inevitably fail. In the words of Qohelet, "There is no righteous person in the earth who does only good and never sins." (Qohelet [Ecclesiastes] 7:20) But when a person makes teshuvah, or turns from their errors, they come out stronger and better than ever. The Rabbis of old said, "The Gates of Repentance are ever open. As the sea is always accessible, so is the Holy One, blessed be He, always accessible to the penitent.  The person who has done wrong and repents is on a higher spiritual plane than the person who has not. Better is one hour of repentance and good deeds in this world than the whole life of the world to come" Put more succinctly, it is better to have failed and learned than never to have failed at all.

This is a rather odd dichotomy, but why not? Yom Kippur is a day of dazzling paradoxes. Today we stand with all Israel before God, united as a community of sinners. We publicly acknowledge the universality of evil in all, yet we expect to experience forgiveness and the purging of guilt through not only confession but also the mutual acceptance of the other penitents. We symbolically give ourselves over to the realm of death, which does not know eating, drinking, merriment or sexuality, so we can emerge with a renewed meaning in life. All day is spent in prayer and fasting, yet the theme of today's Haftarah is that God does not want prayer and fasting unless it leads to justice, specifically feeding the hungry. We stand on trial before the One True Judge, dropping all of our defenses as we throw ourselves upon the mercy of the court, yet the liturgy instructs us never to lose our conviction that we will experience pardon. The place of judgment is the mercy seat. But still I believe the greatest paradox is that we are seeking perfection through the only possible avenue, confession of our imperfection.

This dichotomy can prove to be dangerously self-defeating if we do not approach it with great care. After all, Judaism's drive for perfection reaches its pinnacle today.  And those who internalize this perfectionism will likely find it difficult to admit their imperfections. So how can it be done?  May I suggest that you judiciously mix the command of Torah to "be Holy" with the aphorism "little strokes fell great oaks." Accept your failure if you wish to turn and grow.  And don't expect to do it all at once, or by yourself. Kapparah or atonement is by divine grace, it is above and beyond the individual's own effort.

Rabbinic tradition claims that Moses broke the tablets of the Ten Commandments on Yom Kippur.  The original tablets were crystalline and beautiful, written with the finger of God and untouched by human flaws. But when the children of Israel sinned and created the Golden Calf, God despaired and threatened to destroy them. Moses was so distressed that he smashed the tablets as though he realized they were too pure to be left in human hands. For the next forty days, Moses worked through the heartbreak and achieved reconciliation and forgiveness for Israel. The next forty days were spent fashioning a new set of tablets. This set of tablets, the product of hard-won repentance built on realism, forgiveness, and acceptance of others' limitations, would guide Israel for millennia to come. Such tablets express the spirit of Yom Kippur when out of our brokenness we become stronger than when we claimed to be whole. But it is a wholeness that must be built slowly and painstakingly.

This story should dispel the misconception that while Christianity focuses on vicarious atonement and the sacrifice and mediation of another, Judaism is a religion of white knuckling and rugged individualism. If this were true then millions of Jews are gathering today for absolutely no reason at all. Though Judaism shifted toward a greater focus on individual acts after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the liturgical balance of Yom Kippur still favors the communal and the sacramental. Maimonides affirms that this sacramental power of grace still emanates from the community of Israel, and each person is part of the larger cosmic balance.

Everyone should regard himself throughout the years as exactly balanced between acquittal and guilt. So, too, he should consider the entire world as equally balanced between acquittal and guilt. If he commits one additional sin, he tilts down the scale of guilt against himself and the entire world and causes its destruction. If he performs one good deed, he swings himself and the whole world into the scale of merit and causes salvation and deliverance to himself and his fellow men.

This truth is evident throughout life, but most people are too self-indulgent to face it. There are those who earn their world in one act of self-sacrifice. And they are rarely the superstars we might expect; rather they are normal people who embrace their fragility and take steps toward transforming themselves and their world. Talmud is filled with such stories; a Roman Senator who gave his life to annul an evil decree against the Jews; a Roman executioner who died to release a rabbinic martyr from his suffering; a Jewish man who bought a Jewish women from captivity and prostitution and, having her in his control, then voluntarily released her.

Oskar Schindler was the epitome of a wasted life. A drunken philanderer, Schindler would do anything to turn a profit. It is not surprising then that he would seize the opportunity of the Nazi regime to supply cheap Jewish labor for his factory. The real surprise is his willingness to risk his own life and livelihood to save the lives of the Jews that were in his employ. This one sacrificial act saved the lives of thousands, changed the destinies of their children and their children's children, and gave a transcendent significance to his otherwise squandered existence.

But the world has known no greater act of self-sacrifice then that of an obscure itinerant rabbi from the Galil who was willing to die an excruciating violent death so that all of Israel, and through association all of the world, might better understand the transforming power of teshuvah and the spirit of Yom Kippur. He passed over greatness and embraced the fragility of his humanity so that we would learn of the power of humility. Though he was a Cohen Gadol who had passed through heaven and earth, it was not in His divinity that Yeshua could deliver us from the unbearable weight of guilt. But it is in his humanity we can accept his empathy and have the weight of our consciences lightened by his acceptance.

So let us accept his challenge and follow in his path. On Yom Kippur, as we continue our fast, as we proceed with our introspection, and as we begin this New Year, can we embrace the weakness of our humanity and tap into the strength of our fragility? Are you willing to die to self-centeredness so that you can gain your world? Today is Yom Kippur-let's begin together to trudge this road of happy destiny.