A Kingdom of Priests

 March 14, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

This week's Torah portion is the first in the book of Leviticus. As the Greek name implies, it is made of matters that are essential to the Tribe of Levites, the priests. This portion contains laws regarding the kinds of sacrifices that should be accepted by the Temple. You might think, since we no longer have a Temple and we no longer make sacrifices, this portion is hardly relevant to you.

But the Torah is like an iceberg. There is always more beneath the surface than what appears on the surface. What was once expressed through the sacrifice of animals and grain is now expressed in our prayers and in deeds of mercy and loving kindness. The way in which we give thanksgiving or expiate guilt or atone for sins has changed, but only to find new practical expressions in our everyday world.

We still require ways to interact with God for the sake of our souls. We still need to bring offerings and make personal sacrifices, even though these are no longer made to a priest or to the Temple. Today, we are the priests. As God told Moses on Mount Sinai, "If you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine, but you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" [Ex. 19:5-6].

Sacrifice is still a way of "setting us straight" when we temporarily forget our mission of being a holy nation, a way of keeping our minds alert to the fact that all things belong to God and are only on loan to us, and a way of praising and thanking God.

Leviticus is not describing new sacrifices to the priests: most or all of these kinds of sacrifices were already known to the ancient Israelites. What is set forth here are the rules, the rituals, the proper way of coming before God with each particular sacrifice. Now that the Temple is gone, the rules look naked. We need new equivalents to the ancient sacrifices. But we do not need to reinvent the sacrifices. The rest of the iceberg is just beneath the surface. Our lives have not changed so much that we cannot apply the meanings of these sacrifices to ourselves.

A good example is at the end of the portion which deals with theft, robbery, and fraud -- things which cause others to lose property. These intentional crimes are perpetrated by people today as much as they were in ancient times. You find a wallet on the ground and, because it contains a great deal of money, you conveniently forget to seek its owner. You are an investment banker or a builder and people give you funds in  advance but you fail to make good on your responsibility for their funds -- this is an intentional case of fraud. The people you harmed have little or no recourse. There are no witnesses to these crimes. You can even lie under oath in a courtroom and the person you harmed can never force you to tell the truth.

But you may find that your guilt is too burdensome to bear. Even in ancient times this quality of conscience was understood by the writers of the Torah. You do not have to be Freud to know that guilt is a powerful manifestation of the divine within us. It is so powerful that some people commit suicide or attempt to commit suicide to escape their guilt, but this only shifts the punishment out of human hands into God's hands. Far better, the tradition gives you a means of being forgiven in this life. You can become clean again. You can restore your place within the "kingdom of priests" and rejoin "the holy nation."

There are two stages to your redemption, your atonement. The first is accepting responsibility. You must make restitution to those you have wronged; and to compensate for wronging them, you must repay twenty percent more than what you withheld to begin with. After two thousand years, this is still an efficacious means for setting things straight.

If you lied under oath, you also became liable to God, since swearing falsely is not only a betrayal of truth, but an offense God has promised in the Ten Commandments to punish. So a sacrifice to God becomes necessary. In ancient times it was called an asham, guilt-sacrifice. But what is a guilt-sacrifice today? If the Temple no longer operates, what can this mean to us?

It should not surprise you that the rabbis discussed this question immediately after the Temple's destruction. But their answer may surprise you since it shows a deep understand of the psychology of human beings which you might think would only be conceived in modern times: You must own up to what you have done. You must publicly admit your guilt.

Now when a person engaged in criminal activities is accused by witnesses, human courts decide on the punishment. The opportunity for coming forward is lost. It is only when you come forward on your own, when you make the admission of guilt on your own, that you become clean before God.

A person who repays what he or she has taken from others and atones in a public way has completed the atonement, has made all the sacrifices necessary to be restored to a place within "the kingdom of priests and the holy nation."

This applies to misappropriation of funds or pledges -- things that come into your hands and you control such as loans or business investments. It applies too to all forms of robbery. And it applies to fraud, a kind of robbery in which you withhold what someone else is entitled to receive, including withholding the wages of a laborer -- and, by the same token, since an employer is due an honest day's work, withholding that is also a fraud.

This is the part of the iceberg of sacrifices beneath the surface. It turns out that not that much has changed since the Torah. You have only to open today's newspapers to see headlines about people stealing from others. Not everyone who defrauds is a criminal, normal folks like us sometimes find ourselves in a position to defraud others and just cannot resist. It may be anyone who urges others to invest even when he or she knows the investment is a bad one, anyone who takes money from the till when pension funds and partners have not been paid, anyone who profits from others without paying what is due.

This presupposes that those who do come forward on their own and do make restitution deserve our respect and our admiration. They are not to be pitied or accused, they are to be admired as having the strength to bear their guilt. If God can forgive them according to their sacrifice, then so should we. Or as the old adage would have it, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." Of course we pray that this will never be you who must be forgiven, but if it is, we should stand ready to forgive you, even as God is ready to accept you back as a member of God's "treasured possession," "the kingdom of priests and the holy nation." And let us say: Amen.