The Leviticus:8 Project
 
If, however, her means do not suffice for a sheep, she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. The priest shall make expiation on her behalf, and she shall be clean.     Leviticus 12:8
​
Almost every organization in Washington, DC has an evening event during the year.  Sometimes it is meant to raise money; sometimes it is meant to raise a profile.  But the best of all of them is meant to raise up good people.  It is the annual Peace Awards of the El-Hibri Foundation, a family foundation that pays tribute to the memory of the extraordinary Ibrahim El-Hibri, philanthropist and lover of humankind.  The family members are committed Muslims, some born into the tradition, others who have embraced it.  Each year they have awarded scholarships to Muslims students pursuing careers that will benefit society, but also named three recipients of honors reflecting their mission.
 
This year, the Peace Educator Award went to Prof. Marshall Ganz of Harvard for his extraordinary work in training community organizers.  (He does a training each year at El-Hibri. I had the privilege of participating a couple of years back.)  The Fearless Ally Award went to Amardeep Singh, founder of the Sikh Coalition, whose response to the tragedy of September 11, 2001 was to organize his community as a constant voice against bigotry.  The Community Leader Award went to Nadia Mohajir, co-founder and Executive Direct of HEART Women and Girls, a women’s health and wellness project in the Muslim community.  A Jew, a Sikh, a Muslim.  They were celebrated by an interfaith crowd treated to music, entertainment and inspiration from the American Muslim community.  I never feel as good as when I attend this extraordinary evening.
 
This brief endorsement comes only to set the stage for what I learned from Nadia Mohajir in her acceptance speech.  As you might imagine, the Muslim community is no different than any other faith community when it comes to addressing matters of sexual abuse.  Women are the usual victims, and the male-dominated hierarchy makes it exceptionally difficult for abuse to be dealt with.  Ms. Mohajir spoke forthrightly about the need for a new context to respond to such crimes, and she offered a sacred story from the Qur’an to illustrate the underpinning of HEART’s mission.  I, in turn, offer it to you in my own words, conscious that the retelling will capture neither her eloquence nor the exact language of the text.
 
Before he was chosen to be the Prophet, Muhammad was an illiterate shepherd.  Called into a dark cave, he was held in a crushing embrace by someone unseen and commanded to read.  Despite his protests, the voice did not relent, and to his surprise, Muhammad was able to read the revelation.  The Qur’an recounts that the experience left him both uplifted and deeply shaken.
 
Muhammad had married an older woman named Khadija, and when her husband returned home after this experience she could see he was deeply shaken.  She wrapped him in a blanket, offered him comfort and listened to his story.  She believed him.
 
Nadia Mohajir told this crowd that while Muslims rightly focus on the choosing of the Prophet, they often overlook the lesson of Khadija. He was shaken to his core by this unexpected encounter.  She embraced him.  She comforted him.  She listened to his story.  She believed him.  That, Nadia insisted, was the mission of HEART.  That is the wisdom of a woman of some years.
 
Just to be clear, neither she nor I suggest an equivalency between the revelatory experience of the Prophet and a sexual assault.  In the generic sense, however, each is a trauma, each unexpected.  But she did suggest an equivalency in the appropriate response.  Embrace. Comfort. Listen. Believe.
 
The chapter of Leviticus that gives us this verse is the shortest of all the chapters.  It deals with childbirth and a time of “impurity” a woman endures as a result.  It is no surprise that the powerful liminal experience of childbirth provoked both fear and awe in Biblical times.  It still does.
 
Some days after the birth, the mother is expected to bring an atonement offering to the priest.  Acting as her agent, the priest sacrifices the offering and then, as the verse says, “she shall be clean.”  Ritually, the new mother is restored to the natural state of innocence every person enjoys.
 
It is hard for me, and maybe for you, to comprehend the response that the Bible codifies to childbirth.  It is especially difficult in this generation to understand why a woman is not her own agent in responding to the revelatory miracle of new life squeezed into existence.  In this process, a woman’s body is not hers alone, and when she and her child are separated there is a sense of both miracle and loss.  She is shaken to her core.
 
In this case, the loss of the sacrificial ritual may not be such a terrible thing, nor something whose restoration would make us great again.  Instead, we may wish to aspire to example of Khadija, midwife of the Qur’an, if I may so suggest.  I do not suggest an equivalency between childbirth and sexual assault.  In the generic sense, however, each is a trauma.  Neither calls for the ministrations of a man to the woman so that she shall be clean.  Instead: Embrace. Comfort. Listen. Believe.

 
The Leviticus:8 Project
 
You shall not eat of their flesh or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.  Leviticus 11:8
 
It was third or fourth grade and it just was not cool to like members of the opposite sex.  There were a few long-time friends with whom we could interact somewhat privately, but otherwise no contact was permissible.  They had cooties.
 
You probably know variations.  Sometimes it was the sloppy kids.  Sometimes it was the clumsy kids.  Sometimes it was the socially awkward kids.  I know that among some kids that cooties were attributed on the basis of race, native language, social or economic status or presumed ethnicity.
 
Cooties were highly contagious; a single touch could infect you, a fact that the designated carriers who were brave enough used to terrorize the clique that tried to ostracize them.  Getting rid of them required a cootie shot, generally administered by a friend with a slightly sadistic streak.
 
There are real cooties – a fact I didn’t know when I was little, but that probably are the origin of the imaginary kind – and a game that involves building a plastic bug piece by piece.  However, for kids, cooties were an exercise in exclusion.  They were the pop culture version of the Bible’s uncleanliness.
 
There has been a lot of ink spilled trying to explain the rules of ritual cleanliness in the Bible. Modern scholars no less than medieval ones have analyzed the types of situations that were considered to produce some type of pollutant.  Like playground cooties, these ritual pollutants were not physical entities.  Like playground cooties, they were highly contagious.  Like playground cooties, there was a way to get rid of them, though it was much less sadistic than a “shot;” instead, it involved some combination of the passage of time and submersion in a pool of water collected in a specified way. 
 
Unlike playground cooties, however, there was a divine imprimatur on these pollutants.  The person who touched a corpse or a carcass, or who had a flow of blood or other bodily effluence, or who displayed certain skin conditions, or engaged in certain other forbidden contacts was unclean and ostracized from the general population until the condition could be reversed.  Ingrained in the consciousness of our tradition is the notion that it is forbidden to have contact with some people when they have these ritual cooties.
 
To be sure, there are fellow Jews who take these restrictions very seriously.  Most usual among the observances are men and women who will not touch a member of the opposite sex who is not an immediate relative.  From the simple prohibition of shaking hands to the extreme practice of not sitting next to a stranger on an airplane, individuals who take literally these concerns will avoid the accidental contagion that might spread throughout the unsuspecting members of the pious community.  There are many of us – including me – who find this obsession absurd, but there is no denying that it is consistent with a world view of a certain kind.
 
Here, however, is the one thing that I believe is undeniable.  Like cooties, and despite the Bible’s insistence on a divine source for ritual pollution, this contagion is made up.  That is to say, without an acceptance of the spiritual biases that seem to necessitate ritual pollution, the “disease” is an illusion.
 
(Allow me a quick disclaimer, please.  If you believe literally in the Biblical and rabbinical categories of tum’ah (pollution) and taharah (cleansing), then the categories are very real to you, which I do not challenge.  I accept a metaphorical assessment of those categories and of the rituals associated with them.  That is to say, I will shake the hand of any willing person and sit in my assigned seat.)
 
That illusion begins with a bias that translates into real human consequences.  A dead bird or moldy wall, both carriers of uncleanliness, does not care one iota if it is sequestered.  But a human being who does not share the necessary bias most certainly does.  Playground cooties are cruel devices of exclusion, and almost every child grows out of them.  But some children do not, and they carry that prejudice from playgrounds to borders and schools and gated communities and commercial businesses.
 
The presumption that all people in specific categories carry disqualifying blemishes seems to be animating much behavior in our country – contrary to both our founding documents and what (ought to be) established law.  Families fleeing oppression and danger to our southern borders are infested with criminal motive and cultural imperialism.  Drivers, pedestrians and children on their way to school with darker skin are possessed of darker motives than simply getting from here to there.  Anyone who prays five times a day in Arabic is infected with a bloodlust for Americans who spend Sunday morning in worship.  And a man who loves a man or a woman who loves a woman can cause cakes to fall, flowers to wilt and calligraphers to lose their skill.  
 
Playground cooties should not be taken seriously by anyone who has completed fourth grade, absent a long tradition of recess with aging classmates.  The roots of discrimination and exclusion begin with that game. Every teacher in middle school knows it.  Those boys and girls who hope for friendships outside the few figure it out, and the rest deserve patient weaning.  As for those who just can’t give it up, let’s keep them away from making and enforcing public policy.

The Leviticus:8 Project
 
And the LORD spoke to Aaron, saying:  Leviticus 10:8
 
It was bound to happen.
 
After almost 100 of these columns, each focusing on the same verse in consecutive chapters of each of the first three Books of Moses, I finally land on the most usual formulation in the entire Torah:
 
“The Lord spoke to [insert name], saying:”
 
Almost always, some sort of instruction follows.  And almost never, some kind of reply is recorded.  Yes, there are remarkable exceptions, but overwhelmingly, God speaks with some sort of instruction and whoever is thus commanded acts accordingly.
 
I know that there are a lot of people who aspire to that kind of authority.  Perhaps because of this literary formulation (and the intimation in the original text that God is male), societies that are influenced by the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible and the Qur’an put a lot of emphasis on male dominance in almost every social structure. There is, of course, nothing inherently better about a man being in a position of authority than a woman.  Yet there are people who insist that every meaningful organization in society ought rightly to be led by men.
 
Mostly, the people who believe that way are known as “men.”
 
Despite the strides forward of the past few generations, it is still much more difficult to find businesses, universities, governments at any level or thought leadership led by women than those led by men.  Some sectors of society are yet dominated by women – doing what has been praised/dismissed as “woman’s work” – including elementary education, social work, “hospitality,” and retail sales.  But they are mostly supervised by men. 
 
I am certain you can name some other examples, or might even know a bank president, university chancellor, sports team owner or auto repair foreperson who is female.  Maybe you even know a man who cleans hotel rooms, demonstrates make-up or cares for other people’s small children.  Those exceptions prove the rules.
 
And, in my opinion, those exceptions are terrifying to people who believe there is a natural order that places men in positions of unquestioned authority.  Those exceptions are tolerated only to the point that they can be controlled.  Whether at home or in the marketplace or in the halls of government, for people who believe that every meaningful organization in society ought rightly to be led by men, the justification is this: “The Lord spoke to [insert name] saying:”
 
Ironically, it doesn’t seem to matter much what comes next.  I plead guilty to being a believer in God, but not because of what is presumed to be God’s power.  Rather, what inspires and sustains my faith is what comes next, that is, the truth and wisdom that is framed by what “The Lord” is reported to have been “saying.”  I know it sounds judgmental (and I don’t care), but I believe that a faith nurtured by an appreciation of authority reflects an aspiration of ego, not of spirit.  Those who speak as if they held God’s authority, as if they were the ones who could speak to [insert names] and say whatever they choose are reading the wrong words of Scripture.
 
Golda Meir is reported to have said to one of her ministers (perhaps Moshe Dayan), “Don’t be so humble – you’re not that great.”  Indeed, I am likely no better than most men who believe they are supportive of full human equality as long as it does not mean giving up their own privilege.  So I do not hold myself up as a paragon of enlightenment.  Yet, having witnessed some of the worst examples of presumed male dominance take the public stage over the last couple of years, I will indeed allow myself one smug smile of woke-itude before I get back to work on my own self-examination.
 
It is the kind of work I recommend to every clergy person who believes he speaks in the same voice as God.  It is the work I recommend to every senator who believes that the outrage expressed by an accused man is more credible than that of an abused woman.  It is the work I recommend to every man who is currently President of the United States.

The Leviticus:8 Project
 
Aaron came forward to the altar and slaughtered his calf of sin offering.   Leviticus 9:8
 
As many of you know, I had a long career as a pulpit rabbi – just about 35 years.  That’s a long time in the adult life span, and when I look back on it from this perspective, I am surprised at something that should not surprise me – especially since I said it with some frequency.  Incremental changes over a long period always create a major shift.  It is true of my physical existence, it is true of my belief system and it is certainly true of my conduct as a rabbi (but not only as a rabbi).
 
When I retired from the congregation, I felt a sense of relief that I did not anticipate.  The tightly defined schedule of duties that spoke for my days, and most especially my weekends, suddenly dissipated.  It’s not that other expectations did not take their place, but the Jewish life I had cultivated as a younger man that led me to the rabbinate had incrementally slipped away from my control, and as my continuing evolution as a believer proceeded in one direction, my continuing evolution as a practitioner steadfastly remained defined for me by the schedule of services, the calendar of programs, the prescribed responses to others’ life cycle events and the demands of the institution for human and financial support. 
 
As the tension between the two increased, I became more and more stretched between the two influences which can most simply be described as why I believed and how I believed.  And I have no doubt that I might have found ways to experiment and change my public practices – the congregation was very accommodating – but my expectations of my own public role were the biggest obstacles to that change.  It was not an indication of a lack of confidence as much as a sense of responsibility to my role as a conserver (after all, I am a Conservative rabbi) of the tradition.
 
I wonder if this is a modern problem that results from a world of choices that did not exist in ancient times.  What sustained leaders like Aaron who, for years at a stretch, performed prescribed rituals with precision and without variation?  Even if he had the thought that things might be more effective or efficient or engaging with a little variety or modification, he was obligated as High Priest to come forward to the altar and slaughter his calf, just as he was instructed.
 
There might have been a time earlier in my life when I believed that if Aaron had nicked the neck of the offering a little, or had sprinkled blood to the other side before the prescribed side, or had taken one too many or one too few steps that the ritual would have been ruined. I am not such a literalist – I merely appreciate the art of meaningful and tested choreography.  Now, I am not so strict – so machmir, as the word is in Hebrew.  There are some practices I still believe have veto power.  (Though I made exceptions for married or engaged couples, two necessary halves of a whole, I still hold to the notion that only one person should be called to the Torah at a time rather than the “gang honors” that put the honorees above the singular voice of the reader of the sacred text.)  But mostly I have come to understand that there are often different paths to the same destination, and that integrity can be measured more ways than by behavioral metrics.
 
The luxury of relinquishing my previous responsibilities allows me to say and do what current leaders must weigh more exquisitely. Leaders who embody deep respect and credibility (usually qualities bestowed by others and not presumed by self) can risk change without as much suspicion and resentment as those who are perceived as wrecking balls.  The late former King of Jordan came to Israel to pay a condolence call when a disturbed Jordanian soldier killed Israeli Jewish schoolgirls at a peace monument, kneeling before the bereaved mothers in a very unkinglike gesture; the criticism was minor.  The current Prince of Wales abandoned hopes of ascending to his mother’s throne when he married a divorcee for love.
 
Currently, the President of the United States is a man who is a disruptor. Setting aside agreement or disagreement with the value of the changes in policy and practice he has instituted, increasing numbers of Americans feel unmoored from the otherwise dependable conduct of the officeholder.  Republican or Democrat, combat veteran or civilian, southerner or northerner, former Presidents seemed to adhere to certain conventions – call them rituals or unspoken expectations – that allowed transitions from Commander-in-Chief to Commander-in-Chief to proceed with confidence.  Aaron would not be High Priest forever, but for as long as someone occupied the office, when the time came he would come forward to the altar and slaughter his calf of sin offering.  Changes in the conventions of conduct were only as acceptable as the person making them and the case that could be made.
 
I don’t know whether I admire or object to the self-regard that enables some leaders to make changes that suit them without much concern for the people who feel the impact, practically or emotionally.  But now that I am on the receiving end, I know I was right to exercise restraint when I was a leader, and right to step away when my enthusiasm for the status quo began to wane.

​The Leviticus:8 Project
 
He put the breastpiece on him, and put into the breastpiece the Urim and Thummim.     Leviticus 8:8
 
Albert Einstein famously proclaimed that he did not believe God played dice with the universe.  As with all such pithy sayings from famous skeptics – especially ones that seem to reveal an unexpected feature of an internal landscape – a lot of people of faith have built cathedrals on this unusual reference to religious belief from the paragon of science.
 
Einstein’s religious skepticism (or, perhaps more accurately, disbelief) is not contradicted by this observation.  He did not not believe that God “played dice with the universe.”  Rather, he did not believe that “God played dice with the universe.”  It was his way of rejecting the emerging field of quantum physics which posited unverifiable exceptions to the laws of physics to which his theorems adhered. He was willing to stalk an uncertain outcome, but not with uncertain methods.
 
I don’t want to claim an expertise on Einstein beyond what I have read in various biographic profiles.  But I am pretty comfortable in affirming that he was a casual atheist.  That is to say, I think he saw no particular harm in a belief in God as long as it had no consequence for the immutability of science (and perhaps other formal disciplines).  If you want to argue that point, take it off-line, because that presumption informs what follows.
 
Just because Einstein was not a believer in God did not mean he was without his spiritual side, if you are willing to understand spirituality as an openness to awe, or what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called “radical amazement.”  Awe is a recognition of the stunning improbability of our place in the universe, including our individual places, our collective place and the very existence of our planet.  I think that responses to awe fall into two general categories: appreciation and fear.  Appreciation causes people to come closer to be immersed in the source of that awe, whatever it may be.  Einstein and Heschel each rushed headlong into the embrace of radical amazement.  Fear makes people build artificial constructs to prevent being swallowed by what they do not understand.
 
Ironically, the reaction of each looks superficially the same.  It is easy to identify how the fearful among the secularists and the pious have built a wall to deny the other, and each identifies the other side as the greatest threat to life as we know it.  Those who claim that religion is responsible for all the world’s ills are correct only if the data is not subject to the same methods of inquiry on which they rely.  Those who deny climate change and life-saving medical procedures and the common DNA of all human beings are forced to forego not only the knowledge of science, but the wisdom that can flow from it.
 
Perhaps less obvious is how the appreciators in each camp are similar. Each seeks understanding, and if integrity is intact, each seeks understanding from whatever source presents itself.  Yes, like Robert Frost imagined, each arrives at a fork in the road and chooses one to pursue.  Perhaps, as a result, they have little or no contact with travelers who made the other choice.  In the end, each path leads to the other side of the wood.  It may be my prejudice as someone who tries to live in this camp, but I suspect that the those who eschew fear and travel with appreciation would be glad to see others emerge in the meadow beyond – even if it meant the hard work of discovery was not concluded.
 
Among my very favorite authors is Alan Lightman, who teaches both physics and writing at MIT.  He has written wonderful speculative fiction informed by his appreciation of the stunning improbability of our place in the universe.  I had the opportunity to interview him once; I accused him by the evidence of his behavior of being an adherent of the essential tenets of Jewish tradition.  We were sitting in front of an audience at the Jewish Theological Seminary, which may have influenced his response, and he acknowledged my framing of his lifestyle and his writing with an affirming and flowing response.  Pressing my luck, I asked, “Do you ever pray?”  His answer was more succinct: No.
 
It was Dr. Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams that brought him to my attention.  It is pure fiction, not including the references to Einstein’s early job and the circumstances of his life.  In it, he posits a series of dreams about the nature of time and the worlds that result from small differences in time’s essence. 
I was so enamored of it that it informed my High Holy Day messages after I read it.  (Also, I prayed.)  It was as if someone tossed a message from the other road through the wood that landed at my feet.
 
Not being a High Priest (or even a low one), I never would have qualified to wear the embroidered breastplate.  As such, I never would have had cause to encounter the Urim and Thummim, probably best described as the dice of the universe with which God played.  Maybe if I had more of a vested interest in maintaining the wall of fear, I might have tossed the Lightman book back over the brush.  What a tragedy that would have been for me.  The road might have led me to the meadow, but I probably would have turned around when I got there if I didn’t like what I saw.
 
I’d like to think, however, I would have reached for the dice. I would have given them one last shake and returned the favor to my fellow traveler on the other path heading for the embrace of truth.

The Leviticus:8 Project
 
So, too, the priest who offers a man’s burnt offering shall keep the skin of the burnt offering that he offered.                Leviticus 7:8
​
Every business has a vested interest in keeping need alive.  It is something of an irony for almost every endeavor. There are obvious needs that require little cultivation – hunger, for example – less-critical needs that nonetheless sustain themselves – fashion comes to mind – and other needs which have been invented to create a market – professional sports qualifies.
 
And then there are needs that have been addressed and eradicated.  What does the successful endeavor do when it has met the need and eliminated it?
 
Hardly anyone remembers the origin of the March of Dimes.  When President Franklin Roosevelt’s polio became general knowledge, neighborhoods organized around his call to find a cure for the disease that afflicted millions.  Mostly mothers marched from neighbor to neighbor collecting dimes to support research.  It worked.  The causes of polio were discovered.  A vaccine was developed.  And incidents of polio became few and far between. 
 
But in the meantime, an organization had been formed.  And never mind that the disease had been eradicated.  And never mind that collecting and processing a dime cost more than ten cents.  The charity reinvented itself – many times.  Today, the March of Dimes is devoted to preventing premature birth.
 
Compare that approach to the organization called Freedom to Marry.  It was formed to promote marriage equality for gays and lesbians.  Formally chartered in 2002, though initiated in 1993, the ability of two people of the same sex to marry was a matter of settled law thanks too a Supreme Court decision in 2015. 
 
At that point, having achieved its goal, Freedom to Marry dissolved.  It still has a web site to tell its story, and its founder, Evan Wolfson, puts the lessons in social change he learned to use for other causes, but the need was met and so the business closed down.
 
I am a member of the demographic that watches the evening news.  As such, I know what ailments I am expected to have, almost every one a condition I never heard of until a drug was developed to cure it.  I don’t doubt that these are real medical conditions, but the commercials make me nervously set up an office visit every time my leg is restless, I have momentary trouble taking a deep breath, or I can’t remember what that drug developed from an ingredient originally discovered in jellyfish is supposed to treat.
 
It’s not just older people who face this dilemma, and it’s not just physical needs that are being cultivated by people who want to offer a remediation.  In technology, transportation, education, home maintenance, finance and even entertainment, every age cohort is facing a roster of needs defined for them by others who want them to secure the cure.  If I sound a little cynical, I am. 
 
My jaundiced eye is not yellowed by contemporary marketing alone. There is a guilt industry that has been operating for thousands of years, originated by the foundational documents of faith traditions.  The basic premise of almost every such tradition, including my own, is that human beings have betrayed their potential for goodness and fallen out of favor with God.  Ritual behaviors are prescribed to mend the rift – sacrifices, professions of shortcomings, pilgrimages, prostrations, submissions, self-denial. 
 
I won’t argue that, left to our own devices, humanity would rise to the occasion and create a wonderful world.  We have thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.  But I will argue that religions have a vested interest in making the case for guiltiness.  Some argue that we are all sinners.  Some contend that goodness is attained by fasting and prayer.  Some demand a denial of the pleasures of this world.  Some require a recitation of shortcomings even if we are not currently culpable.
 
But who benefits from these demands?  In the verse above, it is the priest.  He gets to keep the skin (in addition to a share of the meat) left over from a guilt sacrifice which only a priest may offer. Two thousand years after the sacrifices came to an end, it is clergy of every kind who have taken the role of the priest.  We are employed to make the case for being a better person by making the case that everyone needs a savior, a month-long fast, a daily confession or some other inorganic practice to be in right relationship with God. And no one ever reaches that level of right-ness for very long.
 
I look forward to the day promised in every faith tradition when the mission is accomplished and there is no longer a need for guilt.  I hope when that moment comes – may it happen soon – our faith traditions will have the wisdom to declare victory and follow the example of Freedom to Marry.  I worry, though, that the guilt industry is so good that we won’t let an effective organization go to waste.

The Leviticus:8 Project
 
A handful of the choice flour and oil of the meal offering shall be taken from it, with all the frankincense that is on the meal offering, and this token portion shall be turned into smoke on the altar as a pleasing odor to the LORD.      Leviticus 6:8
 
The sense of smell is often relegated to secondary status among the others.  But it has two characteristics that set it apart from sight, hearing, taste and touch.  First, smells tend to linger even after the stimulus has been removed.  And second, smell can trigger memories with more profundity.
 
That former quality is no surprise.  You know that when something acrid or pungent invades your airspace the scent seems to take up residence inside you nose even after the wind blows it away or you leave the site of the source.  It is not permanent, fortunately.  But it is persistent.
 
The latter is a staple of realtors around the country.  Many of them I know bake chocolate chip cookies just before an open house to trigger warm associations with prospective buyers.  A friend who was particularly adept at caring for an incapacitated friend said she would often fry some onions around 4:00 in the afternoon so that returning family members would have a sense of something on the stove.  And an entire industry has grown up around removing some odors and introducing others as aromas.
 
When my eldest child was in kindergarten, she demonstrated this idea.  We were expecting company on a Tuesday night and my wife had cooked a special dinner and baked a dessert – something generally done for Shabbat dinner on Friday.  My daughter walked into the kitchen from outside, took a sniff and said, “Hmm. Smells like Shabbat.”
 
There is a scent I no longer smell because, well, it was a short-term and long-term danger.  Back in the day, in the fall we would rake the leaves from our yards into the gutter and set them on fire.  They wouldn’t flame, but they would smolder indefinitely until turning all to ash and washing away in the next rain.  I loved that smell, and if I got a whiff of it again, I immediately would be on my Schwinn in the crisp autumn air cruising along the tree-lined streets between my school and my house.
 
I read once that our sense of smell was the latest to develop such sensitivity.  According to the article, personal hygiene of the kind that is now so obsessive was a much more casual affair in the days before plumbing and Palmolive.  Noxious odors were masked when they got overbearing, but the day-to-day stink of physical labor was familiar and unnoticeable. 
 
That’s not to say that little Rivka didn’t enter the tent on the Tuesday that the tribal chief was visiting and say, “Hmm.  Smells like Shabbat.” Some smells were probably always like that.
 
The pleasing odors of the altar were probably pleasing to the people at least as much as they were presumed to be pleasing to God.  Some combination of wood and fat and fragrant spices lingered once sniffed and likely spurred a reminder to be conscious of the divine presence that dwelled in the Tabernacle.  There were no cookies to bake or onions to fry, but the familiar aromas certainly were reassuring too those who felt physically or spiritually on the outside wanting to come in.
 
The persistence of an unpleasant stench, similarly, still carries with it an automatic repulsiveness.  We know to avoid sewers and garbage heaps and the like.  (And don’t ask me to take a whiff of curry – not my thing.)  We have taken this sensation alone and turned it into a term of judgment.  We never say, “You feel, you sound, you taste,” or “you look.”  But even when no actual odor is involved, telling someone that they smell, stink, reek, or are redolent delivers an immediate message of disapproval.
 
These days there are whiffs of stenches past emerging from certain kinds of politics.  They linger in the nose and remind us of memories we hoped to forget.  They stink.
 
But every now and then, even in moments of grief and loss, the scents of better times waft through the air, set loose from an altar in a chapel or church.  Pleasing odors.  Happy memories.  Smells like better times.

​EXPIATION
 
The Leviticus:8 Project
 
He shall bring them to the priest, who shall offer first the one for the sin offering, pinching its head at the nape without severing it.   Leviticus 5:8
 
I was chatting with a new friend of my generation about the changing circumstances in which we live.  I am a rabbi, though out of the congregational setting after more than 35 years, and he is a pediatrician.  Each of us acknowledged that certain practices that were deemed perfectly ordinary and even advisable when we were close to the beginnings of our careers are now completely redefined.
 
I have tracked gradual increase of space and the gradual decrease of privacy between me and people who sought my counsel.  A hug, even in public, is no longer innocent.  Pastoral counseling, which remains privileged and confidential, must provide for immediate interruption if either I feel or my visitor feels the need.  And I am not sure what to do with the instructions I received in seminary from the Freudian psychiatrist who taught us always to ask people about their sex lives.  (He is dead a dozen years, so I don’t mind admitting that I rarely followed his advice.)
 
My friend has a more complex situation than I.  As children approach adolescence their need for privacy makes having a parent in the examining room uncomfortable; a stranger as a third-party chaperone has its own complications.  Conversations about gender identity, sexual activity, domestic abuse and even pronouns are both more necessary and less simple than ever before. Even turn-your-head-and-cough is a fraught instruction.
 
He and I each have discussed this dilemma with people in our children’s generation, people who are more “woke” than we claim to be.  Each of us has heard some version of reproof that what we find so difficult to change in our practice and behavior never should have been a part of that conduct in the first place.  I will acknowledge that there were behaviors I considered flirtatious or seductive when I was dating that I understand now were demeaning and disrespectful with the benefit of hindsight.  But what about behavioral conventions that had no (conscious) element of the inappropriate attached?
 
The whole section of Leviticus from which this verse comes deals with people who realize after the fact – sometimes long after the fact – that they have violated a law or convention.  Maybe they forgot what they had done or maybe they just weren’t paying attention, but something or someone comes to remind them that they have (religious word warning) sinned. The spiritual bruise of the act has never healed, even if it has faded.
 
Bringing an offering to the priest helps to rectify the situation. The two birds are the offering of someone with modest capacity – not enough to afford an animal, more than enough to afford a measure of flour.
 
But how do I address the unconscious sins of my past?  Unlike at least some of the men caught up in the #metoo awakening, it is fifty years later that I understand that “pick up lines” were not as much the innocent love call of the hormonal teenager as a manipulative attempt to scratch an itch.  Unlike brother clergy lately in the news, it is twenty-five years later that I consider that wrapping my arms around a distraught congregant (of any age or gender) might have been considered as much assault as comfort.  And only recently do I hear “ick” beneath the laughter at some of my humor.
 
How do I become an agent of healing, for others first and then for myself?
 
I have the luxury of retirement.  I can attend to my own social behavior going forward without the challenges that my doctor friend faces in his sacred profession.  I can reflect on whether incidents I remember from long ago, now in a different light, demand that I seek out people who may or may not be as baffled by circumstances as I am.
 
Yet, I admit that despite my complete aversion to the restoration of Temple sacrifice, there is something comforting in a process of expiation that acknowledges it is never too late for healing.  Where do I bring my two doves?

​The Leviticus:8 Project 
 
He shall remove all the fat from the bull of sin offering: the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is about the entrails      Leviticus 4:8 
 
I have a friend who is morbidly obese, so much so that I am startled every time I see him because I cannot hold in my brain his size.  Some time ago we had lunch and I asked him if he was alarmed by his weight.  He told me he was not because he never saw himself as fat.  He said he had a fixed image of himself since he was a teenager of more usual proportions and that’s what he saw when he looked in the mirror or thought of himself. 
 
I was fascinated by that response, but only recently understood it viscerally.  I was skinny at 16, but fifty years later, I most certainly am not.  And worse, I carry most of the extra weight right up front.  Pictures of me taken in the last number of years show ample reason why my granddaughter asked me, during her mother’s recent pregnancy, if I had a baby in my tummy, too. 
 
Mostly, I don’t see it in the mirror, probably because the direct frontal view I have when brushing my teeth or shaving allows me to see the svelte teenager that is still the source of my body image. 
 
But there is no getting around it – almost literally – that in the midsection, I am fat. Adjective or noun, that word is morally neutral, but in common usage it carries a negative judgment.  If it didn’t, we would not have so many euphemisms for it or spend so much time and effort addressing it. Certainly, there are serious health considerations to schlepping around excess poundage, but so many cultural references disparage fat that it is hard to hear a description without hearing a judgment. 
 
I alternate between resolve and despair about my shape.  When buttoning my pants requires a yoga position or squirming into my car in a tight parking spot soils my shirt, I become determined to lose whatever I must to eventually melt that belt. (I know you can’t choose where to lose, but sooner or later it will be my belly.)  When facing a particularly delectable dessert or a chance to join a friend for a drink, I tend to rationalize the inevitability of my condition.  At the moment, I am making slow progress.  I won’t say in which direction. 
 
It does not make me feel better to notice that so many people around me have wider girths than I carry.  Some of them, I suspect, are in the same place of denial as I am.  The expansion of the American physique is well-documented, even as airlines and theaters try to squeeze more revenue out of narrower seating.   
 
The fat that attaches to certain internal organs was, under whatever system governed the sacrifices, not considered edible. Instead, it is used to create the sweet-smelling smoke of the altar.  In that sense, it is not really a sacrifice – there was no particular value to it.  That which had worth was preserved and used to sustain the priests and their families.
 
I imagine this context affirms both of my attitudes toward the current condition of my body.  There is no worth to the fat.  It would be sweet to divest myself of it and to return to sizes of suits and jeans that I remember from my earlier days.
 
But the fact is that I, like my friend, still recognize what is of real value.  The younger and more vital forms of ourselves still reside inside these larger versions.  Being able to understand that the fat may obscure the sight of our teenage bodies but not the spirit, not the dreams, not the delights is essential to living well today. 
 
That’s not an excuse to ignore the health risks that come with being overweight.  But it is a caution against despair.  Fat is extraneous.  It is neither inevitable nor definitive. 
 
This physical lesson is a spiritual one as well.  There are all sorts of behaviors, beliefs and neglects that have encased our better selves in unnecessary and probably unhealthy disguise.  But if, by remembering the good person at the core, we can learn not to fixate on what is neither inevitable nor definitive, with or without the excess poundage we can live a good and happy life.