Sermon 3.25.07 - Parshat Vayikra: Ascending Past Demonology

Parshat Vayikra
3.25.07
Jonathan Jaffe, Congregation Emanu-El

When I was growing up, I was permitted to stay up late and watch TV on one night alone: Saturday evenings. This was because Saturday Night Live represented a real institution in our house, shared by the entire family. Like many in my generation, I grew up on Gumby, Wayne’s World and the Church Lady. My sister and I would bet on whether or not my father could stay awake long enough to reach the fake news segment. Inevitably, he would fall asleep and start snoring loudly after the first 30 minutes of the show. Even today, SNL reruns don’t seem the same without the background noise of his deep snoring.
One of my favorite skits from Saturday Night Live featured Steve Martin as Theodoric of York, a medieval physician. People would enter his home with various maladies [mal-uh-dee] which Theodoric would treat through absurd remedies such as bloodletting, leeches or disgusting potions. In one particular episode, Theodoric’s treatment fails as usual to heal a certain patient. He confides to her mother,
“You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.”
While the ludicrous nature of the diagnoses and remedy gives the skit its humor, it is also based on historical reality. For almost all of human history, disease has terrified and confused the human race. For our ancestors, even a minor disease or infection could spell doom for an entire population. Major diseases like the bubonic plague had the power to wipe out large segments of the population. Ancient peoples lived in a constant state of worry and confusion regarding illness.
Like Theodoric of York, ancient doctors tended to connect disease with demonic possession or divine judgment. Think of Job’s sores or the boils suffered by Pharoah and the Egyptians. Ancient civilizations from the Greeks to the Babylonians viewed epidemics as being divinely inspired. Such thought was all the more important in the Middle East environment, a region of hot and wet weather, perfect for bacteria growth and infection. Thus for the ancient Israelites, care and ritual precision was as important as cleanliness is for a modern day surgeon.
The book of Leviticus, which we begin with this week’s Torah portion, therefore represents a major step forward in how diseases and contaminations are viewed. The book refuses to blame the victim, and never says that someone is sick because they are sinful. We may contrast this with the book of Deuteronomy, which clearly outlines a covenantal relationship between God and Israel in which God punishes the people with epidemics when they fail to keep the covenant. For example, God offers this choice threat in Deuteronomy 28:
20 The LORD will let loose against you calamity, panic, and frustration in all the enterprises you undertake, so that you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of your evildoing in forsaking Me. 21 The LORD will make pestilence cling to you, until He has put an end to you in the land that you are entering to possess. 22 The LORD will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew; they shall hound you until you perish.
Leviticus, on the other hand, refuses to blame the infected individual and therefore transcends the limits of demonology. The book is not interested in blame but rather in helping the individual return to society unscathed. The patient must go through a complicated set of purification rituals, not because he has sinned, but because he has become contaminated. In sum, Leviticus undermines common stereotypes and expectations from ancient civilization and replaces them with a set of rituals to safely bring the individual back into the community.
Animal sacrifice was a regular facet of ancient religion, but was originally meant to tempt or scare away the evil spirits from the patient. Such ritual itself represented a step forward from human sacrifice, which eradicated the demonized soul from the community. Leviticus goes a step further, taking the ancient practice of ritual sacrifice and transforming it into a means towards human purification. In Leviticus, disease is a regular fact of life which does not involve the deity, through blame, cure or otherwise. Rather, a complicated set of rituals are constructed by which the infected individual is outed publicly, sequestered from the community, and then reintroduced in a series of stages. Once back in the community, the individual regains full status. In this way, the book of Leviticus is light years ahead of Theodoric of York, as well as much of middle age and medieval medicine.
Thus while many of us often turn from the book of Leviticus with disgust and confusion, we should note that it presents the most modern theology of all the books of the Torah. Whereas we long ago dismissed the idea of God punishing all sins and rewarding all good deeds, this is the ideology supported by most of the Torah. Leviticus alone shrugs its shoulders and says, “things happen”, and turns not towards blame but rather in the direction of remedy.
Additionally, though filled with gory details of animal sacrifice, Leviticus is the least violent book in the entire Torah. Only two people die in the entire book: Nadav and Abihu, who violate the rituals layed out by God. Unlike earlier sections of the Torah, Leviticus deals with violence in a sophisticated way, containing it and making only ritualized slaughter legitimate. Rather than being full of violence, the way we think of it, the book looks for a way to contain violent impulses in a way that avoids murder. Just as Isaac’s death was avoided through the sacrifice of the ram, so too does the Israelite community shield one another from violence through sacrificial rituals.
According to Jewish tradition, Leviticus is the first book to be taught to a child. We often give the reason that this book teaches us the basic do’s and don’t of the religion: Don’t eat this, do celebrate that, don’t go here, do remember this. But perhaps we teach this book foremost because out of all the books of the Torah, Leviticus most closely mirrors our own modern theology. As Rabbi Harold Kushner points out in his famous book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, things happen all the time for which we have no logical or theological explanation. The Holocaust has shattered any remaining notion that human suffering constitutes a form of divine punishment for personal or group sin. The best we can do is to accept a given level of chaos and uncertainty in our lives and offer our best response. Leviticus supports the individual’s dignity as a member of the community, all the while containing society’s impulse towards violence through religious ritual. Once violence is made a part of the priestly function, it can no longer be tolerated in the public arena and can be forcibly legislated and punished.
But most of all, Leviticus represents the most pure form of monotheism in action. By denying demonic powers over such frightening threats as disease and sickness, the book reaffirms the notion that there is one God alone. After Leviticus, nobody can claim that the devil made them do it. It is for all of these reasons that our liturgy, including tonight’s service, is based upon the priestly rites as outlined in this week’s parsha. Hidden here, beneath the blood and burning flesh, lies the heart of the modern and ethical religion we now call our own. So before you turn your nose at another list of animal body parts and places for blood to be sprinkled, realize that you are ready the earliest stages of modern ethical monotheism. Now if only someone had told Theodoric of York.