Reflections on a Paschal Goat

 

I remember well the year I spent the weeks before Pesach in Dimona, a development town in Israel’s Negev desert founded during the great immigration of Jews from Morocco in the 1950s. It was a diverse place, as well as Jews from across North Africa, there were Indians and Ethiopians, just not many Ashkenazim. On Rosh Chodesh a sheep appeared, tethered to a tree on the front lawn of the next-door apartment block. For a couple of weeks, it mooched around, nibbling the lawn and looking bored. And then on the eve of Pesach it was gone – with a red daub of blood marking the doorpost where, hours earlier, the sheep had mooched.

It was shocking for me, a nice genteel Anglo-Jewish eighteen-year-old, to witness this most corporeal preparation for Pesach. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about Pesach myself. It’s not that I haven’t done a whole bunch of strange stuff to prepare for Pesach my entire life. But … a sheep, really a true-life Paschal sheep?

Actually, I wasn’t a vegetarian back then, but even then I distrusted meat-eaters who worried about meat while still walking around with fur or feathers, yet didn’t worry about meat in polystyrene packs or on plates.

But, even as a non-meat eater now, I felt I should Modeh this proud tradition I had witnessed, peering out from my own flat across the street, looking down on the sheep next door. Modeh as in doff my kippah, acknowledge and even feel grateful for the opportunity to see something that connected me so profoundly to the sacrificial heart of our faith.

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, and the abandonment of the sacrificial system, two different parts of the Jewish diaspora developed in related, but differing ways.

In Ashkenaz – northern Europe – the place where my family comes from – the abandonment of the sacrificial system is observed more actively. If we can’t offer a Paschal sacrifice, there shall be no lamb served at Seder night at all. We replace the lamb with … something else. We read the story and recite the practice of Hillel, ‘at the time the Temple stood who would eat the sacrificial offering together with Matzah Marror.’ But we’re done with all that. Growing up, for me, that meant some kind of chicken cooked in a sauce – no roast meat.

But in Sepharad, the response to the destruction of the Temple with the possibility of offering a real Paschal sacrifice was more nostalgic – lamb would be served, of course, lamb is served at Seder, how else are you supposed to remember leaving Egypt?

In some ways it’s a bit like Jews and Christians when it comes to head coverings and places of worship. Jews put a Kippah on, and Christians take a cap off. I’m not making a claim that one is right and the other is wrong. There are different ways to achieve the same thing – remember that God is around us and above us. It works, on a good day, for me.

But there is something profound to be realised about a real death, of a real sheep that I, in my nice Anglo-Ashkenaz experience of Judaism, had missed up to that point in my life.

It’s real, it matters, it’s corporeal. The sense that we are supposed to really feel as if we ourselves went forth from Egypt, is easier to experience when there’s a real sheep at stake – literally, at the stake.

But when there’s a real sheep you can feel the things you are supposed to feel.

I remember too the year I spent Yom Kippur. And on the eve of Yom Kippur I went to Machane Yehuda to see the much-discredited tradition of Kappores. It’s a post-talmudic, but still 1400-year-old tradition of taking a chicken, holding it above the head of a person and, sort of, expiating the sins of the Gever – man onto the Gever – rooster. I was prepared to hate it, I was prepared to find it crude and ridiculous. I mean, I don’t believe you can be relieved of the suffering due your sins by swinging a chicken above your head. But then I noticed that after each chicken was waved, it would go off to the Shochet and end up in a bag being carried away by one of the scores of poor people who turned up knowing there would be free chicken on offer. I realised watching what was going on that it was all, really, being driven by the desire to give Tzedakah. And it felt, watching these Jews dressed as 18C Polish nobles, that Kappores had been driven by the desire to do Tzedakah for some time, several hundred years, you know.

It’s too easy, in these days, to abstract everything, everything becomes a thinner version of what once was, and stripped back of their corporeal reality Jewish rituals that once upon a time felt so vibrant and true can be left feeling just out-of-date.

I’ve also been thinking about the one thing left, the one really literal ritual that is the thing itself, still, rather than a Zecher L’Mikdash – a memory of what once was. Brit Milah – the covenant of circumcision. It’s literal and immediate and to be in the room for a Brit Milah is to feel a very stark connection to the covenant that was given to Abraham. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that even despite its visceral immediacy Brit Milah is still hanging on in there as an observance even among those who don’t keep Kosher, or don’t keep Shabbat. Maybe the strength of Brit Milah is its visceral immediacy.

What I’m saying is that part of me is nostalgic for the sacrificial system. I get it. I mean, there is another part of me that thinks, literally, thank God I don’t need to do Jewish that way, but I wonder what I would understand if I did.

Here’s the first thing;

I think I would understand gratitude more profoundly. These days, when I feel grateful I say Modeh Ani, or perhaps log into a website and press ‘donate – and don’t forget to send me a Gift Aid receipt.’ I don’t even donate cash any more, there are just numbers on the screen that go down when I give Tzedakah. Bac in the time of the Temple, I would have offered an animal, literally taking an animal from my flock and acknowledged it as no longer mine – as a transfer from my jurisdiction to the department of God.

Moshe Halbertal in his terrific book, Sacrifice, makes a brilliant point about prepositions. The Biblical sacrificial system isn’t, he says, sacrificing for something, it’s sacrificing to something. Biblical sacrifices weren’t offered to get something back from God. They were offered as a gift of love, as a coming closer – literally, a Korban – the word for sacrifice and the word for coming closer are the same word. The rabbis say that there was a fire lit on the sacrificial altar and the smoke rose from the altar towards the heavens, and there was a flame that would descend from the heavens and come close to the flame rising from the people and there would be in that moment, a point of meeting. I miss that.

 

I think I would have understood sin more profoundly. These days, I don’t tend to think about sin very much at all. I mean, on Yom Kippur I’ll give it some thought and tap my chest as I roll through the language of our liturgy. But back then it would have been an animal, each time I messed up. I wonder how much more it would have held me to the straight and narrow; calculating carefully aware with so much more a concrete sense of what wrongdoing would cost, not even in financial terms, but in terms of the loss of life of an animal. I like to think I would have been moved by that knowledge, bettered by that system.

What’s the point?

I’m not advocating for a return to the sacrificial system. I’m not religio-luddite. I’m also not blind to the challenges and failings of a sacrificial-based Judaism. It’s hard enough for our caretaking staff with kiddush. Can you imagine having to ask for assistance scrubbing sacrificial blood off the carpet on a weekly basis? I digress.

The point is, it’s too easy to look at the history of Judaism, with its immediate visceral rituals and mock, or think we know so much better than those fools of ancient times. The truth is always going to be more complex. We would be better off suspending judgement and foregoing arrogance and focusing instead on curiosity and the possibilities of learning more than we knew yesterday. For the great truth of the sacrificial system, whether we are considering the sacrifices of our weekly reading or the remembrance of the Paschal sacrifice we will consider in less than two weeks’ time, is that immediacy and visceral observance have a power that talks and shadow observance cannot match.

The point is, don’t throw out any more of the baby with the bathwater. There are visceral observances left in Judaism, and they are absolutely worth tending to, performing and, literally, observing – watching how they change us, for they do, far more than we would imagine. That goes from the visceral observances of Shabbat to Tefilin to Kashrut to … almost anything. We’ve an incredible trove of treasure left, still, even despite the end of temple-based Judaism. We would do well to tend them well.

To get Judaism properly, to get Passover properly, it’s not enough to talk about it and say you feel it. You have to do it, you have to get your hands dirty – clean, cook, cook differently, eat differently. Give the physical, practical, visceral vestiges of Judaism that we have left the space to do their work on our soul. and in our hearts. Opening to the power of these rituals, and submitting to the power of these rituals will allow us to understand more profoundly, more deeply who we are and what it is to be standing here today, less than two weeks away from Zman Cheruteinu – the time of our Freedom.

Shabbat Shalom