Spirograph, Leviticus, and the Cycles of our Lives

For Congregation Ner Shalom, Parashat Vayikra

New moon, new year, equinox, eclipse, junk in a basement. 

The possibilities are endless.

Today is a day when all the cycles collide. It's evening, the denouement of another day on this planet. It's Shabbos, the settling out of another week of struggle and effort. It's a new Hebrew month, the launch of a new lunar cycle. It's the 1st of Nisan, which is one of our people's four new years. (This one is declared in Torah, in the book of Exodus, but historically it relates not to Egypt but to the Babylonian calendar that we adopted in exile, which is why tonight is also Nowruz - the Persian new year.) Meanwhile this particular new moon, thin as a pencil line, traces the underside of a supermoon that is brushing close to us, closer than it has in months. Today was the equinox and the beginning of spring. And to top it off, overnight was a solar eclipse, dazzling the Scandinavians while we were sound asleep. It's like there's a big celestial party going on. All these cycles - 24 hours, 7 days, 28 days, 1 year, 14 months - all of them intersecting and overlapping like the whirling designs we used to make with our Spirograph sets when we were kids.

Do you remember Spirograph? I had a set. So did my sister. Over the last month, they resurfaced in the cycle of chaos and order that over the last year has characterized my mother's basement in Niles, Illinois. As you know from previous drashot, this basement is a magical treasure chest, a never-ending cornucopia of objects from every era of our family's history in this country. From immigration through junk peddling, political scandals, business ventures, cousins clubs and deaths; the basement is littered with diplomas, ketubos, NRA badges, meeting minutes, sheet music and an awesome collection of childhood games. Lynn and I looked at our Spirograph sets side by side. Hers had all the pieces, each one carefully put back in its proper slot after its last use some time in the 1970s. Mine was a mess, many of the translucent plastic disks cracked or chipped; none of them in the right place; the little pins that held pieces and paper to the cardboard backing were all over the place, threatening to prick whoever would reach into the dusty box heedlessly.

My sister decided to keep hers, and it took its place in her takeaway stack, perched atop Candyland and Mystery Date. I let mine go. It's hard for me to let anything go. But I decided to make a clean breast of it. A fresh start. I couldn't see myself at this point in my life sitting and drawing crazy psychedelic spirals anyway, and a half-ruined childhood game seemed a waste of my otherwise prodigious powers of sentimentality.

So I took a fresh start on that one, even while other items cycled back into my "reconsider" pile. See, the thing about cycles is that they're always giving fresh starts and second chances. What I mean is this: we all know that today is just a continuation of time. It is not qualitatively or empirically different from yesterday, other than the fact that it is later; the world is older. But today can feel like a completely different thing. What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours. A new month, a new year, all of these arbitrary markers signal possibility. Rebirth. Reset. Reboot.

Of course, sometimes the desired reboot doesn't happen. We get stuck in a rut, a needle in the groove of an old LP. Whether it's a habit or a grudge or an Israeli election, we don't know how to think, do or try something differently. How to clear the way for a new chance. Sometimes we need something extra, something a little more juiced up, to break the inertia. But what?

One possible answer comes from this week's Torah portion. This week boasts another new beginning, this one in our cycle of Torah reading, which stretches from Genesis to Deuteronomy and from Simchat Torah to Simchat Torah. This week we orbit back into the Book of Leviticus, our great and ancient ritual manual. It details a system of offerings that themselves mark time and mark cycles of human experience. Our failings, our leaders' failings, our brushes with death and illness, our communal festivals, our personal joys - all of these end up marked in Leviticus as part of a cycle, marked with ritual offerings. We move from tamei to tahor - from states that are pervaded by everydayness to states that feel radiant with holiness. And back again. In English we call the states described in Leviticus "purity" and "impurity", which is unfortunate. Because they don't refer to physical states of contamination, but to a range of emotional states, spiritual states. Think of the way you feel after you break a promise. Or the way you feel after experiencing a loss. These are psychological states that Leviticus addresses, by prescribing the kind of repair you can do in your world to release it, or the kind of offering you can give to God in order to make a shift and experience, even if briefly, a new start.

In our culture, we don't recognize these fluctuating states in any open, community-supported way. Our emotional ups and downs belong to each of us individually. We hold them privately, even secretly. We are told they are aberrations from what we should be; they are disorders, rather than the emotional landscape of living. We do therapy and we are sold medication. We hide our messy states and pretend we're fine. And we move forward as if we weren't ever in a state of spiritual disarray, when actually we probably are most of the time.

The system in Leviticus, though it seems archaic and, in the case of animal sacrifice, barbaric, was far more accepting of the emotional topography of life than we are. It was assumed that you experienced the full range of life's gifts and sadnesses, fulfillments and foibles. And that you could mark those those by an interaction with the divine that would allow you to transition from one state to another; to let go of one part of the cycle and move forward into another.

In the Levitical code, there's always a new beginning available for you whenever you need it. And the prescription for that new beginning is usually an offering.

So I wonder what we can offer up to help us move from state to state, or to be mindful when we do?

When Lynn and I work in the Chicago basement, it doesn't clearly feel like a cycle, but more often like one, unending difficult state. A jumble of reverence and frustration and ambition and despair. We look at all the holy relics with which my mother was entrusted and ultimately burdened. We sit inside of it and wish it had a cyclical quality. After all, even Sisyphus has his "up" moments. Where are ours?

But then, unforeseen, came some change, through a ritual of offering. We had already been giving furniture and housewares to cousins and friends right and left. But one morning last week I opened a dry cleaner's paper garment bag to discover my father's army uniforms - two dress uniforms and one set of fatigues. They were clean and pressed. His overseas hats folded flat and pinned to the lapels. They had been in this garment bag since, I assume, 1946. They were in pristine condition and their discovery led to a quandary. What do we do with these? They suddenly were symbolic of our father. Not just his service in the army, but the gentle meticulousness that was so part of who he was. How could they be thrown out? We were stuck in a humbling and hobbling reverence for him and needed ritual to move from that state to a different one.

It was my sister's partner who saved the day. Sue said, "Call a theater." And we did. Lynn called Steppenwolf, Chicago's premiere theater, the one that produced Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Laurie Metcalf - performers whom my mother referred to never as "actors" but rather as "Chicago actors," as if that signified something obvious about their skill and their talent and their loyalty to the city of her birth. Over the past 20 years my mother frequently ushered at Steppenwolf. She would call us after a performance and tell us the storyline, mixing into it tangents about the other ushers and the very nice house managers, all of whose stories were as interesting to her as the plot of the play. Steppenwolf said they'd be happy to take the uniforms. Lynn inquired further. Would they take our grandmothers' and great aunts' fur-collared 1940s and 1950s coats? Yes, they said. And we collected them all up and we lay them on the back seat of the car like sleeping children, and we drove into the city. Laurel, the wardrobe mistress, accepted these with the gentleness and regard that one would hope was shown by the Levites as they accepted the offerings of the Israelites on the steps of the Temple. She examined them to see if they were in fact without blemish. She complimented them. She remarked to us about their uncanny state of preservation. As we left the uniforms and the coats on the costume shop cutting table, the altar of alterations, we felt a burden lifted. This was not like giving coffeepots to cousins. This was an offering, in a near-Biblical sense. We were offering up these objects of love to the greater universe. To the gods of creativity and catharsis. So that someone on stage one day in a diminutively sized seargent's uniform might make an audience member cry or laugh and rethink something in their life and be released from some state that they were trapped in so that they too could have a fresh start.

These clothes, held in suspended animation for seven decades, had now reëntered the cycle of things; they were recycled, upcycled. And we moved from our stone-heavy state to one of elation. Even knowing that the next day we might once again feel buried under the weight of our earthly responsibility. For today, it was new beginnings all around.

So new beginnings. From an outsider's view, every day on this earth just looks like a continuation of the previous day's developments. As Ecclesiastes would say, eyn chadash tachat hashemesh, there is nothing new under the sun. But from the inside, from inside our cycles, new beginnings are possible all the time. A new year, a new month, a new day, a new chance. Just offer up what you need to offer up - your regret, your love, your gratitude, your hope. Let the regret burn away. Let the gratitude feed the gods. And then you can descend the Temple steps, into your new beginning, the place where possibility lives.


I am grateful to Suzanne Shanbaum who, when I was at a loss, said, "Write about new beginnings." And to Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan, who teaches the class I'm taking called, "Learning to Love Leviticus." Thanks to her and my classmates, I am.

Note: This drash is powered by Congregation Ner Shalom. If they ever speak to you enough to be so moved, you are always invited to make a contribution to Ner Shalom by clicking here. (Please notate it with Itzik's Well so I know.]

Priest, Have a Little Priest!

For Congregation Ner Shalom

So, big news this week. Very big news. No, not the Russians mobilizing on the borders of Crimea. Not jobs. No, the big news, at least in certain circles, is John Travolta and his public mangling of the name of Idina Menzel at the Oscars. Idina Menzel, a Jewish daughter-made-good, who originated famous roles in Rent and in Wicked, playing respectively, the arguably Jewish roles of pushy creative type and green-skinned outcast. She is part of Broadway history and yet is someone still unknown to the masses who are not Broadway buffs, including Travolta. (In fact, the hip, Jewish online Tablet Magazine today speculated that the fact that Travolta didn't know who Idina Menzel was should now dispel all rumors that he's gay.)

But Idina walked out and sang her song, gorgeously of course, despite having just been introduced as Adele Nazeem, which made her sound something like a mix of British pop star and Turkish poet. And a lot of people learned in the process that you have to look a bit beyond name, to just let it go, and you'll be ready to discover something truly beautiful.

Which brings us around to the new book of Torah we begin reading this week, in Hebrew called Vayikra, a beautiful name meaning, "And God called." Because it opens with God calling out to Moshe, and arguably to all of us. A call, a question, awaiting our answer.

But before we get to that, we've got to deal with the other name of this book: Leviticus, a label that has come to symbolize so many things both related and unrelated to the book's actual contents, a handle that sets many a tooth on edge, a word that is used with equal facility as punishment and punchline. A book that challenges, for sure, but is typically dismissed too soon.

You see, even though we've come to associate Leviticus with sexual taboos and suspiciously fixated Bible-thumpers, it is meant to be something different. A holiness code, a ritual system, a guide for moving cleanly through the human world and for bumping shoulders respectfully with the Divine. In this tome are sensible and easily supportable laws of human-human conduct: caring for the poor, loving your fellow, resisting  the allure of hatred. And it contains business ethics as relevant today as 3000 years ago: paying your workers on time, using honest weights and measures, judging fairly. And yes, there's sex stuff too - a sexual ethic that addresses, in the thinking and language of the time, proper and improper relations - many of which we would still consider improper. It's this sexy bit that gets the most press, and has arguably unleashed more harm than anything else in our tradition, through the disproportionate literalism with which it continues to be read in some corners.

But mostly the book is about ritual. Leviticus is the Levitical code. An instruction manual for the Levites, laying out all the ritual they will practice or oversee. The Levites, as you might recall, are a tribe of Israel, the descendants of Levi, one of Jacob's 12 sons. But unlike the other tribes, they do not possess a parcel in the Promised Land. Instead they have a function. They serve in the mishkan, in the Tabernacle in the desert, and later in the Temple. Which means that they are both the ritual guardians and the bureaucratic class of ancient Israel - part cleric, part clerical.

And one family, one clan from among the Levites, the Kohanim, were charged with being the priests. They would receive the offerings brought by the people, offerings whose requirements start getting laid out this very week, right at the top of the book. All sorts of offerings. Beasts, birds, first fruits, meal offerings. Guilt offerings. Shlamim - peace offerings, or offerings for the purpose of making something whole. The priests would offer the sacrifices. They'd slaughter the animals. They'd sprinkle the blood. They'd add incense to make the reyach nichoach - the scent that is pleasing to God: a smell of smoke and herbs and burning meat that is as irresistible to God as the nearly identical smell of sizzling bacon is to a Jew on a Sunday morning.

The priests, dressed in special garments that marked them as the human-divine gatekeepers, would enact all this ritual, grisly ritual to be sure, and they would become the vehicles for atonement and expiation. For fulfillment of a vow, for completion of an endeavor. The priestly ritual would bring a spiritual stamp of completion to an earthly problem posed. The Kohanim represented the people to God and God to the people. In doing so, they were a human reminder that what we do on earth is also l'shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven. We are accountable to the Divine, our actions and inactions affect the Divine. They were a reminder that there is something overarching, unifying, sanctifying our homes and our fields and our bodies and our relationships.

I've often wondered why we read all the priestly instructions every year. Yes, we read it because we read all of Torah; the cycle of it is ancient. But the cycle could also have been changed by the rabbis after the destruction of the Second Temple. They could have chosen to make the priestly code something that we read on the side, voluntarily, as we do later books of the Bible. But no, we read them year in, year out. Fixed.

It seems to me that although the Temple rituals described are no longer viable in the absence of an actual Temple, the need for such ritual, or the needs that those rituals addressed, are still alive in each of us. There are times I need forgiveness, or to express my gratitude, or give voice to my sorrow, to honor a new beginning or an ending. Modern rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism we know, gives us mechanisms for doing those things. Yom Kippur, Hallel, Kaddish, Shehecheyanu.

But I'd like to suggest that the synagogue and its liturgy are not the only successors to the Temple in Jerusalem. Each of us is its successor too.

There is a lovely tradition that in every Jew there exists a pintele Yid. A tiny spark of Jewishness.  The pintele Yid is the Jewish part of each of us that endures, no matter how Jewish or not we choose to live. But maybe that pintele Yid is in fact a kohen. Maybe in each of us is a spark of kehunah, of priesthood. In each of us is a human-divine gatekeeper, robed in holy garments. A part of us that serves us, that serves our inner Temple. A part that has the final say on matters of spirit. This is the part that can, at last, when needed, say, "Forgiven." And can say, "It's done." And can say, "It is l'shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven." When we feel heard by God, or forgiven, or blessed, or loved, perhaps that sensation is coming from, or through, our pintele Kohen, our tiny internal priest.

It might be that our internal priests dictate a different kind of ritual than we saw in the Temple in olden days or that we see in the synagogue today. Private ritual. Maybe our pintele Kohen decides the right dinner to help relieve a terrible day. Or the right walk to take after having been laid up in bed with an illness. The right person to call to share your good news. When to stop working and go do yoga. Where to hang the wonderful old photo of grandma.

How does your inner priest know what the right ritual is? Experience. Instinct. Svara - the Talmudic idea of an inner moral impulse that is at least as important in guiding us as the specifically enumerated mitzvot of Torah.

The pintele Kohen, the little priest, is, or should be, a Big Kahuna among our often-conflicting inner voices. A reminder that we are holy, and the fires of that holiness need to be tended, like the fires of the altar in the Temple.

And this - the vision of ourselves as holy, holy enough to require priesthood and holy enough to embody it - is perhaps the most enduring and beautiful aspect of the Book of Leviticus. The book that is better called by its Hebrew name, Vayikra, the book that reminds us that we are called, and that our lives - both our spiritual lives and our lives on this earth plane - are the answer to that call.

This book, Vayikra, is like a certain under-appreciated Broadway star. A daughter of Israel, with a great set of pipes; it sings a song that can raise our spirits and our sights. And ultimately, it doesn't matter at all if we get the name right.

The Kedoshim Question: Aural Argument

 For Congregation Ner Shalom ~ April 19, 2013, Netzach sheb'Netzach

Heaven was abuzz this week. Abuzz in a way that on earth you might perceive as an unusually high incidence of static electricity in the air, or gooseflesh for no particular reason. In the high reaches Malakhim and Seraphim gathered at fountains and courtyards to wonder together; Cherubim enfolded themselves in their six wings in disbelief. Ofanim exchanged meaningful glances with the animal faces of the Chayot. There was a holy hubbub of curious talk and rarely felt trepidation. How could this even be taking place? How could Holy Beings oppose the Holy Writ?

It is admittedly a most unusual case. A celestial challenge of divine law. Not a law given to angels, who need no law. But a law given to humans. A band of angels suing on behalf of humankind. Trying to upend law given at Sinai. Asking God to eat God's words!

Outrageous.

This has never happened before. Not since the Revelation, not since Creation, not since the Singularity that preceded that. The Archangel Metatron presides over the Heavenly Tribunal, and, as is the way of judges most supreme, would not comment on a case still in controversy.

Inside, the courtroom was packed. A gavel fell and a crier called out: "Shema! Shema! Oyez! Oyez! Let all persons having business with the honorable Yeshivah shel Ma'alah be admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting." The advocates approached the bench.

One spoke.

"Your honors, Rabbi Hillel, on behalf of petitioners, the petitioners being a coalition of angels representing the interests of the Sefirah of Chesed and the steady circulation of love from God into the world and back." Rabbi Hillel had been in happy retirement since his death, spending slow days playing Scrabble with Rabbi Shammai, who always complained that Hillel was making up words; Hillel insisted that if he had a plausible definition, especially a humorous one, his words should count. But now Hillel had been persuaded out of retirement in order to argue this most unusual case. He stood at the bench and beamed, despite his slightly dishevelled appearance, compounded by matzah crumbs from the sandwich he'd snuck into the chamber in his pocket.

"And opposing?"

The fiery glow was almost unbearable. "Archangel Gabriel, Solicitor Celestial, Avatar of the Sefirah of Gevurah, Keeper of Limits and Boundaries, Upholder of the Rule of Law. Your honors."

"Thank you counselors. Rabbi Hillel, you may begin."

"Your honors, as you know, the present controversy centers around a piece of Torah that begins with the words kedoshim tihyu ki kadosh ani. "Be holy because I am holy." The specific provisions that follow are considered a Holiness Code. The parties have stipulated that these mitzvot are the actions and restrictions humankind was instructed to follow in an attempt to embody holiness."

A nearly imperceptible flutter came over the gallery as the angels present imagined humans, with their seawater bodies and short attention spans, and felt a mix of amusement and pity and perhaps resentment. For the blink of an eye, the angelic drone of holy holy holy faltered; just a fraction of a second but long enough for the National Geological Survey to record tremors in three distinct points in the Pacific Ocean.

Rabbi Hillel pressed onward. "We have no dispute with the first verses of the Holiness Code, your honors. In fact, we applaud the Divine Wisdom that instructed humans to welcome the immigrant, to feed the poor, to respect elders, to observe the Sabbath, to love your neighbor as yourself. We also hold no opinion regarding the puzzling but largely benign prohibitions on planting mixed seeds and wearing linen-wool blends." With this, Rabbi Hillel suddenly became aware of his wrinkled kapoteh and moved a hand as if to smooth it before realizing the effort would be futile. "We do not object to any of those laws, your honors. However, where we see a tremendous, if previously overlooked, injustice is-- "

"Rabbi," the Chief Justice interrupted, "let us first take up the jurisdictional issue. By what authority does humankind seek to annul a law given by God? Are the earthly courts insufficient to handle the resolution of this matter?"

"Your honors," replied Rabbi Hillel, "we humans are gifted by our Creator with some sechel, some smarts, that we bring to difficult questions. We do not claim your wisdom of course; after all, as the Psalm says, just below angels are we. Yet as we humbly ponder the law and the very real lives of flesh and blood -- no offense your honors -- to which they must apply, we try to do so in the name of heaven. As it says in Talmud, eylu v'eylu divrei Elohim chayim. All of our conflicting points of view as we debate are in fact the living words of God."

"Yes, Rabbi" interrupted Chief Justice Metatron, "you are doing heaven's work; it has been delegated to humankind to do. So why bother us? Why do you humans not just do it?"

"Yes, your honor. We could; we would; we do. But there is precedent for a more direct exchange between heaven and earth in certain legal matters. For instance when there is imminent danger to God's creation -- or even to God's reputation. In such cases, petitions have gone directly to heaven. For instance, Father Abraham bargaining for the lives of the people of Sodom."

"It did him no good," spat Gabriel.

"His intervention was permitted even if his goal was not achieved," replied the sage. "And at times, in our toughest of cases, heaven has, unbidden, sent a bat kol, a prophetic voice, to guide us."

"Which guidance you have always ignored," countered the archangel.

"In any event, I would like to remind the Court that I am not here representing humankind but rather an intervening angelic body. The Coalition of Heavenly Entities Supporting Equality in Desire. CHESED." Rabbi Hillel glanced at the balcony where his clients waved a rainbow - a real rainbow in this case. He looked back at the panel. "These are angels who, observing the human struggle over the law we will discuss, are deeply moved to bring about its nullification."

"Your honor," broke in the Archangel. "These CHESED people cannot decide to challenge the law. They are angels. They have no free will. They are limbs of the divine. They respond only to Divine Thought."

"And yet," Hillel replied, "here we are. They are certainly responding to some element of the Divine Will, as are you, Counselor. We are aware of many aspects of the Divine - Truth, Beauty, Majesty, Mercy. Maybe it is time we add one: Ambivalence."

There was a collective gasp in the courtroom and this time the low monotone of holy holy holy broke off entirely. On earth, souffles fell and many thousands of individual socks instantly vanished unobserved from electric dryers.

"Rabbi Hillel will please leave the nature of the Divine to us," scolded the Chief Justice. "In the meantime, please move on to the merits of your petition."

"Thank you, your honors. Yeshivah shel Ma'lah, Judges most High, we are here today to correct a wrong. We are here to overturn Verse 13 of Chapter 20 of the third book of Torah, which says, "Man shall not lie with man as with a woman; it is an abomination; they shall be put to death." But I wish to begin with another text altogether. Shir Hashirim. Song of Songs, our people's greatest love poetry. "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine."

"Relevance!" barked Gabriel.

"His left hand is under my head; his right hand embraces me."

"Your Honor!"

"Justices, my successor in life and colleague in Paradise the great Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef, noted that Song of Songs is a holy book. Is this disputed?"

"No objection," said Gabriel cautiously.

"Akiva also said that while all the writings of our Writ are holy, Shir Hashirim is the Kodesh Kodashim - the Holy of Holies, and that the whole world is not worth the day that Shir Hashirim was created. He says this because while the other books give important laws and tell important stories, only Shir Hashirim comes close to describing the love of God for Creation, and the love of Creation for God. Human love, human longing is an earthly embodiment of this love; it is the most deeply felt way for our very limited kind to experience the Great Holiness. And so human love, human longing, in all its forms, is holy."

"What?" cried Gabriel. "Surely you are not suggesting that what Leviticus makes abomination, Song of Songs makes holy? To claim that the right to engage in such conduct is implicit in the concept of holiness is, at best, facetious."

The angels in the CHESED section began to boo, but in a loving way.

"Yes, Rabbi," probed the Chief Justice, "what are the parameters of your position. Are you saying all human sex is holy?"

"No, your Honor. Only sex that is steeped in love. Only sex approached with an open heart. Oh, and sex that is really, really fun."

"Rabbi, the Holiness Code also prohibits sex with slaves, sex with close family members, sex that is adulterous, sex with animals. Are you proposing those prohibitions be lifted as well?"

"Those prohibitions are distinguishable, your honor. They address relationships with inherent power disparities, relationships where it isn't clear that both parties have equal ability to say 'no' - or even any ability. And the adultery prohibition reflects an awareness that there are others who might be hurt by the relationship.  But the provision we challenge today, Leviticus 20:13, has no mention of power disparity; not a hint of exploitation. It applies to consenting adults. And yet their holy act of love is punishable by death."

"Your honor," chimed in the Solicitor Celestial, "other laws in the Holiness Code that exact a death penalty have simply been ignored by humankind or commuted to another type of punishment. A child cursing its parents, for example, I can't remember the last time I saw one of them stoned - well, you know what I mean. In any event, I know it is unlike me to say so, but flexibility has been demonstrated in the application of the laws of Leviticus. Humankind takes many of these rules with a grain of salt."

"However," responded the sage, plucking some stray horseradish from his beard and absentmindedly removing it to his tongue, "in the case of this one particular prohibition, humankind gets uncharacteristically literal. The law is still taken at face value in many cultures and many places on earth, and in some of them still invokes a death penalty. And in other places the death penalty takes the form of violence in the streets or the suicide of young people. No, your honors, as for taking this abomination thing with a grain of salt, it seems much of humanity is on a salt-free diet. Ah, wait, I misspeak," continued Hillel. "One flexibility is commonly granted: women who lie with women, not mentioned in the law at all are, thanks to Leviticus, treated to the same condemnation in much of human society. Living in the shadow of this prohibition is a source of profound sadness; since Sinai humans have been pressured into marriages without love, from which many more people suffer. This law has brought on of a world of suffering."

"But your honors," thundered Archangel Gabriel, "even if this is so, it is for humans to work out. Let them make change however they go about making change. I don't understand what the rabbi here expects us to do about it. Shouldn't this unfold in a human way, country by country, society by society?"

"Your honors," answered Rabbi Hillel, "I submit to you that Leviticus 20:13 was not correct when it was given at Sinai, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent and should be overruled."

In the gallery you could hear a pin drop, and many dancing angels falling right off of the head of it.

Rabbi Hillel lifted his hands in supplication. "It is not for our sake that I ask this, your honors, but for yours. Words of Torah should give honor to God. And this law has caused good and holy people to dismiss you, and You, and Torah itself, from their lives. They have come to trust the holiness of their love; they just think that You don't. There is imminent threat to God's reputation here; you must take note. It is not for the sake of the people sometimes called "gay" that we seek redress. They will continue on and fight their fight along with their friends and families and allies, and they will keep loving each other despite, and they will make art and song about their struggles and jokes to make light of the indignity of it. And they will change the world, with or without you. It is not for them but for heaven that this correction must be made."

"But Rabbi," said Metatron, the Chief Justice, sounding now old and tired himself, "what can we do at this point? This has gone on so long."

Rabbi Hillel thought at this moment that something passed between himself and the Chief Justice. The Chief Justice, who was the only angel in the spheres who was once a man, Chanoch, a particular beloved of God, who could not bear him to die and installed him instead in the heavenly court, alive and immortal. The Chief Justice must be able to remember back to his earthly existence, his love, his longing, his long walks with God. The Chief Justice would help. The Chief Justice would cast his vote for Chesed.

"Rabbi," the Chief Justice called Hillel back to attention. "Torah has already been given. What relief can we offer?"

Hillel held Metatron's eye as he delivered his unorthodox request. "Your honor, in the rabbinic academies, we have a phrase that guides us: Eyn mukdam um'uchar batorah." There is no before or after in Torah. Erase this error now so that it will not even exist at Sinai. Undo it now so that it will never have been. Let the world unfold without it; let love prosper; let this particular hatred and shame never get born; see how a more loving world fares; see how--"

A flame came down from the sky to rest on an altar next to the Chief Justice. Rabbi Hillel sighed. "I see I have used my time."

For a moment, the eyes of Metatron, the angel formerly known as Chanoch, seemed lost in thought.

"Rabbi, a question from upstairs. If there is no before or after, why should we act now?"

"Because, your honor, if not now, when?"

The Chief Justice seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. "Thank you, Counsel," he remarked at last. "The case is submitted."


This drash is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Alan Lew. The last drash I heard him give was about this verse, and in it he reached the conclusion that the line of right and wrong had shifted, and that Leviticus 20:13 was now simply inapplicable, and not to be heeded. He seemed (or maybe this was my projection) dispirited that Torah process couldn't redeem this Torah problem. 

Many thanks to Reb Eli Herb and to Anna Belle Kaufman for their thoughtful feedback.