Avodah Sermon
One of the most striking aspects of our services today is the emphasis on the actions of the High Priest in Temple. Our Torah reading recounts how, after the death of Aaron’s two sons, God instructed Moses to tell Aaron how to observe the very first Yom Kippur – and that we should observe it from thence forward as a day of atonement. Then, in the middle of the Musaf Amidah, we recount in greater detail the ceremony as it was observed in the Temple. Why do we need to repeat the description of these ancient sacrificial rites? Why do we need to act out the whole ritual, counting the drops of blood, getting down on our knees over and over? Years ago, a dear colleague who serves a small Conservative congregation in Maine was telling me how she shortens their High Holy Day services. All I remember about what she said was, “And of course, we never do the Avodah service!” Her shul is much like ours, serving a diverse kahal, many of whom prefer a shorter service; why am I keeping the Avodah in our Musaf Amidah today?
It’s easy to understand how the Avodah section came into being. The Mishna, compiled in the first couple of centuries after the fall of the Temple, meticulously reconstructs what the High Priest used to do, how he prepared for this most frightening of occasions, the one day of the year when he would go into the Holy of Holies alone and say aloud the sacred, secret name of God. In the next few centuries, possibly hundreds of Piyyutim – sacred poems -- were written to describe the offering of the two goats by the High Priest. Each was designed to transport us to the time of sacrifices at the Temple, and take us through that experience step by step. Many strove to locate the events in the context of a complete Jewish history, beginning with creation. These piyyutim were written when the Jewish community was struggling to understand if there was any way to continue to connect with God.
“The loss of the Temple” write Michael Swartz and Joseph Yahalom in their anthology of Avodah piyyutim, “meant the loss of the Presence [of God] in the world. With no sacrifices and no physical sanctuary, the annual appearance of the Divine on earth was no longer to be.” Two millennia later, it’s difficult for us to grasp the level of despair that our people were experiencing. Not only had they been cast into exile, but their God had seemingly abandoned them, and there was no apparent way to mend the connection. It is not inapt, I think, to liken the fall of the Temple to the Holocaust, in this respect: after the Shoah, many felt that God was no longer reachable – or did not even exist. So, too, the Jews of the centuries following the destruction of the Temple were trying to find their way back to a God who had been cut off from them.
In Avot deRabbi Natan we read, “It happened once that Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai was coming out of Jerusalem, followed by R. Joshua, and he beheld the Temple in ruins. ‘Woe to us,’ cried R. Joshua, ‘for this house that lies in ruins, the place where atonement was made for the sins of Israel!’ Rabban Yoḥanan said to him, ‘My son, be not grieved, for we have another means of atonement which is as effective, and that is, the practice of lovingkindness – g’milut chassadim, as it is stated, For I desire lovingkindness and not sacrifice’.” Elsewhere this same tractate suggests, “… the study of Torah is even more acceptable to the All-present than burnt-offerings, since if a man studies Torah he knows the will of the All-present, as it is stated, Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find out the will of God.” And the Prophet Hosea proposed that instead of bulls we give “the cows of our lips”, which midrash understands to be prayers. We made these substitutions long ago, and now we accept that prayer, Torah reading, and doing acts of justice and mercy are the best way to get in touch with the Divine. But our service preserves this striking piece of ritual theater in which we try to take ourselves back to how it was when the Temple stood
The Reform Movement has almost completely abandoned the High Priest and the goats. In many Reform synagogues they don’t even read the portion from Leviticus, substituting a section of Deuteronomy or of Genesis instead. The most recent Reform machzor, “Mishkan HaNefesh”, puts the Avodah service in the afternoon, and replaces the traditional poem with a baffling section cobbled together from various random sources which it calls “A Journey of Holiness”. Within this section it embeds a sanitized description of the High Priest’s actions that carefully avoids all mention of knives and blood. The Reconstructionist machzor, “Kol HaNeshema”, keeps the Avodah but removes all mention of blood sacrifice, placing instead an emphasis on a personal confession of sin that is quite anachronistic. The Hillel machzor, “Wings of Awe”, edited by Rabbi Richard Levy, introduces a much shortened English version of Avodah by saying, “Sacrifice…the word almost makes us shudder. Ancient, faceless functionaries offering up something helpless to a G-d who does not need it and cannot want it; taking in vain the life of an innocent animal, ruining good grain that might feed humans.”
Now, some of you may be vegetarians, vegans even. You may genuinely find the idea of killing and eating animals abhorrent. But for those of us who still eat meat, how can we be repelled by these descriptions? Granted, we are accustomed to buy our meat portioned up and wrapped in plastic – very far from the animal it once was. Yet we live in a town with slaughterhouses, we see the cattle trucks on our roads – we surely understand that animal lives have been taken in order for us to eat hamburgers. Sacrifices were a ritual slaughter; the meat was roasted and eaten by the Cohanim and the Levi’im. I would argue that this form of killing was actually far more respectful, and less mindless, than the abattoirs of today.
Even the strictest vegetarians can surely appreciate the experience of reenacting the High Priest’s encounter with the Divine. The rhythm of the piyyutim – which our machzor offers in a compilation from three Avodah sources -- the cinematic cutting back and forth from kahal to Kohen, the vivid imagery, the hypnotic flow of the words, the counting – in all this we are transported to the Temple on Yom Kippur. To remove, as some “modern” machzorim do, the description of the High Priest’s holy tools -- the knife, the coals, the bowl, the spoon -- is to remove all sense of mystery and connection. To remove the description of the korbanot themselves is to force us into a position of distance and distaste. To remove all mention of the demise of the second goat is frankly to disembowel the Avodah service entirely, cutting it loose from our history, lopping it away from the Akedah, and sending us, rather than the goat, merrily off to Azazel.
We read the Akedah last week. At the last minute, angel stayed Abraham’s hand, saving Isaac from being sacrificed and offering a handy ram instead. This week, the story of the first korbanot comes immediately upon the heels of the death of Aaron’s two sons, who short-circuited some Divine process by offering “strange fire” and were themselves incinerated. Our ancestors understood that our lives and animal lives were not so far apart. They did not offer up bulls, goats, and sheep out of a sense that they were cheap. Rather, as Cantor Judith Ovadia (z”l) has written, “The Avodah service, with its blood and awe, forces a confrontation with the fragility of life.” Animal sacrifices were a vivid, dramatic way to express our understanding of how close we are to death, and what little control we have over when it comes. Like all rituals, it was less about what we think God “wants” than about what it takes to make us feel the power of the Divine.
Cantor Ovadia, in an eloquent article proposing the reinstatement of the Avodah in the Reform liturgy, suggested, “To recall and seek understanding of the meaning of this service, once the centerpiece of all Jewish worship, could elevate our experience of Yom Kippur services beyond its current state. […] The liturgy of Yom Kippur adjures us to repent because life and death do hang in the balance. This is true every day; we merely ignore it as long as we are able. On Yom Kippur we confront our mortality, using the terror that it invokes as impetus to take ourselves back in hand and rectify the mistakes we have made, setting us back on the path toward righteousness. Instead of offering the blood of animals we offer the service of our hearts, following the message of Psalm 51: 16, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.”
I do hope you will stay for Musaf today – after all, where else do you need to be, on a day set aside for fasting and praying? We may no longer feel comfortable in offering the lives of animals. We may no longer believe that God requires that of us. We have no Temple in which to offer them, in any case – and it seems unlikely that that Temple will be rebuilt in any foreseeable future. Some of us may even have decided to heed the midrashic reading of Genesis which suggests that we were never meant to eat meat in the first place. But today we emphasize the ritual offerings that were once made as a way of acknowledging the power of the Universe – a power that is not in our hands. In the Unetaneh Tokef we confront death; here, we reenact the way our ancestors sought to confront it.
“True Avodah,” said Cantor Ovadia, “meaning worship or service, is supposed to be difficult. The word comes from the same root as “work,” and “slave.” To yoke oneself to God, to accept God’s commandments, to serve God in faithfulness requires sacrifice. This is a concept that we, as liberal Jews, sometimes find difficult. We fear alienating those among us who are turned away by the notion of personal requirement. Without sacrifice, however, there is little opportunity for redemption.” I hope you will join me for Avodah today, and experience a step toward redemption in the dramatic recreation of this ancient rite.
