Torah Readers Reflections

This week's parasha is named “Shemini” meaning eight, or in the context of the first verse of the parasha, the eight day. There is special significance to the with day, however in order to understand it we have to take a look back at the beginning of the book of Genesis and the creation.

Mankind was created on the sixth day and then came the seventh day, which was the Shabbat - the holy day, the day of rest. God rested after his creation and showed that there are boundaries to creation, it wasn’t something that he continued beyond the sixth day.

What about the eighth day? The day after the shabbat, what happened on the eighth day?

On the sixth day, God created man in his own image, he created a being that, much like himself, had the power to create. The key difference is that man could only create from what already existed whereas God could create something from nothing. 

The ability to create goes hand in hand with the ability to destroy. Whatever man creates can be used for good or used for evil. Every new technology that we invent, whether it was originally designed for good or for evil can be applied to the other. Take for instance war time developments of weapon technology that was later repurposed for the good of humanity. Social media is another good example; it was originally created to make connections between people easier, to share news and photos with family and friends. Quickly it became a weapon used to spread violence and hate. What was created for good, is now used for evil. Thus it is for every innovation.

God already prefaced the creation of man with some caution saying, “Let us Make…” as if to say, there is implicit risk in creating a being that can speak, think, have free will and create. Immediately we see that man breaks the rules set forth in paradise and eats from the tree of life. What he ate is irrelevant, what is relevant is that he broke the rules, the boundaries that God put on creation. Creation has boundaries and by breaking the rule, man put nature - the world we find and culture; the world we make into conflict. The result was expulsion from paradise. 

It is said that before leaving the garden of Eden, following the sabbath, God taught Adam how to make fire, light, by rubbing two stones together. For this reason we light the havdalah candle at the end of the sabbath, to inaugurate a new week.

There is a fundamental difference between the light of the first day and the light of the eighth day. God created the light of the first day, but he partnered with man to create the light of the eighth day. It was a light that God taught us how to make and it symbolizes our partnership with God in his work of creation. On Shabbat we remember God’s creation and on the eighth day we celebrate our creativity as the image of and partner of God.

We believe that God wants human beings to exercise power: responsibly, creatively and within limits set by the integrity of nature. The creative God empowers us to be creative and begins to teach us how to do that. He wants us to be guardians of the world that he entrusted to our care. That is the significance of the eighth day: It is the human counterpart of the first day of creation.

With this background we can now understand the significance of the eighth day in relation to the tabernacle. There are linguistic parallels in the Torah between the construction of the Tabernacle and the divine creation of the world. The Tabernacle was intended to be a miniature universe constructed by Humans. Just as God made the earth as a home for mankind, so the Israelites built the Tabernacle as a symbolic home for God - it was their act of creation.

If the first day represents divine creation, the eighth day signifies human creation under God’s tutelage - the Tabernacle could not be dedicated on any other day than the eighth day - it was man's creation with God’s instructions.

The other major theme of this week's parasha is the dietary laws. It is no coincidence that they appear immediately following the dedication of the Tabernacle and the episode of the death of Aaron’s sons for offering “strange fire” in the Tabernacle.

Many commentators over the generations have tried to make some sense of the reasoning behind the dietary laws but to no avail. There is seemingly no logic to the laws; why one animal is unholy and another holy, how one is ok to touch after it dies and another is not. Some tried to give explanations of health reasons, for instance, eating partially cooked pork can cause Trichinella spiralis, a roundworm which causes an infection called trichinosis, also known as trichinellosis. However, if the Torah was more concerned with the health effects of eating certain foods, it would have called out in great detail the cooking instructions for these meats. Some have said that Pigs were used in pagen sacrifices and are therefore banned, however others have countered that pigs were not considered appropriate even for pagen sacrifices. In summary, we don’t know why the dietary laws are commanded as they are, however their order in this week's portion, following the dedication of the Tabernacle, gives us a very good clue.

Maybe the most simplistic explanation of these laws is given by the Torah itself:

For I am the Lord your God: you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not make yourselves impure through any swarming thing that moves upon the earth.

For I  am the Lord the One who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy.

These are the instructions concerning animals, birds, all living creatures that move in water, and all creatures that swarm on earth,

for distinguishing between the impure and the pure, between the living things that may be eaten and the living things that may not be eaten.(Lev. 11:44-47)

Then later in Leviticus 20:24-26:

I am the Lord your God who has set you apart from other peoples.

So you shall set apart the pure beast from the impure, the impure bird from the pure. You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves through beast or bird or anything with which the ground is alive, which I have set apart for you to treat as impure.

You shall be holy to Me, for I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from other peoples to be Mine. 

The keywords are “holy” and “to distinguish”.

To be holy is to make distinctions, to recognise and honor the divine order of creation.

After the flood God permitted humanity to eat from all the meat with the exception of blood. It was a concession to humanity's urge to kill. It is better they kill for food rather than kill each other, was the logic. However the people of Israel were to serve as role models of a higher ideal. They were permitted to kill animals for food, but only those that best exemplified divine order. Amphibians were forbidden since they lacked a defined place, sea creatures had to be defined by fins and scales, animals had to be clearly defined by cloven hoofs, and birds of prey were forbidden for they are carnivorous.

Human beings become holy when they become distinction-making animals, when they recognise and act so as to honor the boundaries of nature.

We can now see the amazing connection between all these themes:

1. The creation of the universe

2. The building of the sanctuary

3. The dietary laws

4. The Havdalah ceremony with its fire at the end of the sabbath

5. The number eight

The universe is a place of ordered harmony, the intelligible design of a single creator. That harmony is constantly threatened by mankind. In the covenant with Noah, God established a minimum threshold for human civilization. In the covenant with Israel, He establishes a higher code of holiness. The principle of holiness, as of creation itself, is the maintenance of boundaries, within which every form of life receives its due.

The sanctuary with its partitions represents boundary making in space. The dietary laws, with their divisions of permitted and forbidden, represent boundary making in life. The priest - the person who most exemplifies holiness - is the maintainer and defender of boundaries. His mission; to make distinctions between holy and profane, between unclean and clean.

In the Havdalah ceremony we mark the boundary between sacred and secular time, as Shabbat ends, the eighth day begins. That is when we start working and become, once again, God’s partners in creation. Like Him, we begin by creating light and proceed by making distinctions between sacred and profane, between light and darkness. The eighth day therefore is this great moment that God entrusts His creative work to the people He has taken as his partners. So it was with the Tabernacle and so it is with us.

To be holy is to be the guardian of order, a task delegated to us by God. It is both an intellectual and ethical challenge: intellectually to be able to recognise the boundaries and limits of nature; ethically, to have the humility to preserve and conserve this world for the sake of generations yet to come.

This essay is based upon an essay by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks that appear in his book Covenant and Conversation - Leviticus, pg.135