D’var Torah: Tetsaveh
Torah reading: Exodus 27:20 to 30:10.
Haftarah: Ezekiel 43: 10-27.
When I was a young child -- maybe 7 or 8 years old -- I set out to read the entire (Christian) Bible, from beginning to end. I’m fairly certain I got bogged down, and stopped, in the place where everyone gets bogged down: the labyrinthine and seemingly endless laws of Exodus and Leviticus. Laws about the incense and the altar. Laws about wave offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings. Laws about the exact dimensions of the Tabernacle. Laws about this and laws about that.
It’s easy to argue that the Jewish laws relating to treatment of slaves, forgiveness of debts every 7 years and support for widows and orphans are quite progressive, even (we might say) "modern." But the laws relating to worship are a different story: their emphasis on blood sacrifice and -- perhaps even more so -- on formalistic, ritualized worship, seem inexplicable and even repulsive to most people today. I think most of us can relate (in a limited way) to an angry, vengeful God who demands blood; after all, most of us have felt this all-consuming, unappeasable rage at some point in our own lives. But what are we to make of this petty, niggling, bureaucratic, near-OCD God, who obsesses over the minutiae of lampstands and ordination rituals and priestly garments?
Follow me below the orange cloud of incense smoke for more discussion.
It’s true that even some of the prophets rebelled against this portrayal of God. God, they argued, requires only love and justice, not obsessive attention to the outward forms of worship. In a famous passage, Isaiah rails against empty ritual:
“The multitude of your sacrifices—
what are they to me?” says the Lord.
“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals...
Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
I hate with all my being....
Your hands are full of blood!
Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:11-17, excerpted)
In the same way, Transcendentalist thinkers such as Emerson would later argue that worship of God must be free and without rules, spontaneously flowing from within. Formalized structure opposed from without (as Emerson saw in most Christian churches of his time) is meaningless and empty; inner intuition, emotion and inspiration are everything.
I’ve always been a bit of a rebel at heart, so I can quite naturally sympathize with Isaiah’s and Emerson’s viewpoint. At the same time, though, I recognize that even a rebel needs something to rebel against; that without some sort of structure or order to our lives, we have no basis from which we can make progress.
I was speaking with a friend the other day who works in law, but who has always been drawn to music and writing. Compared to her strictly organized job, the “pure inspiration” and “intuition” she finds in the arts feels like a breath of fresh air to her. She was rather shocked when I told her that I approach my own creative work in the exact opposite way! As a professional pianist, I carefully break a piece into sections and learn each chunk systematically, analyzing it on many levels (harmonic progressions, technical challenges, relevance to the overall narrative of the composition.) Before I began writing the novel I’m currently working on, I crafted an elaborate scene-by-scene outline. Even when writing poetry -- such as the sonnet redouble on Lord of the Rings I posted recently -- or music, I find that a strict structure or a specific challenge (“Write a piece for left hand alone!”) gives me more scope for creativity, not less. My greatest terror in any creative art is to be left alone with a blank piece of paper and a pen and told, “Create something” -- no further instructions.
Stephen McCrainie, at Doodle Alley, has created a brilliant comic called “Hug the Elephant” which sums up the need for some rules and structures in any creative artist’s work. Likewise, recent research has shown that traditional “brainstorming” -- in which participants are told to blurt out any ideas, no matter how random or bizarre, and prohibited from criticizing others’ ideas -- actually reduces the number of useful ideas generated. Rules, structure, and criticism are aids to creativity, not hindrance. As I pointed out to my “inspiration”-driven friend, you can’t think outside the box unless you have a box in the first place!
In the same way, it’s quite likely that most of us -- told to worship God in a purely free-form, original way (without drawing our inspiration from traditional prayers or worship services or rituals) -- would simply feel silly and give up, our minds blank. Or, like the Israelites dancing around the golden calf in Exodus 32, we might seize the opportunity to indulge our immediate desires (for food, sex, or entertainment) in the guise of “worshipping God”. Neither of these options, I think, helps us to gain a deeper connection with the Divine. Ritualized worship may be rigid, stuffy, automatic, and dismissive of individual differences -- but perhaps it’s a necessary stage on the road to a more personal and authentic form of communion with the Divine, which can then use the structures and traditions of the past as a foundation for personal inspiration and spontaneity.
Any thoughts?