Thoughts on parashat Vayikra 5785.
Moshe was very bothered about the sin he committed, namely, that he didn’t wash his hands and didn’t say a blessing before he ate. So he decided to see his rabbi, to confess the sin hoping that it would make him feel better: “Rabbi, last week I didn’t wash my hands before I ate, I didn’t say the blessing, and I am very upset about it.” – “Well, that’s not the most severe sin in the world”, said the rabbi, “just remember to do it next time and every time before you eat. But, out of pure curiosity, why did you not say the blessing?” asked the rabbi. “Well the food itself wasn’t kosher, so I didn’t think it was appropriate” – “You ate non kosher food? Hmmm… this is much more serious, Moshe. Why would you do such a thing?” – “Well, Rabbi, they didn’t have any kosher food in a non kosher restaurant.” – “You couldn’t find a kosher restaurant to go to?” asks the rabbi incredulously. “Yes, unfortunately,” says Moshe, “I was really trying but all the kosher restaurants were closed on Yom Kippur!”
The Hebrew word for “sin” (chet) literally means “to miss the mark” or “to err”. Judaism emphasizes that sin is a result of our actions and choices, not an inherent flaw in our nature. The focus is on repairing relationships and making amends for wrongdoing; not on an internal struggle to eradicate all desires that may lead to transgression or on attempts to rationalize the status quo with the belief in original sin or eternal damnation. Judaism recognizes different types of sin, including unintentional wrongdoings, iniquities arising from twisted attitudes, and intentional transgressions. What I would like to focus on today are the sins of non-action and negligence.
Judaism acknowledges that failing to act when one has a moral or religious obligation to do so, can be considered a form of sin. This is often framed as “missing the mark” or “missing an opportunity” to act in accordance with God’s will or to help others, which is in line with the definition of the word chet I just presented. From this perspective, failure to fulfill any of the positive commandments would be considered a sin. However, even though being a religious Jew means fulfilling all the commandments of the Torah, not every failure to fulfill a commandment has the same consequences. In this aspect, different commandments have different weight. Forgetting the blessing before a meal does not have the same weight as forgetting about Yom Kippur or not visiting your sick parent in the hospital. In a way I’m touching a taboo here, namely, our rabbis have been very reluctant to put the commandments of the Torah in a hierarchy in terms of their importance. The reason it is a taboo subject may be the fact that Christianity had gone this way and had gone radically (the Church fathers basically rejected almost all the commandments of the Torah, keeping only the Decalogue and a few others). Later, in the 19th century, Reform Judaism did a similar thing, i.e. introduced the idea that every Jew can choose commandments he or she wants to observe which ultimately resulted in a complete abandonment of most of the 613 commandments of the Torah – it’s a slippery slope.
In any case, for us, religious Jews, all the commandments of the Torah are important and equally binding; nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that fulfilling or not fulfilling one, or the other, can have very different consequences.
Regardless of the incurred consequences, the source of failure to fulfill an obligation is usually more or less the same: negligence, carelessness or laziness. Our Sages taught “No person will commit a sin unless a spirit of folly has entered into him.” Sin is therefore an act of ignorance or foolishness. If premeditated, it is an act of willful rebellion or outright stupidity. Either way, it is rooted in heedlessness, in shortsightedness, in failure to think. It usually follows upon a blinding obsession with the here and now, egocentricity or self-righteousness.
How should we respond to our failures in terms of fulfilling our obligations, missing the marks or opportunities? Our parasha helps us to bring the answer to this question, namely, through the analogy with an overlapping case of unintentional sins and the sin offering (korban chatat) that was required to be sacrificed: unintentional sins required both a sacrifice and atonement. Why? Here our commentators give us a variety of answers.
R. Samson Raphael Hirsch and R. David Zvi Hoffman give the most straightforward explanation. Ignorance – whether of the facts or the law – is a form of negligence. We should know the law, especially in the most serious cases. We should also exercise vigilance: we should know what we are doing. That is a fundamental obligation, especially in relation to the most serious areas of conduct. Another commentator, Abarbanel, argues that the sin offering was less a punishment for what had been done, than a solemn warning against sin in the future. The bringing of a sacrifice, involving considerable effort and expense, was a vivid reminder to the individual to be more careful in the future.
And here we come to the most interesting point, I would say, in which we again touch the issue of importance of all the commandments: they are all, again, equally binding and important. What is the rationale for that? Treating “less consequential” matters equally seriously, making up for them and atoning for relatively small failures makes us more careful, more vigilant and this alone often prevents us from really serious and fateful failures. Let’s not be petty, but, at the same time let’s not disregard the “small”, minor commandments and principles: they all have their own, relevant place in the whole system of the Divine law.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Mirski
