by Rabbi Neil Gillman
professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and author of The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought and The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism.

Number our Days is the title of a book-length study of an aging Jewish community in California, written by Dr. Barbara Myerhoff, an anthropologist who tragically is no longer among us. The book is a scholarly work but because of its subject matter and the author’s sensibility, it is also an extraordinarily moving portrait of the day-to-day life of this community of Jews in a senior citizens’ center.

When I first opened the book some years ago, my attention was caught by a chapter titled “We don’t wrap herring in a printed page.” As the chapter progresses, it takes up the development of a “graduation-siyum” to mark the conclusion of a five-month course of study in Yiddish history. This graduation-siyum was to be an original ritual, combining the characteristics of an American graduation ceremony and the traditional Jewish siyum (literally, “closing”) that celebrates the conclusion of the study of a talmudic tractate.

Myerhoff introduces her description of how this original ritual came to be by writing as an anthropologist about the power of ritual in general. “Because they are dramatic in form,” she writes, “rituals persuade us by our own senses, appealing to us through color, smell, music, dance, food, rhythm, lulling our critical faculties. We perform in rituals, and doing becomes believing.”

I returned to this chapter this week because of the confluence of the upcoming Pesach festival and this Shabbat’s Torah reading, the opening chapters of the book Vayikra. Both the festival and the Torah reading deal with ritual and the rich pageantry involved in preparing our homes for Pesach and of the Pesach seder on one hand, and the sacrificial rituals of the desert sanctuary on the other. The first is familiar; the second seems very remote. We eagerly anticipate our annual reenactment of the seder, but we relegate sacrifices to ancient history and show minimal interest in reviving them.

But this year’s confluence of the two pageants — for such they both are — gives us an opportunity to understand and maybe even identify with what the sacrificial rituals might have meant to the biblical community and, therefore, to not dismiss them so quickly.

Recall Dr. Myerhoff’s characterization of ritual: the appeal to our senses, to “color, smell, music, dance, food, rhythm,” to the way rituals lull our critical faculties, to their quality as performances, to the way they help us believe by doing. All of this is perfectly familiar to us from the seder: the colors of the seder plate, the taste of the bitter herbs and the haroset, the choreography of dipping our finger in the wine recalling the 10 plagues, and the music of the popular songs at the end of the Haggada. The seder is a highly sensual experience.

These rituals also succeed quite well in dulling at least my personal critical faculties, because whatever I believe about the lack of a firm historical background for the exodus from Egypt, none of this is relevant when I sit down to the seder. The pageant is all. By doing, I believe.

But if I engage in time-travel and return to the early history of our people by reading closely the chapters in Vayikra that describe the pageant that took place in the sanctuary, all of these features were present then as well: the architecture of the sanctuary, the colors of the priestly robes of office, the choreography of the service of worship, the music of the Levites singing, the tastes and the smells of the offerings.

And underlying all of it is the theological message that is identical in both pageants: God has entered into a relationship with us by redeeming us from slavery. In response, we reenact that liberation each year, we pledge to become a holy people, to worship God, to acknowledge God’s oneness and to obey God’s commandments. When we do all of this on Pesach, our ancestors’ history becomes our history, and in Vayikra, God pledges to dwell among us. By doing, we believe, in both cases.

When we read this week’s Torah portion, then, we should try to anticipate our feelings at the Pesach seder. That may help bring Vayikra alive for us again.

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