Tazri'ah (Leviticus 12:1-13:59): Humanism & Holiness

My sermon, this Shabbat, is dedicated to some thoughts I had in the course of the week about Pope John Paul II. The thoughts were prompted by questions that were asked about him, questions I was asked about last week’s Torah reading, and this week’s as well, and questions that I had to ask myself about what I believe, so that I could provide myself with answers to those questions that I could live with.

This week, I was asked the usual question about the logic and relevance of the many chapters of VaYikra – Leviticus – that treat of laws of impurity. How can the ashes of a red cow make you clean? How can a natural event like childbirth make a woman dirty? Why do we care about these ancient conceptions of hygiene? A variant of those questions goes like this: Okay. Admittedly these often-preposterous rituals may actually have staved off infection and illness before the discovery of microbes, but what possible relevance do they have for us today? What truth is there in all of this ancient magic and superstition? How can we accept a religious tradition that is inconsistent with our modern worldview?

All of these questions, and many others like them, are based upon certain underlying assumptions. They assume, for example, that cleanliness and purity are the same. They assume that something that is clean is pure, and that something that is impure is dirty. They confuse the temporal and the spiritual. They apply the rules of one system to the phenomena of another, and then question the validity of the other when its phenomena refuse to conform to those rules.

These observations are pretty trivial. In the physical world, we understand that the rules for blending colours apply differently to light. If you mix all the colours in your paint box together, you will not get white. We accept that there would seem to be no unified field theory that applies to everything. Different systems appear to operate according to different rules.

But somehow, our understanding breaks down when it comes to society, morality and spiritual truths. When it comes to our humanistic views of justice, our personal assessments of fairness, and our cultural opinions of what is socially acceptable, we allow no deviation. We reject the idea that there may be some moral ideals that do not conform to our sense of what is right, or that there may be truths that are not consistent with our subjective definition of honesty. We cannot accept that a right-thinking person could possibly disagree with our sense of justice, equality, and fairness. We cannot imagine how our religious heritage might present a logically consistent ethical position that rejects one of our current beliefs.

That was made particularly clear this week, when people raised questions and voiced opinions about the late Pope John Paul II that were not at all unlike the questions I was asked about the logic and relevance of Leviticus.

How could the Pope be a political liberal and yet hold conservative views on marriage? How did the Pope’s love for humanity jive with his views on homosexuality, abortion, and the ordination of women? How could Karol Wojtyla be so modern, and John Paul II be so medieval? Perhaps most importantly, how could I use the head of the Catholic Church as a role model and an example of righteousness when I disagreed with him on fundamental issues?

Apparently, we have a problem when the spiritual conflicts with our conception of the temporal. We have a problem when our sense of social justice seems to require one thing, while our religious heritage appears to demand something else. We want everything to operate by the same rules. We want all the systems to agree. But they don’t always agree, and we really can’t expect them to. Let me try to demonstrate.

A person can champion gay rights, and support the right of the gay and lesbian community to hold a conference or a convention anywhere in the world, and yet object to the holding of a Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem, or in any other place. After all, based on the behaviour we have witnessed in the past, the parade is not just people walking down the street with posters and balloons. It is not hypocritical to support equality and freedom, and yet object to what we fear may be a public exhibition of lewd conduct. Political correctness does not transform public indecency into protected speech or an exercise of freedom of expression.

Opposing the parade in Jerusalem or in the Vatican is not a form of gay bashing or of discrimination. It is a legitimate moral stand that does not deny anyone’s God-given equality. The problem is that we tend to confuse the issues, and to characterize them according to who holds what position. If the Orthodox, the Catholics or the Christian Right are against, then we Jewish liberals must be for. But that is not a principled form of consistency. It is simply a different form of discrimination.

A person can view all human beings as God’s children, created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and yet legitimately object to attempts at redefining the concept of marriage. One can be a political liberal, and an advocate of equality for all, and yet maintain that same-sex unions do not reflect the biblical ideal of matrimony, without questioning or doubting that such relationships may truly express a deep, valuable and enduring relationship of love and commitment.

The ideals concerned are not the same, and our assessment of them need not be identical for the sake of consistency. The fact that our fundamental religious belief in the Torah, and our devotion to normative Judaism may lead us to take a position that coincides with the view of politicians we may have voted against, or of religious groups that we disagree with, does not require that we adopt a position that negates Jewish values.

Even if one disagrees with the late Pope’s absolute opposition to termination of pregnancy, it is possible to view the idea of abortion-on-demand as immoral. A person can take a broad or narrow view of the considerations that might justify the termination of a life, and be steadfast in the belief that a foetus is alive, that life is not a relative value, and that a feeding tube is not an extraordinary measure.

These moral questions have been debated by philosophers and theologians at least since Carneades was Scholarch of the Platonic Academy in Athens in the second century B.C.E. They have been resolved in a variety of ways without requiring that we view life as a relative value, and without the need to view a foetus or a person in a vegetative state as a lump of flesh, and without the need to be a Catholic. The fact that my Jewish view of the sanctity of life may coincide to some degree with the Pope’s view makes me neither a hypocrite nor a Catholic.

I can insist upon the moral imperative of equality between the sexes, while accepting the view that a woman cannot be a kohen. I can also understand why a Church that views its priests as representing kohanim would prohibit ordaining women. Yet consistency does not require that I relinquish my support for the ordination of women as rabbis. The issues are different, and in none of them is the question one of equality or women’s rights. Our desire for equality may prompt us to consider the issues, but they must be decided through an assessment of the roles and symbolism of rabbis, priests and kohanim.

Indeed, if the issue of “who is a kohen” were simply one of equality, we should sooner abolish the priesthood than increase the number of people who can call themselves kohanim. Certainly, we do not further the objectives of equality by selectively increasing the size of the privileged minority. But my belief in equal rights does not require that I abandon all legitimate distinctions.

When the Equal Rights Amendment was put to a referendum, I remember an anti-ERA activist trying to convince my grandmother that if the Amendment were adopted, there would be no separate public toilets for women. That’s the kind of thinking that defeated ERA. That’s the other side of the kind of superficial logic that leads us to abandon our moral principles in favour of consistency.

What may seem to be contradictions of the logic of liberalism may also be consistent moral positions that derive from an honest assessment of religious values, and of the message that those values are meant to communicate. They are not wrong or immoral simply because they appear inconsistent with other deeply felt convictions. Deep feelings and persuasive slogans cannot replace a sincere assessment of those values. To allow that is to permit demagoguery to supplant honesty and judgment. As Disraeli once said: “Justice is truth in action.” It is truth that concerns a person of faith. It is the commitment to truth that guided John Paul II. It is truth that must ultimately decide what is just.

What is truth? With all due respect, for the secular humanist, truth is no more than a currently fashionable opinion. For humanistic religion, those opinions are God. The religion of humanism is a relativistic morality that allows us to posit our personal biases as ultimate truths, but that is to mistake fashion for ideals. That may seem a strong way of putting it, but it is an accurate definition, nonetheless. Couching it in fancy terminology, or calling it a categorical imperative will not change it into what it is not. What it is not is what we commonly think of as truth.

What confuses us in understanding John Paul II is that he did not reflect the standards of humanistic religion; he lived by the ideals of religious humanism. Those ideals place us at the center of the universe not because of our absolute worth in our own eyes, but because we are God’s creations, made in God’s image. Our respect for life is an expression of our reverence for God, Torah and tradition. Our love of mankind speaks of our desire to emulate God. That is the humanism of religion. It is not about being the best person we can imagine; it is about striving to be what we believe to be God’s conception of the ideal human being.

That is the humanism that allowed a devout Catholic traditionalist to visit a synagogue and embrace a rabbi as his brother, that is the humanism that allowed the head of the Roman Catholic Church to visit England and pray with an Anglican bishop. That is the humanism that helped bring down communism, and that inspired people around the world to freedom. That is the humanism that allows me to embrace John Paul II as a role model, even if I do not embrace his dogma. The humanism of John Paul II was not born of a modern liberalism that views the individual as an ultimate goal, that sees freedom as an end in itself, or that deems equality to stand higher than any ideal. Indeed, he is reported to have said: “When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.”

The rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women is not a dictate of current fashion. The voice of conscience is not the battle cry of contemporary society’s political correctness. It is the still small voice of truth that you can only hear when you allow yourself to be alone with God. If you listen to that voice, you will understand that John Paul II was neither modern nor medieval, he was not liberal or conservative, not right or left, nor right or wrong. He was true. If you listen to that voice, you will appreciate that Leviticus is not about red cows and disease, and that it is about something beyond cleanliness. It is about holiness. It is about being true. That is all that John Paul II asked. It is all that he was. It is all that any of us can be.

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

In memory of His Holiness Pope John Paul II.