After two sons
of Aaron died in the Tabernacle there was an urgent need to purify it from
corpse defilement. That was the initial purpose of the ceremony describe in Leviticus
16. Although we also know it as “the Yom Kippur service of the High Priest,”
the instruction to repeat it annually on the tenth day of the seventh month
comes only at the end of the description.
Every year, for
as long as the Temples stood, the rite was enacted: The High Priest bathed, dressed
in the proper vestments, drew lots for the two goats, sacrificed one and sent
the other “to Azazel” in the wilderness. After a purification sacrifice on
behalf of himself and his family, the priest took incense from the altar and
entered the Holy of Holies.
Everything was
done precisely as prescribed, but even in the midst of a highly-scripted performance,
interesting things can happen. Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha, the High Priest
reported:
Once, I entered the Holy of Holies to
offer incense, and I saw Akatriel Ya, the Lord of Hosts, seated upon a high and
exalted throne.
He said to me: Ishmael, My son, ברכני bless Me.
I said to Him: “May it be Your will
that Your mercy overcome Your anger, may Your mercy prevail over Your [other]
attributes, may You act toward Your children with the attribute of mercy, and may You enter before them beyond the
letter of the law.”
[God] nodded His head.
(Babylonian Talmud,
Berakhot 7a)
Rabbi Ishmael responded to the request for a blessing with a prayer. His
prayer is important, I think, because it expresses awareness that ritual is
insufficient to achieve atonement. God’s mercy is also necessary.
But did Rabbi Ishmael give a blessing?
How can a child
bless a parent? How can person, even a high priest, bless God?
The answer
depends on how we understand the word “bless – ברך
.” That’s a subject for a full-length class, so today I’ll
present only one perspective.
Let us return
to Genesis. During creation, God bless creatures “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Rashi confirms the importance of bounty to the core meaning of “berakhah blessing” when he wrote: “Every berakhah in
scripture is a term of increase.”
Later, when God
and Abram first meet, God promises: “I will bless you; I will make your name
great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you” (Genesis 12:2-3).
In Genesis
Rabba (39:11) Rabbi Berechya (note his name) said: “‘I will bless you’ was already stated.
Why is it necessary to say ‘Be a blessing?’ Rather God said to him, ‘Until now,
I needed to bless my world, but from now on, I will bless those who you bless.” In other
words, God blesses Abram, then gives him, and is descendants, the
responsibility of the sharing the God’s bounty with others.
Indeed, people
can bless other people, and be beneficent with the resources, tangible and
intangible, at their disposal. But how can person bless God?
One possibility
was proposed by Rabbi Ovadia Sforno (Italy, 1475-1550), commenting on
Genesis 12:2: Blessing the Eternal
means making the Eternal happy
with God’s creations, as the Sages taught “Yishmael my
son, bless me…” Sforno,
too, doesn’t really describe a blessing, but rather “translates” blessing as
“giving pleasure.”
The difficulty
in identifying something that people can give God, and opposition to the idea
that God might be in the position of a passive recipient, led many commentators
to contend that “bless – ברך” has multiple
meanings. People can offer nothing to God but praise and thanksgiving.
Rabbi Samson
Raphael Hirsch (Germany, 1808-1888) objected strongly to that position:
If a person man is active in blessing
God, then God must be blessed in a passive sense,
receiving a blessing from a person, one cannot get away from it. And
why should we try to get away from it? At the moment that God made the fulfillment of God’s Will on earth dependent on the free
decision of humans, God said to them, “Bless me!” Promote
my goals, keep My commandments, do My will; bless my work because completion of
it on earth depends on you” (commentary
on Genesis 9:26).[*]
Indeed, there
is a resource that people can provide for God and thereby bless God: The ability
to actively engage this world.
Hirsch’s
younger colleague, Rabbi David Zvi Hoffman, notes that the key verse for
understanding the ways in which people can bless God is, “And now, O Israel,
what does the Eternal your God
demand of you? Only this: to revere the Eternal
your God, to walk only in God’s paths, to love God, and to serve the Eternal your God with all your heart and
soul” (Deuteronomy
10:12). The verse combines inner traits, reverence and love, and action,
“walking in God’s ways.” (Al
Hatefillah)
Walking in
God’s ways according to the Talmud (Sotah 14a), is
exemplified by dressing the naked, visiting the sick and burying the dead. These
are acts that God did for the Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Moses but now leaves
for us. Indeed, we can bless God through
our actions in this world.
Hoffman also
emphasizes: “The blessing expresses not only an ambition but also a commitment
on our part to advance God’s sovereignty on earth” (Al
Hatefillah). According to Hoffman, when we respond to "Barekhu,
Let us bless” we are making a commitment, inter alia, to act with loving kindness in this
world.
In conclusion,
let us return to where we began: atonement.
Only memories remain of the ceremony described in Leviticus. How can we
attain atonement in a world without a Temple? After the destruction of the
Second Temple, Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai comforted his students who bewailed
the loss of atonement, by saying, “Do not be
dismayed. We have another form of atonement that is its equal, deeds of loving kindness, as it is written: For I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6) (Avot D’Rabbi
Natan A, 4:5).
May we merit being a blessing to both God and others.
[*] Note that
he is commenting on Noah, meaning his words could be taken to apply to all of
humanity, not only to Jews.
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