An Exercise in Time Travel

AvodahThis week, in our Torah, we read of the High Priest’s service in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem.  On the other side of the summer, when – with heaven’s help – we arrive at our Day of Atonement, we will read these verses again, and our traditional liturgy will give us the opportunity to walk through the Temple-service, as it were, along with the High Priest of old, literarily and spiritually to contemplate each step of the ancient atonement rite.

I say our liturgy will afford us the opportunity to accompany the steps of the ancient Temple service.  However, in actuality the traditional Avodah – the narration, in the High Holiday prayer book, of the High Priest’s service in the Temple on Yom Kippur – is some of the most difficult and to many even impenetrable poetry of the season.

Picking up on the idea of Seder Ha’avodah – the order of the Priestly Service – when I led communal High Holiday services at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for several years, I put together a translated Avodah service, structured in segments to be read in turn, around the room, something like a Passover Seder.  For several years now, our traditional egalitarian High Holiday services at Harvard have also adopted this approach to the Avodah, with traditional segments in Hebrew interspersed amid the segments of the adapted Avodah.

The Avodah really is an exercise in sacred story-telling, an exercise in time travel, transporting us into a moment holy to our ancestors, and somehow bringing the sense of it into the present day. 

The following rendition of the Avodah draws upon and adapts on three textual sources: 1) the almost cinematic description of the High Priest’s service in the Temple from the Mishnah (the earliest document of rabbinic Judaism, compiled near the end of the 2nd Century); 2) the medieval liturgical poem Amitz Koach, written by the tenth-century Italian rabbi Meshulam ben Kalonymus, which forms the Avodah service of many traditional High Holiday prayer books (and Philip Birnbaum’s prose translation of that poem); and 3) quotations from an essay entitled, “To be a Jew, What is it?” by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (as reprinted in the volume, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, edited by Susannah Heschel), rendered in italics below.

As we head toward the summer recess here at Harvard, and as we read about the Avodah in our Torah this week, I hope this present-day liturgical experiment will help translate the mystery of our people's ancient Temple-service into the present – and perhaps it can help remind us of our trajectory, over the summer, toward our High Holidays at the start of the new academic year ahead.

Avodah

(The Service of the High Priest in the Temple)

Who can rival the works of this world?  Lofty spaces soar above cold waters; the earth is suspended in emptiness.  When unfathomable darkness enveloped the world, You brightened it with the light of the first dawn.  You divided space from space, waters from waters, and oceans from dry land.  When You uncovered the face of the earth, it budded and blossomed.  You set the stars in their courses and breathed Your spirit into humankind.

From the first we have sensed Your presence within us and around us.  From the first we have reached out to You, deep within ourselves, and far beyond ourselves; and from the first we have fallen short.

The essence of conscious living is to act according to aspirations, to strive for ends which we set for ourselves.  The great events of the past were not visions of the mind, but impregnations of the will.  Our souls became fertile, waiting to give birth.  To us, therefore, the conception of the past is the source of what is vital in the future

In the wilderness of Sinai, Moses erected a tent of meeting; on Mount Zion, Solomon built a Temple.  The entire cosmos is Your dwelling place.  Our sanctuaries of worship dare to express the prayer that we, Your people, might be Your dwelling-place as well.

Seven days before Yom Kippur, the High Priest was taken from his home to a chamber on the Temple grounds, where he practiced his service for the Day of Atonement.  Another priest was made ready lest anything happen to defile and disqualify the first.

Judaism is a gift of God.  It is not something that we inaugurate, not our attainment, but our inheritance, the accumulated experience of ages.  We live not only on what we have created but also on what our ancestors have received.

Elders were commissioned to read to him the prescribed details for the day.  They would say to him, “Lord High Priest, read by yourself, you may have forgotten, or perhaps you have never learned.”

On the morning preceding Yom Kippur, he was placed in the eastern gate, where some of the beautiful offerings for the day were made to pass before him.

We do not consider the past to be a model of perfection.  We do not indulge in conserving antiquities.  Yet, whenever we are faced with the alternative of betraying the past and accepting the dogmas of intellectual fashion, we should recall that neither an individual person, nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to Truth.

Throughout the seven days he was allowed to eat and drink; but on the day preceding Yom Kippur, toward sunset, he was not permitted to eat much, because food induces sleep.

The elders of the Priesthood adjured him, “Lord High Priest, we adjure you by the name of The One Whose House This Is, change nothing from all that we have instructed you.”

He would turn aside and weep at being suspected, and they would cry as well.

If he was learned, they would discuss Torah with him; if not, the scholars would discuss it before him.  If he was familiar with the reading of the Scriptures, he would read; if not, they would read aloud to him from the books of Job, Ezra, and Chronicles.

If he was falling asleep, the young Priests would snap their middle fingers and say to him, “Lord High Priest, stand up and walk on the cold stone floor, and drive away your sleep.”

We are God’s stake in human history.  We are the dawn and the dusk, the challenge and the test.  We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gate of the kingdom.

Just before daybreak, he would be taken to the place of immersion.  In the course of this day’s service, the High Priest would bathe five times.

Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite we may perceive the infinite.

Standing in the east and facing west, he set his hands upon his own sin-offering, and made his personal confession.  And this is what he said:

"O God, I have transgressed and sinned against You, I and my own household.  By Your Great Name, forgive the sins, iniquities and transgressions, which I and my family have committed in Your sight, as it is written in the Torah of Your servant, Moses: “On this day atonement shall be made for you, to purify you from all your sins, before the Eternal One....”

And when the priests and the people, who were standing in the Temple-court, heard God’s glorious and awesome name clearly expressed by the High Priest in holiness and purity, they would fall on their knees, and bow, and touch their faces to the ground, and say, “Blessed is the name of God’s glorious majesty for ever and ever!”

The High Priest would prolong the intoning of the divine name until the worshipers completed their response, and then he would complete the verse, saying, “You shall be pure.”  And You, O God, in Your goodness, did stir Your mercy and forgive Your faithful priest.

Then the High Priest went to the east side of the Temple-court, where a pair of goats, belonging to the community, stood ready, equal in form and size.  The High Priest drew two golden lots – one offering for God, one scapegoat to carry away the sins of the people.  He tied a crimson thread on the head of the scapegoat and placed the animal in the direction in which it was to be sent away.

We are endowed with the consciousness of being involved in a history that transcends time and its specious glories.  We are taught to feel the knots of life in which the trivial is intertwined with the sublime.

Then the High Priest came to his own offering a second time and made a confession for the entire tribe of priests, including himself among them.   And this is what he said:

"O God, I have transgressed and sinned against You, I and my household, and the children of Aaron, Your holy people.  By Your Great Name, forgive the sins, iniquities and transgressions, which I and my family and the children of Aaron have committed in Your sight, as it is written in the Torah of Your servant, Moses: “On this day atonement shall be made for you, to purify you from all your sins, before the Eternal One....”

And when the priests and the people, who were standing in the Temple-court, heard God’s glorious and awesome name clearly expressed by the High Priest in holiness and purity, they would fall on their knees, and bow, and touch their faces to the ground, and say, “Blessed is the name of God’s glorious majesty for ever and ever!”

The High Priest would prolong the intoning of the divine name until the worshipers completed their response, and then he would complete the verse, saying, “You shall be pure.”  And You, O God, in Your goodness, did stir Your mercy and forgive the tribe of Your priestly servants.

Then the High Priest took the incense and the fire-pan and prepared to enter the Holy of Holies.

There is no end to our experience of the dangerous grandeur, of the divine earnestness of human life.  We know that no hour is the last hour, that the world is more than the world.

Before entering the Holy of Holies, the high priest was addressed by the eldest priest in terms of admonition: “Consider whose presence you are about to enter.  The eyes of all Israel are upon you.  Search your ways and purify them.  Remember that you are about to pass before the Supreme Sovereign, who sits on a throne of justice and destroys all evil.  How can you enter that Presence when malice is still in your own heart?”  The High Priest would reply that he had searched his deeds and his heart.

This is a time of simple alternatives.  Mankind has arrived at the narrowest isthmus in its history, with no possibility of avoiding the dilemma of total peace or total calamity.  As Jews, too, we have to face our existence in terms of sharp alternatives: we either surrender to the might and threat of evil, or we persist in the earnestness of our existence.

The High Priest entered the most holy place with an offering of fragrant incense and the blood of his own sin-offering.  He sprinkled the blood in the holiest place, upon the covering of the ark, once upward, and seven times downward.  And this is how he counted:

One.  One and One.  One and Two.  One and Three.  One and Four. One and Five.  One and Six.  One and Seven.

Then the High Priest sacrificed the goat set aside for the communal offering, and he sprinkled its blood in the holiest place, upon the covering of the ark, once upward, and seven times downward.  And this is how he counted:

One.  One and One.  One and Two.  One and Three.  One and Four. One and Five.  One and Six.  One and Seven.

Why is my belonging to the Jewish people the most sacred relation to me, second only to my relation to God?  Israel is a spiritual order in which the human and the ultimate, the natural and the holy enter a lasting covenant, in which kinship with God is not an aspiration, but a reality of destiny.

Then the High Priest cleansed the gilded altar, using the blood of his own offering and went out to the scapegoat to make the confession of the intentional and unintentional sins of the entire people.  And this is what he said:

"O God, Your people, the house of Israel have transgressed and sinned against You.  Please, by Your Own Name, forgive the sins, iniquities and transgressions, which Your people, the house of Israel, have committed in Your sight, as it is written in the Torah of Your servant, Moses: “On this day atonement shall be made for you, to purify you from all your sins, before the Eternal One...”

And when the priests and the people who were standing in the Temple-court heard God’s glorious and awesome name clearly expressed by the High Priest in holiness and purity, they would fall on their knees, and bow, and touch their faces to the ground and say, “Blessed is the name of God’s glorious majesty for ever and ever!”

The High Priest would prolong the intoning of the divine name until the worshipers completed their response, whereupon he completed the verse, saying, “You shall be pure.” And You, O God, in Your goodness, did stir Your mercy and forgive the community of the upright.

What is at stake in our lives is more than the fate of one generation.  In this moment, we are the living Israel.  The tasks begun by the patriarchs and prophets, and carried out by countless Jews of the past, are now entrusted to us.  No other group has superceded them.  We are the channel of Jewish tradition, those who must hand over the entire past to the generations to come.

After the other sacrifices and immersions, the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies once more to remove the vessels he had used for the offering of incense.  Then he took off the linen garments, bathed a fifth time, put on the golden garments, and he presented the daily afternoon burnt-offering, he burned the incense and lighted the lamps, just as was done on any other day.

But his face was shining, beaming with radiance!

            Like the clearest canopy of the heavens,

            Like lightning flashing among heavenly beings,

            Like the purest blue of the four corner fringes,

            Like the appearance of the rainbow in the clouds,

            Like the splendor in which God first clothed us,

            Like a rose treasured in a garden of delight,

            Like a wreath set on a monarch’s forehead,

            Like grace reflected in a bridegroom’s face,

            Like purity itself in the priestly garments,

            Like one seeing God from the cleft of the rock,

            Like the morning star deep in the sky

Truly, how splendid was the appearance of the High Priest, emerging from the Holy of Holies, in peace and unharmed!

All this, when the Temple stood on its foundations, and the Holy of Holies was intact, and the High Priest stood in service - a whole generation watched, and rejoiced.

Then the people conducted their faithful servant to his home, in the knowledge that the crimson thread of wool had turned to white and their sins were washed away.

The people were now cleansed and purified; their hands clean, they were made guiltless, to declare that The Fountain of Living Waters was the One who cleansed them; the Hope of Israel was the One who purified them, with that sure and never-failing water.  They now felt perfectly pure and wholly renewed, so they sang and gloried and rejoiced in the Creator of the Universe.

Happy the people that is so situated!  Happy the People whose God is the Eternal One!

Israel is a tree, we are the leaves.  It is the clinging to the stem that keeps us alive.  Israel has not erred, even though some of its branches have fallen off.  Its substance can be sustained only within its roots, within the depth and unutterableness of its being.

What was the High Priest's prayer in the Temple on the Day of Atonement?

He would say:

May it be Your will to grant us

A year of abundance,

A year of blessing,

A year of good decreed by You,

A year of bountiful harvest,

A year of assembly in Your sanctuary,

A year of song,

A year of good life,

A year of dew and rain and sun,

A year of sweet fruits in their time,

A year of atonement and forgiveness for all our transgressions,

A year in which our bread and water will be blessed,

A year of rest,

A year of consolation,

A year of abundant joy,

A year of delight,

A year in which the fruit of the womb and the fruits of the earth are blessed,

A  year of blessed travels and homecomings,

A year of redemption for our community,

A year of Your mercy upon us,

A year in which Your people will not need to look to one another with shame for material support, and not to any other nation, Your blessing being in the work of each person's hands,

And for the people in the flood plains of the Sharon valey, he prayed - may their homes not become their graves.

And, on that note, I wish our students here at Harvard a successful season of final exams and papers, mazal tov to those graduating, and, to all, a blessed, safe, and revitalizing summer!