Surviving Catastrophe
Parashat Aḥarei Mot deals with the service of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement. I want in this essay to look at what happened when this ritual was no longer possible and the High Priest’s service came to an end.
The events of the first century CE precipitated the worst crisis in Jewish history until modern times. The various groups in Jewish life responded differently. Some – the Sadducees and Essenes for example – simply disappeared. Their worldviews could not survive a catastrophe of that order. One response, however, was fateful: that of the sages and rabbinic tradition. In this story, one name stands out as a giant of the rabbinic imagination – R. Akiva, the person who turned tragedy into hope.
So long as the Temple stood, once a year there was a national ceremony of atonement. It took place on the holiest day, Yom Kippur, at the holiest place, the Holy of Holies within the Temple in Jerusalem, and it was performed by the holiest person, the High Priest. It was a rite of intense drama. In an ascending series of declarations, the High Priest atoned, first for himself, then for his family, then for the whole nation. Two animals were brought, one to be offered as a sacrifice, the other, the “scapegoat,” sent into the wilderness to die, symbolically carrying with it the sins of the people.
When the Second Temple was destroyed, this entire constellation was lost. There was now no Sanctuary, no sacrifices, no functioning priesthood. A psalm famously records the crisis felt when the First Temple was destroyed. “By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept as we remembered Zion…. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Ps. 137:1, 4). But the loss of the First Temple was accompanied by hope. The people would return. The Sanctuary would be rebuilt. Jeremiah said so. So did Ezekiel. They were right. Within two generations, the people did return.
By the late Second Temple period there was no longer such optimism. Israel was deeply divided. The Romans were stronger and less vulnerable than the Babylonians. Besides which, there were no prophets – or perhaps there were too many. The first Christians, though they were not yet known by that name, were only one group among several – the Dead Sea sectarians were another – expecting the apocalypse, the “end of history,” and the beginning of a new era in the affairs of mankind.
We get the impression, from many sources from that time, of a widespread sense that a catastrophe was about to occur. It did. It was precipitated by the Great Rebellion against Rome in 66 CE. For seven years the battle raged. It was a hopeless task. The Romans were highly disciplined. They could call on the vast resources of an empire. The Jews had indomitable courage, but they were divided. They lacked a single vision, an effective leadership structure, and national cohesion. As Maimonides was later to write in his Letter to the Sages of Marseilles, they “neglected the arts of martial defence and government.”
The rabbinic sages of Mishnaic times spoke of sinat ḥinam, “baseless [internal] hatred.” The picture that emerges from both rabbinic sources and Josephus is of a fatally fragmented people, at times more intent on fighting one another than the enemy outside. In 70, Jerusalem fell and the Temple was destroyed. In 73, the last outpost of resistance at Masada committed collective suicide rather than hand themselves over to the Romans. It was a terrible defeat.
The crisis was not just military and political. It was also, and ultimately, spiritual. Atonement was a central part of Judaism. How could it be otherwise? The very life of the nation depended on its relationship with God. If an individual cannot avoid occasional failures – sins – how much less can a people as a whole? And if these failures could not be rectified or discharged, what then could lift the burden of accumulated and accumulating sin?
Without the ability to restore its integrity before God, there was no hope. And with the loss of Temple, priesthood, and sacrifices, the institutional base of atonement no longer existed. The service of Yom Kippur as prescribed in this parasha was impossible. How then could the people, individually and collectively, restore their relationship with God? How could they live without an overwhelming sense of guilt? Perhaps we in this guilt-free age find this hard to understand, but then (and even now if we have not yet lost the voice of conscience) it was a crisis without parallel and went to the very roots of life in the conscious presence of God.
It is from that period that a remarkable statement appears in the Mishna:
R. Akiva said: Happy are you, Israel. Who is it before whom you are purified and who purifies you? Your Father in heaven. As it is said: And I will sprinkle clean water upon you and you shall be clean. And it further says: You hope of Israel, the Lord. Just as a fountain purifies the impure, so does the Holy One, Blessed Be He, purify Israel.1Mishna Yoma 8:9.
This statement is one of the most transformative insights in the history of the Jewish people.
First, note the radical midrashic reading of the text. The words mikve Yisrael Hashem mean, “God is the hope of Israel.” However, the root k-v-h has two meanings. One is “hope.” The other is “a collection or gathering,” hence “a gathering of water,” and thus mikve, a ritual bath, a place you go to be purified. R. Akiva uses this double entendre or ambiguity to read the phrase as “God is the ritual bath of Israel,” thus generating a daringly mystical vision. In his reading, God is the ritual bath into which we plunge ourselves in order to be cleansed. Not only does God enter us. We, according to R. Akiva, enter God. We immerse ourselves in Him and emerge pure, our sins dissolved.
Second and more significantly, R. Akiva had turned one of the most tragic events in the history of Israel into a stunning disclosure of new spiritual possibility. According to him, when the Temple stood, the people of Israel atoned vicariously, through the service of the High Priest, who acted as representative of the people, the intermediary between them and God. Now that there was no Temple and no High Priest, no intermediary was necessary. God and the people were linked directly. Heaven had suddenly come closer. By atoning on Yom Kippur, every Jew became a High Priest. Every place where Jews gathered to pray became a Temple. Prayer took the place of sacrifice. Confession and remorse took the place of the scapegoat. Instead of being connected to God through the words and deeds of the High Priest, each individual Jew now stood directly in the Divine Presence. Atonement was democratised, and hope was saved.
Here, in dry legal prose, is how Maimonides puts it:
At the present time, when the Temple no longer exists and we have no altar for atonement, nothing is left but repentance. Repentance atones for all transgressions. Even if a person was wicked all the days of his life, and repented at the end, nothing of his wickedness is recalled to him, as it is said, “As for the wickedness of the wicked, he shall not stumble thereby in the day that he turns from his wickedness.” The Day of Atonement itself atones for the penitent, as it is said, “For on this day shall atonement be made for you.”2Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 1:3.
It is sometimes hard to understand in retrospect a revolution of thought. For us, centuries or millennia later, it has become part of our common sense, taken-for-granted interpretation of reality. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, or that it stands at the centre of the universe, and that the sun revolves around it. Yet there was a time when people believed these things, and the suggestion that truth might be otherwise was radical and disturbing. Hence the battle between the Vatican and Galileo. The revolution implicit in R. Akiva’s idea was no less dramatic, despite the fact that it did not generate controversy.
To understand what he was doing, we have first to realise that during the biblical era there were two quite different understandings of how people might find their way back to God after they had sinned. One, set out in great detail in the book of Vayikra, was essentially priestly. It involved sacrifices and a ritual. It took place in the Temple, at specified times and according to a precisely structured set of procedures. It used key terms like confession, atonement, and purification.
The other was prophetic and it used the verb “to return.” We hear this many times in the prophetic literature:
Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall. Take words with you and return to the Lord. Say to Him: Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer our lips instead of sacrifices of bulls. (Hos. 14:1–2)
Therefore this is what the Lord says: if you repent, I will restore you, that you may serve Me. (Jer. 15:19)
I have swept away your offences like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you. (Is. 44:22)
“Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked?” declares the Sovereign Lord. “Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” (Ezek. 18:23)
Prophetic repentance was not about ritual and sacrifice. It was about the change of heart – “return” – that changes lives. It involves remorse and the recognition that we have lost our way. It is spontaneous and internal. It represents a profound transformation in the lives of individuals and the nation that only emerges from a sense of crisis. It is central to the drama of covenant as it plays itself out in the course of history. It involves the recognition that bad things happen to us because we have done bad things. We will only recover our poise, our stability, if we return to the path from which we have drifted: the path of decency and righteousness, caring for others and for God.
The rabbinic concept of teshuva was an almost miraculous coming together of priestly and prophetic traditions. Like the ritual of the High Priest, it had its specific time, the Day of Atonement. It had prescribed words, a liturgy of confession. However, as for the prophets, atonement was less a matter of external deeds than internal rededication: a psychological process of remorse, repentance, and the determination to change. The emergence of a concept of teshuva that combined both priestly and prophetic elements was like the discovery that light is both a series of particles and a set of waves.
In a real sense, of course, this convergence of the two traditions was implicit at the outset. As the sages say, “Whatever new interpretation an experienced disciple will offer in the future was already given to Moses at Sinai.”3Y. Pe’ah 2:4.
Nonetheless, it took the most profound historical crisis to bring it to the surface. It is not too much to say that the concept of teshuva – atonement without sacrifice or High Priest – saved the Jewish people after the destruction of the Second Temple. It did more than save it. It invested ultimate spiritual dignity in the individual as such. No longer did he need someone else to atone on his behalf. At the very moment that redemption seemed distant, God had become very close.
We know several things about R. Akiva. He was known by his saying that “Whatever the Almighty does, He does for the good.”4Berakhot 60b.
In a famous Talmudic scene, we see him comforting his contemporaries as they look down from Mount Scopus and see the Temple in ruins, a fox walking where once the Holy of Holies stood.5Makkot 24b.
He was not an optimist; he was a man of hope. This is not a simple achievement. It needs a combination of faith, imagination, and trust. It means what in contemporary psychology is called the ability to reframe. However deep the distress, there is a path from here to hope, but it sometimes takes a giant of the spirit to discern it. That is what R. Akiva did and was. He was the man who saw through the veil of despair and witnessed beneath it a momentous possibility, that instead of a hierarchy of priests and people, Jews could become, in the words spoken by God immediately prior to the revelation at Mount Sinai, a “kingdom of priests,” every one of whose members was holy.
Atonement was now not a sacrificial rite, but a turning – a returning – of the soul to God. This was always implicit in Judaism, but it took R. Akiva to see it and make it explicit. This is what he discovered: that all it takes for God to return to us is for us to return to God.