Beyond the Functional

Why Levites Matter More Than We Think

Be sure not to neglect the [family of the] Levite as long as you live in your land. (Deuteronomy 12:19)

But do not neglect the [family of the] Levite in your community, for he has no hereditary portion as you have. (Deuteronomy 14:27)

The Levites are, so to speak, the living nerves and vessels emanating from the center of the sanctuary, conveying the spiritual connection of the members with the brain and heart of the people. They are the representatives of the law’s sanctuary within the people. Among a population devoted to agriculture, livestock, and the associated industry, such unproductive Levite members can easily fall into the burden of municipalities’ misrecognition and disdain, and their vital significance for the overall spiritual, moral, and national welfare can be underestimated. Hence, the repeated warning against neglecting the Levite, “all your days on your land”: the duration of your stay on your own soil is fundamentally conditioned by the appreciation of the Levite and the influence you allow him on your spiritual and moral development. — Samson Raphael Hirsch

The Levites are likened to the needy and socially vulnerable by virtue of the fact that they own no land and have no land allotment or inheritance. The land exists to be settled, but the Levites remain unsettled and unsettling. Nonetheless, the key to the people’s longevity in the land depends on its treatment of those for whom the land is unstable: the Levite, the widow, the orphan, the poor.

The treatment of Levites may seem to be an issue of social justice. Like strangers, widows, and orphans, the Levites are outsiders who need aid and recognition. But their estranged position goes deeper than any Pew report can measure. Theirs is the loneliness not simply of leadership or of piety but of Diaspora. It is all the most striking that the Levites are revealed to have no fixed abode right at the moment that everyone else finally settles down. In the desert, the Levites thrive as porters of divine objects and singers of worshipful, nomadic tunes. But in the Promised Land, the Levites—the ones who accompany—are put in the uncomfortable position of doubting the value of their role.

Samson Raphael Hirsch suggests we think of the Levites as connective tissue. Clearly, that’s a necessary function, but it doesn’t have the seem obvious value as an organ or a muscle. Connectivity is postmodern, more a function of vector than fixed position. The Levites are shape-shifters, or in more contemporary terms, generalists. Their inclusion in the list of socially marginal, along with the poor, refers not to their social status nor even to their material neediness, but to their inability to say what exactly they do. Sure, they serve in the sanctuary, but doing what, again? In an agricultural society, the Levites may be seen as a “nice to have” rather than a “must have.” The Levites are the Jews of the Jewish people. And the treatment of the Levites is a karmic sign: “Will you treat them the way you yourselves will be treated when you are a minority, adrift, amongst host nations?”

The treatment of the Levites (scholars, civil servants, saints, artists) decides whether a society is narrowly utilitarian, focused on obvious economic metrics like top-line growth, productivity, margins, etc. or whether it understands the intangible and long-term importance of “culture.” Of course, society would not function well if everyone claimed the special protection of the Levite, but a world in which everyone was a manual laborer would be impoverished. Consider the civilizations of Athens and Sparta, both of which fell, as two horns of the dilemma: In Sparta, all energy went into militarism and survival. In Athens, technology unlocked leverage and leisure, which allowed for the proliferation of the arts. Sparta’s militarism proved uninspiring and unsustainable in the long-run, while Athens’ sense of prosperity and security ironically weakened its strategic position, leading to complacency and vulnerability. How can you combine the tough realism of Sparta and the tenderness of Athens? Perhaps, by combining the best of both and creating a special group of Athenians in a society of Spartans. In that case, the goal would be to foster mutual respect and interdependence between the utilitarians and the culturalists, or between workers and what Nietzsche calls “last men.”

I see a continuity between the Torah’s instruction to care for the Levites and the Jewish value of Torah lishma, Torah study for its own sake. The question of how much funding should support Torah lishma is political. But the principle that some amount of study should be celebrated for its own sake is fundamental. It is not formally different than the bourgeois 19th century debate about art for art’s sake.

What is the use of useless or apparently useless endeavors like study and contemplation and art and flaneurship and curiosity? How do we weight it against competing calls for moral consciousness from effective altruists who can tell us how many fractional shares of heaven we can buy for the price of a single espresso.

“Look, before you is a blessing and a curse,” opens Re’eh. What if the blessing is not simply the quid pro quo that comes from obedience, but the self-confirming phenomenology, the self-proving being-in-the-world, that emerges when we choose to enlarge our value scope beyond the functional and the effective? Are the Levites valued for their output or are they valued simply on the basic intuition that a land filled with farmers would be too boring, too mundane. The word “Re’eh” suggests that some moral truths are self-evident. The stranger, widow, orphan, and Levite—the displaced one—don’t require an Expected Value framework to warrant our care and responsibility. Rather, they reveal to us our own displaced nature and the impossibility of resolving it with anything other than accompaniment.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh