Divine Timing
Rule and Exception in Exodus, Leviticus, and Ecclesiastes
The LORD said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come at any time (b’chol et) into the Shrine behind the curtain, in front of the cover that is upon the ark, lest he die; for I appear in the cloud over the cover. (Leviticus 16:2)
Let [the judges] judge them at all times (b’chol et). (Exodus 18:22)
Happy are the guardians of the law who enact righteousness in every moment (b’chol et). (Psalms 106:3)
To everything there is a time and a season (l’chol zman v’et), to everything a longing under heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
The Torah defines the holy of holies as a region that cannot be entered at any time. To enter it at any time other than the appointed, exceptional day of Yom Kippur is to warrant death. Aaron receives this law—and we read of it—“after the death of Aaron’s sons.” The festival of Yom Kippur is the exception that proves the rule. A person shouldn’t come into the holy of holies ever; but one day of the year the prohibition is waived, inverted into a positive command.
Anthropologists call the sacralized enactment of something that is otherwise forbidden a taboo. Other taboos in the Torah include the commandment to refrain from wearing wool and linen together (shatnez). The mitzvah of tzitzit (the wool and linen fringes on a four cornered garment) transmutes something otherwise prohibited into a context-specific mandate; tzitzit are shatnez. Holiness is often marked by the focused practice of something that is otherwise off limits. Those who are privy to the exception are marked as exceptional, high-status. Only one person is the high priest.
Another way to think about the Torah’s linking of Yom Kippur to the death of Aaron’s sons is that it’s telling us that Aaron must die, must be a non-person, to enter the sanctuary where his sons had previously gone. The holy of holies is not for the living. The special power of the high priest is that he can flicker in and out of life; the day after Yom Kippur is a resurrection of the dead.
Another function of the law of Yom Kippur is that it teaches us that life is not about entry into the holy of holies. To be an earthling is to have returned from the holy of holies and/or to anticipate returning there. As I wrote about Dante’s Purgatory, if heaven and hell are ineffable, then they preclude community. Earthly life is the only place where we can say we’ve been to heaven or hell and back. Stories are markers of the mundane. When we’re immersed in the best or the worst, there’s no time or need for narration. To enter the holy of holies, Aaron must not just die, he must forget his story, his ego; he must “drop the narrative.”
Aaron cannot enter the sanctuary “at any time” (b’chol et), but the judges that Moses appoints in parashat Yitro are commanded to stand in judgment all the time (b’chol et). The Torah creates a contrast between the priestly mode and the judgmental mode. Priests atone, ask for divine forgiveness. Judges enact the law to its perfection—but with no mechanism for absolution or mercy. To see the divine face and to be seen by it is to draw out divine mercy, to discover the exception to divine justice. Perhaps this is one reason we cannot live there. It is impractical, but also destabilizing. If forgiveness is banal, it loses its force. But a world without forgiveness would be equally untenable. To find forgiveness for others and be forgiven by them is to enter the holy of holies and return—to be reborn. In the land of usual living, of everyday norms and procedures, there is no rebirth.
The core thesis of the Book of Leviticus, and the core offering made to the priests (and by extension, us, the readers, placed in the position of the “nation of priests and a holy people”) is that God can draw near to us (even if this means that God can also withdraw). The fundamental theological question of the Torah is not “Is there a God, and if so, how many?” but “Is God accessible? Does God move? “
Leviticus grants that God is frequently, but not permanently, unavailable. The rare appearance of God corresponds to the deliverance of forgiveness. Were God not to move, but to rule strictly from afar—the vanishing point at which Deists, atheists, and negative theologians might all embrace—the only thing that would matter would be the laws put in place to ensure divine order, not the messy affirmation of human complexity; that mushy thing we moderns call lived experience. Because God is infrequently apparent, we can live neither with the certainty of divine absence or presence. The world is too miraculous not to be profound, but not so obviously miraculous that we can live every day as if it were Yom Kippur. To live as if each timeplace is a holy of holies is to die in the social sense, to take oneself out of community and communication. There’s a reason many mystics are hermits. There’s a reason many mystics and poets write hermetically.
Wittgenstein argues that there’s no such thing as private language. If there were one, it would be the non-language revealed to the high priest on Yom Kippur in the holy of holies, that which forgives us.
Ecclesiastes transforms the language of b’chol et (“at every time”) into l’chol et (“to each thing, a time”). In so doing, it expands the insight of Leviticus—and articulated by Walter Benjamin—that time is “not homogeneous or empty.” Rather, each time is an appointed time, a time for a specific purpose. Ecclesiastes takes the notion of Yom Kippur being a special day and suggests that we think of each day as special, if special in its own way. Instead of seeing the world through the binary of holy/profane, Ecclesiastes asks us to see multi-dimensionality in the seasons of life—times to embrace, to refrain from embracing, to gather, to cast away stones, etc. We may not be at the holy of holies most times, but we shouldn’t see or judge our lives negatively as if the only thing that matters are the “peak experiences.”
The Torah’s juxtaposition of legal justice with priestly forgiveness, bureaucratic system with divine exception, teaches that there is no single value that can govern our lives, no single virtue from which others derive. One argument advanced by apologists for monotheism is that gods fight, leading to tragedy (see, Aeschylus’s Oresteia). But this argument doesn’t hold, because the God of the Torah is just as conflicted as the Greek gods. The difference is that the conflict is internalized rather than externalized. The Greek hero must choose between one god and another; the Jewish sage must choose between one divine attribute and another. The priest is not a judge. The judge is not a priest. We need both. And we need each to be their best—even as as their roles can and do conflict.
Scientific method is defined by reproducibility, repeatability. The priestly method, the miraculous method, the prayerful method—of which scientists and systems-people are rightly skeptical—is irreproducibility, singularity. The holy of holies is the place where we see something unscientific, something whose results would make any speech about it sound crazy. And from a democratic, egalitarian point of view, the high priest is a target of skepticism for another reason—there’s only one of him. The two skepticisms are linked. Yet we need the singular, the singular person discovering a singular truth in a singular moment. A world in which everything is predictable and routinized would be as dystopian as one in which the charismatic holy man could just go into the holy of holies and pull out whatever verdicts happen to strike his fancy.
A compromise is needed between the iron-law of algorithmic thinking and the caprice and arbitrariness of singular expression. Yom Kippur represents this compromise. Ecclesiastes continues it—by telling us that no single value can have universal, cross-temporal validity.
Law demands constancy. First principles thinking requires ruthless consistency. Wisdom is about knowing the right time for things—a time to seek and a time to rest.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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