Parshat Vayikra

Daniel W - March 20, 2026

This week we begin Vayikra, the Book of Leviticus. The first parsha, which we also call Vayikra, is entirely made up of descriptions of ritual sacrifice - the killing of a livestock animal (or a bird, or some bread) - the ritual cleansing of the tabernacle with its blood - the burning of its fat and some of its organs as a tribute to G-d. It's one of the bits that doesn't always feel tremendously connected to the modern world, though it's traditionally seen as a practice that we will resume in the Messianic Age. But a number of branches of contemporary Judaism have made their stance on this particular theology very clear - rejecting either the resumption of sacrifices in the Third Temple, or the construction of the Temple entirely.

Of course, TBRS is not a member of any particular branch of contemporary Judaism - nor is there a real urgent need for us to have a position on this. The Temple is not being rebuilt tomorrow.

Or is it? Here's the thing - many theological debates that must have seemed primarily theoretical for centuries have been made newly relevant, even urgent, by the intervention of Zionism. Even this one, because while the first generations of Zionists were resoundingly secular and had no interest in reviving Temple worship, now there's some lunatics in Israel who are actually fundraising for it. They've already recreated the vestments of the high priest and they've even imported red heifers from Texas. I am not making this up. And while I do not think that it is likely that a majority of Orthodox Jews in Israel will back this project tomorrow, nor do I think that they are likely to demolish the Dome of the Rock this week, the level of biblically-inspired Zionist fantasy-making rises every day.

And so, like. What's our position? What's my position? I've been thinking about it! And I think it's important to start by thinking about why the ancient Israelites did this whole ritual sacrifice thing in the first place.

You'll be shocked to learn that there's debate about that, too. For starters, there's a linguistic misconception that one of the sacrifices described in this parsha is a "sin offering," even though it's not really about sin at all - (I wonder if this is yet another example of Christian language sneaking into Jewish texts in translation). Rather, it is about the purification of the Temple after the occurrence of a violation - specifically the inadvertent breaking of a negative mitzvah. "Inadvertent" is the important piece here - Jacob Milgrom, a biblical scholar, considers the real concern here to be "the silent majority's acquiescence." Or, rather, that the whole community is at fault when a member of that community is capable of committing a proscribed act without even realizing that it is wrong.

And this communal failure is thought to introduce impurity into the Temple. Many scholars think of this impurity as almost a physical substance, what Milgrom calls an "aerial miasma that possessed magnetic attraction for the realm of the sacred." A spiritually weak community brings in spiritual sickness, and the blood and fat of an animal is used to spiritually cleanse that airborne moral infection. It is a collective action, carried out by the priests on behalf of an entire community. Milgrom even suggests that this framing is sort of a Picture of Dorian Gray - that the Temple itself takes on the impurities caused by the wicked behavior of the community around it.

This is, of course, fascinating. When someone commits a wrongful act intentionally there is a whole legal apparatus for interpersonal retribution. But when it is done inadvertently, it introduces impurity into the whole community, for perhaps the entire community is at fault. It is collective guilt, if not necessarily collective punishment. And the collective solution is the responsibility of the priests, through the burning of the blood and fat of an animal.

Maimonides, in a position that remains hotly debated, saw this as a means by which G-d intended to wean the ancient Israelites off of idol-worship. And this makes a lot of sense when you look at the archaeological record. The Israelites' neighbors were doing ritual sacrifice in their temples, to their various gods, as well as at altars in their own homes. But they believed that the impurities were demons to be exorcised - and that without their expulsion, the god would leave the temple - the entire framework is polytheistic. The innovation of the Israelites was not the ritual sacrifice itself, but rather the fact that it would take place in a single building, to a single deity - and that its cause was not to defend the deity from demons, but to purge the community of its collective sinfulness. To quote Milgrom again:

"The demons have been expunged from the world, but man has taken their place."

Maimonides, then, also suggested that prayer was a higher form of communion with G-d - but he also was not opposed to resuming sacrifice in the Messianic Age, and his writings sorta contradict themselves between books. So we'll leave him behind and turn back to this question: regardless of how we feel about the killing of a cow as a ritual act, how do we feel about this particular understanding of community guilt? And did we stop conceiving of our community in those terms after we stopped burning offerings?

If prayer, as Maimonides suggests, is a higher form of divine communication, it is also more personal. We do it as a group, of course, with a minimum of ten Jews to get through all of the prayers - in our services that were designed very specifically to take the place of sacrificial offerings. But we often pray silently, we meditate on the words as individuals, we do not (usually) name our sins as we chant. Does the act of prayer change the structure of redemption, as well? Is it simply the spilling of blood that was only appropriate in the ancient world, or have we also abandoned the notion that an entire community must be responsible for the inadvertent violations of its members?

Meanwhile, Judaism has been fragmented and reshaped countless times in the diaspora - in often beautiful ways, each of them reshaping theology and ritual as they grow and change. The Temple in Jerusalem was the core of religious life for but one community of Israelites, who all lived close together, spoke the same language, and occupied the same unitary political entity. None of those things are true anymore, and have not been true since the 1st century CE. There have been, and continue to be, countless ways to live a Jewish life. So would a contemporary sense of collective guilt and purity apply to a single synagogue of Jews? A single denomination, a single neighborhood, a single town? Or would it still apply to all Jews, everywhere?

I do not know! But this, I think, is a more fundamental question to answer in terms of this whole "lunatics building the Third Temple" business. If Zionism has added an urgency to the question of "Temple or not," it has also dramatically reshaped the underlying question of collective guilt. As anti-Zionist Jews living through this moment, as things feel increasingly apocalyptic every day because of the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the fanatical violence of the attacks on Iran and Lebanon, as Israel continues to conduct flagrantly illegal acts of collective punishment on its victims, what do we take from Vayikra and the notion of collective Jewish guilt? Is Zionism a violation that would require ritual cleansing of the Temple - not because its violence is "inadvertent," per se, but because its believers do not consider it a violation of any mitzvot? Is it, therefore, an ideological impurity?

And does that mean that we are obligated, theologically, to do something about it? Does the spiritual contamination of Israel's genocide require a cleansing action by all Jews? Or is that not how it works anymore? Does our turn to prayer since the destruction of the Second Temple also mean that we are no longer all responsible for our collective purity, as a single community of Jews? Or is there no single community of Jews anymore? Is the very concept of collective guilt a doctrine that only really applied in an era of idol worship and fear?

To frame this another way: Which is the more usefully anti-Zionist theological statement? That we, as Jews, are all rendered impure by the violence of Zionism? Or that the very concept of collective Jewish guilt is an anachronism, one that we are happy to have left in the ruins of the Temple, and that the very notion that we are implicated in Israel's violence is a concession to its own rhetorical fantasy that the State of Israel speaks for all Jews?

Honestly, I do not know the answer to this question. But I would love to hear some thoughts!