An Oasis, A Garden In Which God Once Walked
from USCJ Torah Sparks
by Rabbi Neil Janes, West London Synagogue and Director of the Lyons Learning Project and CY alumnus
Here we stand with Moses and God, at the edge of the book, at the Tent of Meeting, the Ohel Moed. As we start our reading of Sefer Vayikra (Leviticus), we are about to begin a journey into a religious world that seems strange. At the same time, we are able to recognize that within it there are ideas of profound significance. From my learning, I have come to understand that the powerful connection to ancient ideas and yet, simultaneously, the feeling of estrangement from that world, is actually an important part of our heritage.
Israel Abrahams z’l, successor at Cambridge University to Rabbi Solomon Schechter z’l (after Schechter had left for JTS), delivered a provocative lecture in New York in 1923 entitled, “The Permanent Value of Primitive Ideas.” He wrote:
“Put bluntly, Judaism is the richer and better, and more human, because, while it has long passed out of anything like a primitive stage, primitive stages are still present and active in it. This is the virtue of a historical religion. The traces of history are never obliterated. For instance, we could conceivably formulate a more purely ethical, a more absolutely philosophical monotheism than ours, but it would be a monotheism of the head not of the heart, of theory not of experience…
“I suggest, therefore, that it is well that the backward gaze is not altogether a gaze into the useless and the lost. I suggest that it is well that the backward gaze draws within its ken not entirely a waste, but a waste with here and there an oasis, a garden in which God once walked.”
Of course in Abrahams’ time prevailed a modernist sensibility that gave him the self-assurance that he could indeed identify the primitive and the not-so-primitive. But the recognition of how our lives have changed since, for example, the composition of Leviticus, yet remain cognizant of that oasis, the garden in which God once walked, is still a powerful idea.
Our parasha opens: “And [the Eternal] called to Moses and spoke to him out of the Tent of Meeting (מֵאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד), saying…” (Leviticus 1:1). The Midrash (Sifre Bemidbar 58) asks from where exactly was God speaking with Moses. The exegesis there suggests that Moses entered the Tent of Meeting and the voice (note, not Godself) descended from the heavens and spoke from between the Cherubim:
שהיה משה נכנס ועומד באהל מועד והקול יורד משמי שמים לבין שני הכרובים
These are not just “stage directions” – who stands where. In deceptively simple language the Rabbis are asking the profound question – how do we encounter God. The Midrash evokes the tension between God who is unreachable and God who is intimate and loving. The question of intimacy and revelation of God’s presence hovers over the whole of the book of Leviticus; that sense of intimacy vanished with the destruction of the Temple. The texts and their interpretation became the locus of encounter. Yet, no matter how wonderful our texts, they also point to the inescapable reality of our inadequacy to fully encounter God. We are drawn in and yet estranged. In that moment comes our humility and with it a renewed vitality to be readers and interpreters. I venture to suggest, amidst this experience comes our glimpse of the oasis, which, of course, vanishes soon after it is brought into focus. Until the next encounter.