The City of Refuge

What does it mean that one ought to remain in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest? The high priest is the intermediary between the people and God. His existence affirms the connection between the High Judge and humanity. According to Philo, Special Laws III.XXIV, the high priest is the common kinsman to all members of the people Israel, ensuring justice even for those who do not have relatives to avenge their deaths.

At least two possibilities open up from these preliminary reflections.

1) The death of the high priest, that is, the death of a relative common to all parties, represents the death of a shared basis for justice. As such, the manslaughterer must be released so as not to fall victim to the arbitrariness, indefiniteness and partiality of the law, which comes into effect when human authority is thrown into question. (What happens to justice between the death of one high priest and the succession of another?) What relation can the new high priest possibly have to events which preceded his rise to power, to justice carried out under the domain of a potential rival?

2) The death of the high priest, although he will be replaced by another, represents a temporary death of God himself—in Martin Buber’s terms, an eclipse of God. In the previous interpretation, the death of the high priest represents a breach in the possibility of unanimous consent. The implicit view of justice expressed is positivist. In this interpretation, however, the death of the high priest signifies a more radical problem. We are not concerned with the practicalities of justice, but with its very essence. Without God, there can be no justice at all. Even assuming unanimous consent on the part of humans to appoint a priest/judge in their lives, without the Judge who sees all, any form of arbitration will be, to some degree, arbitrary. If, according to Buber, the Holocaust is an example of a time in which God’s face became totally hidden from the world, it is no coincidence that in Nazi Germany at large as well as in the concentration camps justice became impossible.

The high priest protects and condemns the guilty, but with his death, either as the death of a shared reference point or as the death of an absolute standard (ayn sof has no standards), the city of refuge becomes temporarily meaningless.

The life-term of the high priest, like the life-term of the Supreme Court Justice, aims at creating the space for “impartial” and fair justice system. But in the case of the high priest, this is especially so. For we know that the task of the high priest was quite dangerous and that every year on the Day of Atonement the high priest, if corrupt or unlearned, would die. In other words, in times of political and ethical turmoil, when the average life-term of the high priest was a single year, the life-sentences to the city of refuge were also quite short. For how could justice exist in a world in which the judges were themselves unjust? This, the Torah knew.

Exodus

At dawn the king awoke, but he had forgotten that he was the king. In fact, he had forgotten everything. He looked around and felt disoriented by the gold and jewels adorning his abode. He bolted frantically out of his palace, through the many gates of the royal city, until finally he arrived at the sea. The king had never seen water before and did not know what to do. When he saw the royal search party, he grew afraid, not knowing why they were after him and why they were calling him, ‘Your Majesty.’ Stepping into the sea, it parted miraculously. (The miracle was not that the sea opened up, but that it did so the very moment the king stood desperately before it). The search party followed.

The king has made it to the other side, but we remain in the split sea, unsure if we’ll be swallowed by its stark indifference or guided by its animate concern. Some hope, others believe. Many drown themselves. A few tell stories.

History: Modern Sorcery

The following ideas come from my extended understanding of Levinas' essay, "Desacralization and Disenchantment" in Nine Talmudic Readings:

According to the Torah, one becomes impure through contact with the dead. But, because there no longer exists a temple, the whole world is impure.

Surely the prohibition against encountering the dead does not forbid us from remembering the dead. No, rather, we are disallowed from communing with the dead, from necromancy. We cannot ask the dead for advice. We cannot be weighed down, mortified, by the past. We cannot be historians.

And yet...we are. In exile, in modernity, in catastrophe, nobody is exempt, not even the high priest, from making contact with the dead, even if indirectly. To live in exile is to live in temporality, to dwell in the shadow of death.

Only in a redeemed world will we cease from our sorcerous engagement with the past. We won't have to worry about the dead, because the dead will be resurrected.

The return from death into life is the return from history into now. In redemption, all "not yets" and "no longers" are subsumed by an eternal yes.

Still, just as we are commanded to care for the dead, so we are commanded to remember that we were slaves in Egypt. The reminder of our limitations through both mitzvot, bears more meaning than redemption itself. Because, in redemption, we know God. But in history, we love God. The sages tell us that carrying out a divine commandment in this fallen world is sweeter than living care-free in heaven.

Holy, Holy, Holy!

God sits on his throne in heaven, wearing purple robes and a crown so heavy as to weigh him down and make it impossible for him to move. So divine is his kingly outfit, an outfit which surely only he could don without collapsing under its great weight, that he is entrapped. From his throne, he can see only the shadows of the earth below, but not the events from whose womb they emanate. God’s rule stretches only as far as he is able to see, but seeing not much farther out of his heavenly window than we see out of our windows, God has become severely limited by his divinity. God could throw off his heavenly robes and remove his crown in order to see all and rule, once again, but doing so would immediately deprive him of the very Godliness which gives life to the possibility of seeing and ruling. For God could once again be free, but only at a price: he would cease to be.

A Yom Kippur Joke

I heard the following joke from a friend and professor of comparative literature, Nauman Naqvi, who heard it from a friend, Gil Anidjar, who was a student of Derrida's. It goes as follows:

On Yom Kippur Eve the Rabbi of the congregation went up before the ark, bowed low, and said in a whisper, "I am nothing before you, O God." Whereupon he wept and returned to his place on the bimah. Then, the chazan went up to take his turn before the presence of the Holy One. He too, bowed low and uttered the words, "I am nothing before you, O God." And he too, wept and returned to his place on the Bimah. Then, the lowliest member of the congregation, who made his living as synagogue janitor, went up to ark to bow low. But as he did, saying, "I am nothing before you, O God," the Rabbi turned the chazan and gave him a little nudge, saying, "Look who feels like nothing tonight."

The Still Small Voice

The still small voice, the chilling echo that can only be heard in the subsiding (tzimtzum) of voice, is the locus in which we come to realize that the nothing is not nothing. The still small voice is the voice of conscience in us, as well as in the divine. And it is also the voice of history, which can be heard whining beneath the piles of destruction. The still small voice is the sound of the nothing nothinging. It is the disturbing sound of the silence which hopes to be left undisturbed. Traditionally, people have attributed the power to tear down walls and to awaken souls to the blast of the shofar. But really, the alarm clock of the universe, the idol-smashing instrument of the divine is not the ram’s horn, an arbitrary and only figurative ritual object, but the still small voice that hovers in the suspension of the tekiah gedolah. The still small voice is the only voice of God. Everything that was uttered at Sinai was only preliminary, symbolic, like the ram’s horn. The real reason God spoke at Sinai was so that people could hear the reverberation of His voice when he ceased speaking.

Couplets of Our Time

If one who seeks nothing will find nothing,
One who finds nothing will yet seek something.

--Indian Proverb

Hear O God, your servant, your self, is one!
(Praised be his name for all its finitude).

--Israelite Call to Worship

Where the cicadas sing in midday heat,
We discuss their reverberating song.

--Inscription on Plato’s tomb

The Great Wall divides paradise from us,
Though the angels wander to glimpse our side.

--Oracle Bone IX.22

The Nile’s defiant flow maintains us,
Our defiant flow, now dead, retains it.

--Book of The Dead (apocryphal)

Bacchus, impostor God, thus posturing,
You reveal the truth of their costuming.

--Motto of the Cult of Dionysus

I made a pilgrimage to poetry,
But hindered on my way, wrote this today.

--Chaucer’s Tale

Do I dare to lift my eyes from the well?
Hold my hands then while I look heavenward.

--The prayer of Baudelaire’s twin