VAYIKRA

Neil Naft, March 15, 2002

When I first read this parsha, I said to myself, "Wow, animal sacrifice! How relevant! How lucky! After all, how often do you get to talk about entrails?

Well, there's more to the Parsha than entrails; and more than liver and kidneys and blood. There are two important issues in Vayikra that I would like to touch on this morning - humility and responsibility. They were important to our people in the past and they are equally important and relevant today.

The issue of humility is raised with the very first word of the text - vayyikra. If you were following closely, you may have noticed that the last letter of the word, an aleph, is written smaller than usual. Although some may argue the practical reason for this, as is pointed out in the Hertz Chumash, that in the original text all words ran into each other. There was no spacing between words and where the last letter of one word was the same as the first of the next, the duplicate was often omitted. In later times, when Torah scrolls were copied as they now are, with spaces between words, the previously omitted letters were inserted and were written smaller to indicate that they were not in the original.

That is one way of looking at the text. But as is generally the case in Judaism, there are other interpretations. Rabbinic tradition places supreme significance on the letters of the Torah as instruments of divine creativity. The letters of the Torah are likened to the subatomic particles of our very being. Thus, according to one talmudic legend, Rabbi Ishmael warned a particular scribe that he had to be very careful with respect to his professional activity since his work was the labor of God (mele'khet shamayim), and if he added or subtracted even one letter from the Torah, he could destroy the entire world (Babylonian Talmud, 'Eruvin 13a; Sotah 20a). And so, the nature of the small aleph has been discussed by many of our sages.

First we have to wonder not only why the aleph is small but also why the aleph is there at all. : Vayikra means, "He called". Without the aleph, the word would read 'vayikar' - He met in a casual way. This latter word comes from 'mikreh', meaning casually, by chance. This is the word used when G-d met Bilaam (Num. 23:16). This implies that while G-d had a reason to speak to Bilaam, it was done out of necessity, not out of love. The Baal Haturim suggests that Moses wished to describe G-d's call to him with the same less complimentary term that was used for Bilaam. G-d, however, instructed him to include the aleph as an expression of Hashem's love for him. As Moses was too humble to do so with a full heart, a small aleph was used.

The importance of humility is described in the Zohar, the classical work of medieval kabbalah: "Praiseworthy is the man who belittles himself in this world. How great and exalted he should be in that world…. Whoever is small will be great; whoever is great will be small" (1:122b). The Ba'al Shem Tov's grandson, Moses Hayyim Ephraim Sudlikov, in Degel Mahaneh 'Efrayim explained that every person who left Egypt in the exodus expected God to call upon him or her, all but Moses. He was such a humble man that he thought to himself that Hashem might call on anyone else, but certainly would not call to him. The maxim 'as you do, so you will be done by' applies here. Since Moses greatly diminished himself through the attribute of humility, G-d's exalted presence could be diminished and could be revealed to him.

Humility and responsibility. The two are surely tied together. It is difficult to imagine the humble person not taking responsibility for him or herself. But to what extent must we take responsibility for not only our actions, but also our presence in the world?

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the question of responsibility in delineating those actions which require sacrificial offerings. In Chapter 4 we are told that a person who unwittingly commits a sin, once made aware of it, is required to make a sacrifice in order to be forgiven. You are required to correct your mistakes, regardless of your ignorance in making them. We all know this, and those of us who are parents practice it with our children. If your child accidentally spills a glass of milk, and then protests "But I didn't mean to spill it," you still ask that he or she get a sponge to clean up the mess. It is not enough to only teach our children this important lesson; we must practice it ourselves as well, always taking responsibility for our actions.

In chapter 5 we are told further, that if you witness a wrongdoing and do not come forward, you have committed a sin. There is a Midrash many of us are familiar with that can be applied to this. A group of people is out on the ocean in a boat when one of them takes out a drill from under his coat and proceeds to make a hole in the hull at his feet. When questioned about it, he says that no one should be concerned; the hole is only under his seat. Generally we focus our attention on the person with the drill and his illogical assumption that his actions affect only himself. However, we must also be concerned with the witnesses. If they do nothing, the boat will sink and they will all drown. They have a responsibility to act. It was 38 years ago this week that Kitty Genovese was killed on the street in front of her apartment. 38 people heard her screams and did nothing. And despite the acknowledged moral culpability of those witnesses, there are still today people's screams which go unanswered. Our silence is not acceptable. We must step forward and act. We must make the sacrifices necessary to create a better world. Shabbat Shalom