Ari Levisohn: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha … diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

This is Ari Levisohn. It's no secret that Leviticus is not the most exciting book of the Bible. I mean, there are so many great stories in Genesis and Exodus. So much drama with the families of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the liberation from slavery in Egypt, and the great encounter with God at Mount Sinai. But Sefer Vayikra... it’s about animal offerings, right? And how the priests need to do their jobs in the mishkan, the Tabernacle. A lot of laws that don't even apply to us any more. So how am I supposed to find meaning in this central book of the Five Books of Moses?

That's why I'm really excited about this episode, because Imu Shalev brings that exact question to Rabbi Fohrman. You see, Imu had been talking to David Block, a scholar here at Aleph Beta, about how Leviticus is actually a connected, embedded part of the Torah’s overall story. So Imu shared their ideas with Rabbi Fohrman, and that sparked a conversation about how Vayikra really is not an isolated book with no relevance to us today. Instead, it’s a key part of our national mission statement. Vayikra is about living a life of closeness with God. Let’s listen in.

Imu Shalev: So, Rabbi Fohrman, Sefer Vayikra (Leviticus) is a difficult book, to say the least. A lot of people don't pay attention too closely to these parshiyot (Torah portions). They're hard to relate to. But with David Block, we tried to solve some of those difficulties in Vayikra by hunting for the overall storyline. What I wanted to do is show you what we noticed and see what that provokes for you. How do you feel about that?

Rabbi David Fohrman: So I feel good about that. Go ahead, shoot.

Imu: So this is how David and I did it. We would open up the parsha, which, if you want to join me at home, you can do that by opening up Leviticus 1 verse 1, and we would read and see what’s going on in this chapter. So let me read with you.

וַיִּקְרָא אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיְדַבֵּר יְקוָה אֵלָיו מֵאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לֵאמֹר – God called out to Moses from the Tent of Meeting, from the ohel mo'ed, saying... Then what ends up in this chapter is a long list of korbanot, of sacrifices. I actually don't want to focus on the list of sacrifices. I want to ask a question: How is this section, this God calling to Moses from the ohel mo'ed, connected to the very last story, the chapter that precedes it, which is the last chapter of Exodus?

Rabbi Fohrman: So I'm looking here at Exodus 40. There's this cloud descending on the ohel mo'ed, on the Tent of Meeting, or the mishkan. And the idea of that cloud is that here's this structure that people have built, but until God actually comes and sort of takes up residence in the structure, it's only sticks and stones. There's nothing special about it. 

Of course, if we go back even earlier in Exodus, the cloud reminds us of the cloud that God descended upon Har Sinai (Mount Sinai), the mountain itself. It says וַיֵּרֶד יְקוָה בֶּעָנָן – that God came down in the cloud (Exodus 34:5). And now the cloud seems to be resting not just on this majestic setting of God's creation, namely a mountain, but it's now resting on a structure created by man, which is this thing at the bottom of the mountain, the Tent of Meeting. And the cloud is now coming all the way down. וַיְכַס הֶעָנָן אֶת אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד וּכְבוֹד יְקוָה מָלֵא אֶת הַמִּשְׁכָּן – And the glory of God fills the mishkan (Exodus 40:34).

Then verse 35 always struck me as very instructive here. וְלֹא־יָכֹל מֹשֶׁה לָבוֹא אֶל־אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד כִּי־שָׁכַן עָלָיו הֶעָנָן – that Moses actually couldn't come into the ohel mo’ed, because of the anan (cloud) there, that God was there, and the holiness of God's presence was so intense that it did not allow room for a human being, for even Moses. And that's really the very last verse of Exodus: כִּי עֲנַן יְקוָה עַל הַמִּשְׁכָּן יוֹמָם וְאֵשׁ תִּהְיֶה לַיְלָה בּוֹ לְעֵינֵי כׇל־בֵּית־יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּכׇל־מַסְעֵיהֶם – This anan, this cloud of God, would be upon the mishkan by day, it would take the form of a pillar of fire by night, in front of the eyes of all of Israel (Exodus 40:38).

Then that leads you into Vayikra, where it seems to me – if you would ask, how does Leviticus connect to Exodus? – to me, the piece that seems to connect it is the idea of ohel mo'ed, is the idea of the Tent of Meeting. Because, if you look at the end of Exodus, Moses is outside of the Tent of Meeting, and the beginning of Leviticus is sort of what happens after that.

Where Are the Journeys?

Imu: So you pointed out, right there in Exodus 40 verse 34, that the cloud covered the ohel mo’ed, and the next verse Moses can't enter. But I want to do something a little bit more ambitious, actually, and even read some of the verses that you skipped here at the end and see what that might tell us, not just about the connection between the very last chapter of Shemot (Exodus) and the first chapter of Vayikra, but whether or not that last chapter of Shemot tells us something about how to read the entire book of Vayikra. 

And let me show you what I mean. In verses 36 and 37, you get something very curious. וּבְהֵעָלוֹת הֶעָנָן מֵעַל הַמִּשְׁכָּן – when the cloud went up from above the Mishkan, יִסְעוּ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל – then Israel would journey. Then the next verse: וְאִם לֹא יֵעָלֶה הֶעָנָן – When the cloud did not go up, וְלֹא יִסְעוּ עַד־יוֹם הֵעָלֹתוֹ – they would stay still until the cloud would eventually go up again. Then it basically says that this is the way that b’nei Yisrael (the Israelites) would travel through the desert. There would be a cloud during the day and there would be fire at night in all their journeys, which is kind of curious. It's telling us a story, not just of how the cloud would settle on the ohel mo’ed, on the mishkan, it's telling us also about the function of that cloud somehow in signaling Israel's journeying. So you'd expect that in the next chapter – or in the next chapters – we'll hear about how the cloud went up and the journey that the Children of Israel took. 

If you read the entire Book of Leviticus, you'll notice something interesting. They never journey. They're staying in one place for the entire book of Vayikra. In fact, one of the very last pesukim (verses) in Vayikra, in chapter 26 verse 46, seemingly summarizing the entire book, says: אֵלֶּה הַחֻקִּים וְהַמִּשְׁפָּטִים וְהַתּוֹרֹת אֲשֶׁר נָתַן יְקוָה בֵּינוֹ וּבֵין בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּהַר סִינַי בְּיַד מֹשֶׁה – These, this entire Book of Leviticus, are the statutes, the ordinances, the laws that God gave between Him and the people of Israel. Where? בְּהַר סִינַי בְּיַד מֹשֶׁה – at Har Sinai (Mount Sinai). We were at Har Sinai all the way back in Exodu, and you're still at Har Sinai at the very end of Leviticus. And yet we're hearing about how the cloud would go up and down to signal their journeys. But they didn't take any journeys!

A Leviticus Sandwich on Cloud Bread

Ari: After Imu pointed that out, he and Rabbi Fohrman jumped all the way ahead to Parshat Beha'alotcha, where the journeying actually does start. And the cloud is there too, acting as a guide exactly the way Exodus chapter 40 said it would. We're in the Book of Numbers, chapter 9.

Rabbi Fohrman: So we have these verses in chapter 9, and it really comes back and echoes these verses that you've pointed out to us in Exodus 40: When the cloud would go up they would travel, when it would go down they would stop. You get that theme pounded into you in Parshat Beha'alotcha when the people are really ready to journey. The cloud going up and the cloud going down was going to teach Israel how to go.

It's almost like there's this little sandwich with two pieces of bread. One piece of bread is these verses here at the end of Exodus 40, which is right before Vayikra, and the other piece of bread is after all of this mishkan stuff where you again come in, and it's like, okay, so let's talk about the journeys, and we'll talk about how the cloud's going to lift up and they'll be ready to go and they're on their way to Israel.

Imu: That's exactly what I thought as well. These pieces of the sandwich or bookends, they're actually signaling to you where the storyline is actually hitting a big pause button. There is a storyline. We were at Har Sinai, and then we're supposed to keep journeying, and the Torah is telling you how the journeying would happen. And we're going to get to the journey in… oh, I don't know, 37 perakim (chapters) from now. But before it continues to tell you about the journey, it's telling you a diversion. We're going to take a diversion and talk to you about a whole bunch of laws. I think when the Torah does that, I think what the Torah is trying to actually show you is that this section is thematically related to what comes before it and maybe even what comes after it.

Rabbi Fohrman: Could I just actually jump in here and interrupt you? Because I think if I understand you correctly, you're trying to make the point that when the Torah does this, when there is a sort of sandwich, so the filling in the sandwich has got to be related to the two pieces of bread on the outside. So there's something about these intervening chapters, which essentially are the entire whole book of Leviticus, which seems connected –

Imu: And the first nine chapters of Numbers.

Rabbi Fohrman: – and the first nine chapters of Bamidbar, which seem connected to these themes of the bread. Which gets back to, what exactly is the theme in the bread? The notion of the travels, specifically the travels of the cloud.

So as you were just saying that, something struck me specifically with the motion of the cloud. If I take you into, say, verse 36, if you look at that language, וּבְהֵעָלוֹת הֶעָנָן מֵעַל הַמִּשְׁכָּן – when the anan goes up from the mishkan, that is when the people travel. And then again that word, that verb – וּבְהֵעָלוֹת – is going to come back in the very next verse: וְאִם לֹא יֵעָלֶה הֶעָנָן – but if the anan does not go up, then they would not travel. 

If you take that idea of going up and take that right into the stuff in the middle of the sandwich, the beginning of Vayikra, the laws of the offerings, and guess what the first offering is? Chapter 1 verse 3: אִם־עֹלָה קׇרְבָּנוֹ מִן־הַבָּקָר – If the korban (offering) is in fact an olah. Well, it just so happens that the olah korban is an offering whose name means a “go-upness” korban. Right? Taking your theory a little further, is there some sort of connection between the notion of an olah offering and the ascension of the cloud that would signal these travels?

Imu: That's really interesting. I definitely did not notice that, but it seems like a really interesting connection that I would want to think more about why that might be.

Living Together with God

So maybe let's come back to it, because the place that I went with it actually relates to what you started talking about way back in the beginning. I was sort of seeing Sefer Vayikra as a consequence of the major story that happens beforehand, which is – you talked about clouds. So there was a cloud on top of a mountain, and that's great, and they got some laws. But now the cloud is on top of a man-made structure, as you said. It's on top of the ohel mo'ed, and that ohel mo'ed is in the midst of the camp.

So I wondered, if to some extent, the cloud descending onto the ohel mo'ed as being the story that precedes Sefer Vayikra, if that sort of demands a whole new set of laws. Meaning, it sort of changes the reality structure. God is now in the midst of the camp, and we need to contend with that reality. There's going to be a whole set of rules for how to live together with God in the midst of the camp. And before we can continue our journey together, we need to know how to live together. We need to know how to get along with God.

I actually think that Sefer Vayikra – a lot of people think it's a book of sacrifices. It's really not. There are plenty of sacrifices in this book, but there are a lot of laws about purity, ritual purity that you need to have now that you're in the midst of the camp. And a lot of the descriptions in this book are about how God's presence can't suffer impurity. It's really describing the context of, we live together with God.

A huge section of the book is about kedushah, about holiness. So it's not just that we can't be impure or that we need to be pure. We also need to be holy. That's also described in terms of living together with God. And then that holiness… we hear about holidays, and that word holidays is “holy days.” So it's not just holiness in your personality, it's not holiness in your actions. It's also, there are certain holy appointed times, the mo'adim. And then there is holiness in years, in shmittah (Sabbath Year), in yovel (Jubilee Year) and holiness in the land in shmittah and yovel. So it really extends further. The idea that somehow, in order to live together with God, in order to continue to journey together with God, you're going to need to know how to do that. You need some laws to guide you.

Rabbi Fohrman: So what you're saying is, the end of Exodus sets the stage for a new reality. The new reality, in a way, if you take the central ideas of the second half of Exodus, they would probably add up to central idea number one – Revelation, central idea number two – the construction of the Tabernacle. Common denominator between them: God appears and is resident upon the mountain in Revelation, and in the Tabernacle, God takes up residence among the people.

So the idea of God being a part of us is not just a momentary flash in the pan at Revelation, then God goes home. Which is to say, it's not so much that the anan comes down upon the mountain and then goes up and departs, but that process of the anan going up and down is a constant process that re-enacts itself in the mishkan. So there's a constancy to God's presence. God's always with us, departs briefly to allow us to leave and to go, but then comes back. In which case, we stop, and that requires some laws to be with God in a certain kind of way.

An Overriding Imperative

And maybe just to pick up on that theme just a little bit, you know – getting back to that idea of olah – isn't it interesting, Imu, that if the anan from the mishkan is kind of an echo of the cloud, the anan, from Sinai, isn't it interesting that when the cloud descends, no one moves, and when the cloud goes up, they do move? What does that say to you? 

Imu: Well, the way I always understood it is, the cloud is God's presence. So when God is present, you hang out with Him.

Rabbi Fohrman: If you think about it, isn't that interesting? Because if somebody would say to you, What were the Israelites trying to do in the desert? So you'd say, they were trying to get to Israel. Well, that's one thing they were trying to do. But whenever the cloud descended, they weren't trying to get to the land of Israel. They were just hanging out. There was this overriding imperative that when the cloud descends, you don't move. Why? Because when God's there, it's not about where you're going, it's about where you are. Isn't it fascinating that if you see these laws in the way you're seeing them, the middle of the sandwich is about: How do we exist with God, how do we be with God, and forget where we're going? What are the ground rules for maintaining this relationship when you and I are in the same place together? 

And then we have these laws of these offerings. The offering, which is described as a korban (“coming close”) – the very first of those offerings is an olah. There's like an irony here, not only in the cloud. When the cloud would be olah, it would go up, everyone would leave, and then you would stop thinking about being with God. It was just time to journey. And when the cloud would descend, that's when you would connect with God. But how would these laws guide you in terms of being with God? Well, there was this olah that you could bring, a free-will offering that just goes up to God. 

The irony is that when the cloud is down and all you want to do is be with God, that's the moment where, instead of you moving, you take motion in the form of this animal, which is almost representative of you. And it's a korban, and korban describes a certain kind of moving towards, to draw near. Almost as if there is this horizontal motion where I draw near, and this vertical motion which is olah, I draw up, and I'm concentrating movement in something that's not me. I'm with God, and somehow, whatever movement is going on in my life, I'm trying to dedicate that to the service of being with God, rather than the service of trying to actually get somewhere.

The Meeting of the Clouds

Imu: So I like where you're going with this. It reminds me of a few things. Number one is that throughout Vayikra there are a few instances of man-made clouds, terrestrial man reaching upward, of creating a cloud that goes upward, almost mirroring God's heavenly cloud which comes downward towards the earth. 

So there's the olah korban which starts off Sefer Vayikra, where we're, I guess, maybe even reaching out to God by creating this pillar of smoke that goes upward. There's also… at the very center of Vayikra is Acharei Mot, the service of the kohen gadol (High Priest) on Yom Kippur, where we bring the cloud of ketoret (incense), literally described as anan ha-k'toret, a terrestrial cloud that goes upward and meets the heavenly cloud that descended from the heavens and rests above the Ark. So there's the closeness of cloud meeting cloud which is at the very center of Vayikra, which you're sort of suggesting begins at the very beginning of Vayikra in the form of korban olah.

Rabbi Fohrman: In other words, it's about the cloud of God coming down into Sinai at the very end of Exodus leading into Leviticus. And right there in the middle of Leviticus, you have cloud meets cloud, where a human being really doesn't want to go anywhere. On Yom Kippur you're not moving, you're just there. And the way a human being expresses that desire to be with God is when cloud meets cloud, and literally where one cloud goes up and there's that language of olah again. You get the beginnings of that in the beginning of Vayikra, where you have another kind of olah, but it's not yet a cloud. It's an offering, which is also, perhaps, some kind of attempt to make contact with the divine.

Imu: I think that's really interesting. I'll just say one more thing that it reminded me of, this idea of when God is there, you don't want to go anywhere, and that so long as you consider the journey, it's difficult for you to be with God. The way I always pictured the journeys in the desert, and the way in which the tribes would travel, would be in a straight line. But that's actually not how they traveled, and it's certainly not how they encamped. The way they encamped is, they encamped around the ohel mo'ed. They camped around the cloud of glory. They specifically put God at the center of their camp, and even in their journey, they journeyed in that box-like formation. Perhaps that is because, even in their journeys, they were sort of showing their desire to be at rest once again and be with God at the center of their camp and not lose their structure or their integrity as a camp. 

I just want to close out by suggesting what these ideas mean to me. For me, the context is really important in understanding Sefer Vayikra's relationship with the overall storyline, because it suggests that Vayikra isn't this appendix. It's not some, like, here are a list of laws that you should close your eyes and not pay attention to until we get some meaty plot points.

It seems to be… it's placed at the center of the Five Books of Moses, and its themes of korban, the idea of closeness, and the idea of the cloud at the center of the camp and the consequences of living together with God – all of that seem to be kind of the mission statement of the people of Israel, the core value that we have in what we're all about, which is closeness with God, living together with God.

Credits

This episode was recorded by Imu Shalev together with Rabbi David Fohrman. 

When this episode originally aired on Aleph Beta, it was edited by Rivky Stern. 

Into the Verse editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our senior editor is me, Ari Levisohn. 

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.