(No music this week. Just video of cute goats at the Jerusalem zoo.)
There are few, if any, clean breaks in our lives. Relationships always leave residue in our lives, even after we broken them off. The effects of past sins, even when forgiven or atoned for, stay in the minds and hearts of those we have wronged. In an increasingly interconnected world, a physical move doesn’t always lead to a complete emotional or social detachment from our past social circles.
So — how do we move on? That is where ritual comes in.
Elizabeth Gilbert writes this about ritual:
This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping.
Ritual provides an off-ramp and a refuge. However, ritual not only serves as a holding place for the fullness and complexity of our emotions, it also provides a meeting place of the mundane and the sacred. In the case of this week’s parasha, the nexus of the holy and the normal resides in the body of a goat. We learn in Leviticus 16:22
וְנָשָׂ֨א הַשָּׂעִ֥יר עָלָ֛יו אֶת־כׇּל־עֲוֺנֹתָ֖ם אֶל־אֶ֣רֶץ גְּזֵרָ֑ה וְשִׁלַּ֥ח אֶת־הַשָּׂעִ֖יר בַּמִּדְבָּֽר׃
Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
This verse is the origin of the term “scapegoat.” It is the being that absorbs the sins of the community, and then — through its exile — absolves them of their misdeeds.
However, there is an odd phrases in this verse. What is an “eretz g’zeirah” an “inaccessible” or “cut-off” land?
Chizkuni, a 13th century French rabbi, defines an eretz g’zeirah this way:
אל ארץ גזרה, “into the wilderness.” Basically, the meaning of the word גזרה, is “radically different from other lands.” We encounter it in this sense in Isaiah 53,8: כי נגזר מארץ החיים, “for he was cut off from the land of the living.” The reason for the choice of such earth to throw the scapegoat into was that if it had been thrown into productive soil it would have made that soil unproductive
For him, an eretz g’zeirah is a place that is radically different. Not only that — it must be a piece of infertile land, lest the sins of the scapegoat turn a productive place into someplace unproductive.
Modern scholar, Adin Steinsaltz, writes that an eretz g’zeirah is a land that is “precipitous.” He provides two translations for the term: one that it means “mountainous and uneven,” and the other is that it is “desolate and bereft of good qualities.”
Finally, the scholar David Zvi Hoffman writes: (translation mine)
"גזרה" מן גזר - כרת, חתך, לפי יומא סז: צוק, מקום תלול. סתם "גזרה" משמעה סביבה שמנותקת מכל קשר עם הישוב, בזה כלול גם צורתו של המקום, כמדרון, ללא דרך שאפשר ללכת בה.
G’zeirah: from the word gzar which means cut off and separated. According to the Talmud (Tractate Yomah 67) “an edge — a hanging place” The term g’zeirah itself means an environment completely disconnected from the local settlement/community — and this includes the very character of the place. It is a place on a downward slope, that lacks the possibility of movement.
In all three readings, this “cut-off land,” describes a physical terrain and a moral/cultural one. In order for a community to be absolved the sin, the one who carries those sins must be distanced from the community, and must lack the ability to bring that sin back into their town. It must be a place — both in its stature and its nature — that is lower and radically different from the place where the rest of the community resides.
It would be cruel to send a human being to an eretz g’zeirah. In last week’s portion, we learn that those who are afflicted with tzara’at,(a physical illness that manifests a spiritual sin) are removed from the community, but are brought back into the fold by the High Priest once they have been healed. While some people are totally cut off from the community for truly egregious crimes, our tradition understands that forced, permanent isolation is a form of social death that is cruel and should not be used widely.
But sometimes, we do need to radically cut ourselves off from our sins in order to start again and re-establish a holy community that can serve the will of God and maintain firm ethical standards. The goat allows us to have as clean a break as possible through ritual. The goat is a living thing — vulnerable, relatable, and pitiable. When he is sent away, it still feels intense and evokes a sense of vulnerability and mortality. That said, the goat is not human, and does not evoke a sense of terror among the community that they could be next.
The lessons that can be learned from the use of the term eretz g’zeirah are not totally negative. The Hebrew root g’z’r that is used in the word g’zeirah, is the same root that is used for legal rulings in Jewish law. We bless God for being the One who gozer u’mkayeim, the One who makes legal proclamations and upholds them. What is the connection between “cutting” and “legislating”? I think part of the connection is that when you lead a community effectively, you need to make clear cuts between right and wrong, and you have to do the hard work of maintaining those boundaries despite the inherent murkiness of the human condition and the many incentives to look the other way when something is wrong.
As we enter Shabbat, let us sit with the reality that our tradition provides us with the possibilities of renewal through rituals that make our deepest and most difficult aspirations possible. Chief among those aspirations is the ability to cut ourselves off from our past sins, and re-establish the holiness of a community that has been polluted from our many misdeeds.
While the ritual of the scapegoat may be/seem barbaric and cruel — it is also cruel to deprive humans of an outlet for absolution and beginning again. And while we often run from the responsibility to set and maintain clear moral and legal boundaries because of the pain that accountability causes to those we love, a lawless and shapeless world is even crueler to the broader community. Let us take this week to think about the blessings that our rituals and laws that provide. They give us paths back to God, community, and our better selves, even as we acknowledge the steep costs of the deep cuts that make it all possible.
Shabbat Shalom.
What I am reading now:
A great piece by Yehuda Kurtzer on the moral challenge of being an American Jew today.
Some suggested steps for this week:
Prepare to join us in Maine! Register for the Maine Conference for Jewish life today. June 13-15, 2025 at Thomas College in Waterville, ME. All are welcome — cost should be no barrier. Contact me if you need a scholarship code.
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