Shabbat Shalom. This week’s torah portion describes the institution of the Nazir – a person who took an oath to abstain from drinking wine and strong drink, cutting his hair, and coming into contact with the dead. Strangely, at the end of the period of the oath – at least 30 days according to the Talmud – the Nazir brings a sin offering. Why does the Torah require the Nazir to bring a sin offering at the being a Nazir when it is the Torah itself that offers it as a path to God?
Nachmanides (1195 – 1270) explains that he must bring a sin offering because in returning to the world, he commits a sin: “This man sins against his soul on the day of completion of his Naziritehood; for until now he was separated in sanctity and the service of God, and he should therefore have remained separated forever… thus [when he completes his Naziritehood and returns to his normal life] he requires atonement, since he goes back to be defiled by desires of the world.” There are two problems with this explanation. The most obvious is that the sin offering is being required, but he hasn’t sinned yet! I can think of nowhere else in the Jewish tradition where one is one required to bring a “pre-emptive” sin offering! Second, Ramban’s approach is based on an ascetic ideal, namely that to participate in the world – to get a haircut, to bury one’s dead, to drink wine – to do all these things is a necessary compromise, a step down. Nachmanides says, “he should have remained separated forever” – I fundamentally disagree with this approach. While the Jewish tradition does not see engagement with the world as an end in and of itself, we also do not think it is an evil, but rather the world offers us opportunities for holiness. We can abuse wine, or we can make Kiddush and enlist it in the service of a mitzvah. We can obsess about our hair and our looks and become vain (I understand the Nazir’s refraining from getting a haircut to be a sort of withdrawal from caring about how one looks), or we can care for our bodies so they can be enlisted in the service of God. We can obsess about death – as did ancient Egyptian culture – or we can be ever conscious of the fact that we do not live forever and use that fact to inspire us to cherish ever moment of our lives before it is too late. As the late literary critic Anatole Broyard once wrote when he was diagnosed with cancer, “[my life] took on a kind of meter, as in poetry, and taxicabs.” Engagement in this world is not a sin. The Torah says the Nazir is Kodesh L’Adonai – holy to Adonai – but that does not mean returning to the world is a sin requiring expiation.
Rashi brings two other explanations: the first is “that the Nazir has not been on his guard against becoming impure by contact with the dead.” The problem with this explanation is that the sin offering is required to be brought by every Nazir, yet we can’t assume that every Nazir has been careless about becoming impure.
Rashi adds a second explanation I will return to in a moment. The next explanation is one that I am sure has been said by someone before but I have not found it. So for now, you can attribute it to Rabbi Daniel Greyber J. To understand it, we have to ask a different question: Why would someone swear an oath to become a Nazir and, in doing so, take on extra stringencies in one’s relationship to God? One answer is that when we sin, we feel distant from God, alienated from the divine image within, a stranger to our best selves. I suspect one reason one became a Nazir was because it was an institution sanctioned by the Torah that laid out a path for repairing one’s relationship with God that had been broken by a sin before. The sin offering that concludes the Nazirite period is the final step in a process that began in alienation and that ends with one feeling closer to God, ready to move forward together. This approach too has its problem – for the Torah nowhere mentions a previous sin that motivates the Nazir’s oath.
The final explanation I want to discuss is Rashi’s second attempt where he quotes the Talmud: “Rabbi Eleazer ha-Kappar said, ‘he sinned by abstaining from the enjoyment of wine.’” I like this explanation very much first because it says that it is a sin to refrain from wine, from Scotch! I thought the Library Minyan would like this idea very much! But also because it is the exact opposite of Nachmanides’ claim that one should have remained a Nazir forever. For Rashi, the Nazir period is not an ideal; it is a source of sin!! Of course the problem with this explanation is that the Nazir is an institution ordained by the Torah – the Torah itself says that the Nazir is “kodesh l’Adonai” (holy to God!) – so why would observing one of its requirements, to abstain from wine, be a sin?
Which explanation is correct? I do not know, and I will leave that to greater minds than mine to solve another day from this Bimah.
For now, I want to conclude with a reflection. As many of you know, Jennifer and I began coming to the Library Minyan in 1997 and, in a few weeks, we will leave for Ramah and, from Ramah, we will depart for Israel and, from Israel we will return to Durham, North Carolina. In thinking about how to say good-bye to a community that we have been a part of for almost 13 years, I am reminded a tradition from the Talmud (M. Berachot, Chapter 5) that one should depart from one’s friend with a Dvar Halakhah shemitcoh kach zochrahu – for through that word of Halakhah or Torah, one remembers one’s friend. What is the word of Halakhah/torah through which we’d like to be remembered?
It is Rashi’s second explanation, the one that says the sin offering is for all the things that the Nazir did not enjoy. Why? His explanation is based upon an idea from the Talmud Yerushalmi which says: “A person will have to answer for everything that his/her eye beheld in this world and s/he did not enjoy.” Put more simply another way, our Jewish life, says the Torah, should be about joy.
Permit me one story from Ramah. It was my very first summer at Ramah. 2nd session, the last Shabbat at camp. Many kids from this minyan were in Machon that summer. The schedule for Shabbat afternoon at camp includes “Machon Mincha” from 6 to 7pm follwed by a campwide Limmud on the Hill in which the entire camp gathers by tent and sits in circle, campers and staff together learning Pirkei Avot or some other text before going to the chadar ochel for seu’dah shlisheet. “Machon Mincha” is a beautiful, unique service – a combination of prayer and song and cheers, all filled with ruach. The end of Machon is filled with sadness because it is not just saying goodbye to camp, but it is the beginning of the end of childhood, the letting go of friendships and a place many grew up. So the last “Machon Mincha” concludes inside the BKR on the edge of the Hill and the Machonies (Machon campers) do not go outside to limmud, but instead begin to sing and cheer again, to hold on for just a few more moments to an experience they do not want to let go. The adults decide to go outside and start our limmud groups and let the moment continue inside for Machon campers and counselors. It does for 5 minutes, then 10 minutes until, a few minutes later, all of Machon starts to spill out onto the Hill, running from circle to circle, from group to group of studying groups, telling campers, “get up, join with us, come on!” Within a few minutes, most of the camp is standing in a large group in the middle of the Hill singing Hebrew songs, cheering and dancing.
As the camp leadership, we had some decisions to make. In that moment, we needed to decide: Do we stop what is happening? Afterward, we needed to ask, “Should we react with disappointment and disapproval?” The following year, we needed to ask, “Should we takes steps to ensure that it does not happen again?” After all, learning was disturbed. Lessons that teachers had prepared went untaught. What about Pirkei Avot?
But we asked, “what is the point?” Is there anything more we can ask for on a Shabbat afternoon than a group of campers and staff singing Hebrew songs, cheering together as the song sets behind the mountains? Is there anything closer to a vision of Olam HaBah – the World to Come – than Jewish children dancing joyfully beneath God’s sky? That moment is now a part of camp history, a part of what each Machon looks forward to in the camp calendar. It is now called, “Oneg on the Hill.” If that is the only legacy I will have left to Ramah, one that I did not, could not have created, but simply one that our staff had the collective wisdom to not squelch, Dayennu, just that would be enough for me.
The Nazir may be kodesh l’Adonai, but I like Rashi’s second idea – that the Nazir must make a sin offering for all the joy he did not feel. To the Library Minyan, to our community of family and friends in Los Angeles we will soon leave behind, that is the Torah we wish to be remembered by, a Torah of joy. I pray you will remember us through the Torah that says each of us will one day be called upon to give an accounting for the moments in Jewish life we did not enjoy. I pray you will remember us through a Torah of joy, that you will remember that prayer, as I mentioned last week, should not be something we “get through,” an obligation we discharge and set aside, but rather as an opportunity for depth and love, and the deep joy that comes from meeting God. May you be blessed with such moments as I have seen in a small part of the Ojai valley; may our family someday merit to return and be introduced at the end of services as guests returning for a visit, and may God bless us so that we sing together again someday soon.