Torah Study Blog

The holiday of Yom Kippur is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and it is the time to reflect on your actions and to atone for your sins. Jewish leaders may encourage you to seek out those individuals you knowingly hurt and apologize to them before Yom Kippur. This tradition cannot be found in the Bible; it is a rabbinic innovation. The writers of the Bible were not concerned about individual sinning and they did not have the concept that you might be able to “get away with it.” Our ancestors believed that God was all-knowing and witnessed all wrong-doing, bringing sin-pollution into the entire community. This was serious stuff and needed to be dealt with before the wrath of God came down upon the community.

In Leviticus 16 we find the ritual of the scapegoat - a ritual that we have been looking at for a couple of weeks - which describes how a community could remove taint from its religious center. In the ritual, two he-goats are chosen for sacrifice. One goat will be sacrificed to the Israelite god, Yahweh. The other will have the sins of the community heaped upon the goat, and the goat will be sent to Azazel.

This week in Torah Study, Rabbi Jaech led us in an exploration of Azazel. Linguists are able to divine the meaning of a word by seeing how it is used in different sentences. The word Azazel does not appear anywhere else in the Bible, so we have to guess who, or what, Azazel was.

It is possible that Azazel was a proper name. The book of Enoch is preserved writing that was not included in the Bible. It purports to have been written by the great-grandfather of Noah, and it provides the origins of demons and giants. (Scholars believe the text was actually written in the 3rd-1st century BCE.) According to Enoch, Azazel was a fallen angel who taught humans to make weapons, jewelry and make-up – and all these items led humans to go astray and become corrupt.

The 13th century sage Chizkuni suggested that Azazel was another name for “Satan.” Another 13th century sage, Ramban, acknowledged that biblical Jews worshipped other deities, but God allowed it by commanding the

biblical Jews to dispatch a he-goat to the “prince,” also known as the angel, of the areas of destruction. Because God commanded it, it must have been okay.

The possibility that Jews in biblical times may have worshipped other deities may provoke discomfort with some Jews today. Jews are believed to be monotheists who do not believe in other divine beings. Why would our ancestors make a sacrifice to another deity, named Azazel? That is a pagan ritual! Rabbi Jaech pointed out to us that the way we think today does not necessarily reflect the way our ancestors thought. As she learned from Dr. Sperling, it is a type of arrogance to think, “How can my sacred text disagree with me?!” That is why, at Temple Israel, we try to understand what the writers were thinking in the time that they wrote the biblical passages. Polytheism was all around the Israelites. The first commandment reminds us that we shall have no other gods before the god of Israel. That commandment recognizes the existence of other gods. And, when we recite the Sh’ma, we say “the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” we are recognizing the fact that people need to be reminded that there is only one god – for the very fact that they believed in multiples.

Our scholar-in-residence, David Sperling, told us that az azel translates to, “the going goat,” so it is possible that the term Azazel is not a person, but an action. The 13th century sage Maimonides taught that people did not actually believe that putting their sins on a goat would make the sins go away. However, the action would provide solace and a way to move forward and do better tomorrow. Jonathan Sacks, a British rabbi who served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in the UK, noted that, in order for ritual to be effective it must have some sort of visual connection. As humans, it is easier to feel cleansed if we believe what we want to get rid of has been carried off by something else. This may not be rational, but then neither are we.

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter