Yoma – The Day

• Yoma – “The Day” – Hard to Say I’m Sorry
  • Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, our most important annual festival is the focus of this tractate. As I understand it the tractate isn’t looking at the individual or communal practices with regard to the day. Most of Yoma is a deep dive into the Temple ritual that day – the one day of the year when the High Priest of the Temple entered the sealed inner sanctuary, and both purged it of any contamination and then communed directly with God on behalf of the Jewish people. The chamber contained the Ark with the original tablets of the ten commandments, and a throne on which God would appear to the High Priest for his annual chat. The ritual is laid out in Leviticus 16 in the bible.
  • 4/13/21, Chapter 1, Page 2 – The High Priest must be safe, sound, and ritually pure for the big day. So first off, he’s sequestered for a week prior to limit the possibility of becoming impure. Second, because the priest who enters the “Holy of Holies” must be married, they get him a temporary wife, with a one week marriage that expires the moment before he enters the chamber (since he can’t be a bigamist when he enters). Just in case his real wife dies that week. The question arises of what if the second wife dies too, and the rabbis argue statistical probabilities and decide that while possible, they’re going for Risk Management, not obsessing over every theoretical outcome, which would require an unlimited number of wives.
  • 4/14/21, Page 3 – Why sequester the High Priest for seven days before Yom Kippur? He’s the High Priest after all, he’s probably perfectly capable of not doing something that will cause him to become ritually impure. Is this just a power move on the part of the rabbis over the Temple priests, as some have theorized? Or just more risk management? Their justification equates it to the period of time that Moses sat on Mt. Sinai, enveloped in mist, before God called him in for the Ten Commandments reveal. But that was six days, not seven, and there’s no evidence that it was a condition for the audience, it happened once. One of those, we don’t know why they did it, but they always did, so let’s come up with a plausible backstory.
  • 4/15/21, Page 4 – The rabbis continue their argument over the source of sequestering the High Priest, the two primary arguments being the one from yesterday, Moses on Mt. Sinai, and the other, the first Yom Kippur with the first High Priest, Aaron, who self-quarantined for a week beforehand to prepare himself. It’s noted that these were personal choices and that even the storylines from different parts of the Torah vary in the details. Then they’re off on a tangent about sharing information – with admonitions that if the information is important, you need to get the other person’s attention first, and that it should only be shared if it’s either public information, or was shared with you with the understanding that you would share it with others. Intent, as always, matters, and “no gossiping” is clearly the rule of the day.
  • 4/16/21, Page 5 – There’s an old joke that if you put two Jews in a room to argue a question, they’ll come up with three answers. We’ve seen time and again during this Talmud journey that things are “left unresolved”, or crop up over and over again. Then other things, an array of choices is presented, and with laser-like precision, the rabbis reason it through and make a flat decision. Today’s page asks why that is, illustrated by a series of arguments over the High Priest’s clothing during his sequestration and what is and isn’t important to make a rule about. If it’s not relevant to what we’re doing right now, today, in life, then there’s no reason to come to a conclusion. Giving opinions and arguing into the wee hours about what happened in the past or will happen in the future is a pastime. If it impacts people’s daily lives in the here and now, if it has import, make a decision and make it a good one.
  • 4/17/21, Page 6 – The mistrust of the rabbis for the priestly class rears its ugly head today as we get into details of why and where the High Priest’s is sequestered. If left at home, or his wife were to accompany him to the sequestration chamber, they opine, he might have sexual relations with her, and she might be menstruating, rendering him impure. Apparently neither his wife nor he is to be trusted to simply avoid screwing for a week. As to where, the “Chamber of Parhedrin” – I’m off on a tangent. Originally called the Chamber of Wood (there’s also Stone and Water), the rabbis called it Parhedrin, a reference to Roman officials, as they accused the High Priest of being in the pay of those officials, and buying their priesthood. There’s also, in my internet wanderings, a couple of references to “after the High Priest enters of the Holy of Holies he will die within one year”. Doesn’t sound like a priesthood most people would want to buy….
  • 4/18/21, Page 7 – Back in Pesachim (page 77) we were introduced to the High Priest’s tzitz, or frontlet – a medallion strapped to his forehead that granted absolution from mistakes when it came to sacrifices. The amulet returns now in regard to offering similar absolution from ritual impurity, when circumstances make it so that the person is unable to undertake the appropriate purification process. The discussion is whether or not the tzitz itself contains a mystical conduit to the divine or whether it’s simply symbolic, and the High Priest has the power whether he’s wearing it or not. Most agree that it’s symbolic, that as long as he is being what we’d call “mindful” these days of his connection to the divine, he can grant absolution. Interestingly, given the last few pages, that power apparently doesn’t extend to himself, or he wouldn’t need to be sequestered for a week before Yom Kippur.
  • 4/19/21, Page 8 – On and off there have been references to being sprinkled with water in which the ashes of a red heifer have been dissolved. There’s a lot of mystical significance given to this, and how it’s made, and passed on from generation to generation. The sprinkling of it on the High Priest on a daily basis during his sequestration is meant as a stopgap purification measure until his immersion in the ritual bath just before the start of Yom Kippur. Those both would seem to negate the need for being sequestered, but, mathematically, the rabbis assure us, it saves on usage of this “Water of Lustration” because, through a bit of convoluted reasoning, they opine that it’s not necessary to sprinkle him on the fourth day. Plus, I suppose, no one has to chase him down to sprinkle him.
  • 4/20/21, Page 9 – You know that there were two Temples in Jerusalem. The first existed from roughly 1000-586 BCE, and if you recall from a couple of weeks ago (in Chapter 6 of Shekalim), was destroyed by Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, because of three things that were going on within the Temple and community – idol worship, forbidden sexual relations, and bloodshed. The second was built 70 years later, in 515 BCE, and existed until 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed it. And why, the rabbis ask, did God allow that to happen, as those issues from the first Temple were no longer extant? Because of, they conclude, the worse sin of baseless hate – hate for reasons wholly made up by national leaders and used to stir up hostility not only against other nations, but within different groups of their own citizens. All because it kept them in power and kept citizens from noticing that it was the leaders themselves who made their lives miserable. Sound familiar?
  • 4/21/21, Page 10 – The question arises, does the Chamber of Parhedrin need a mezuzah, the small box containing sacred scrolls that many of us mount on the front doors to our homes. The official stance is that a mezuzah is required wherever someone chooses to call home. The argument is that the priests in the Temple, in general, and the High Priest sequestered in the chamber, are not in the place they consider their home. Although the rabbis in general come down on agreement that it’s not officially required, they recommend it (should there ever be a future Temple with High Priests, since they’re talking about something centuries in the past), for the sake of image. After all, you don’t want people thinking the priests are all prisoners in the Temple or that the High Priest was sequestered against his will….
  • 4/22/21, Page 11 – What is the purpose of the mezuzah on the doorposts of a home? Growing up, it was a perfunctory thing, it was there, we paid no attention to it, it was just tradition. The mitzvah, the commandment about it, generally seemed (within the more Reform end of Judaism) to be that it was almost a badge of identification – “this is a Jewish home”. So it’s interesting to see a more orthodox take on it as a protective amulet for the home. In fact, delving into it, that was, and is, its function, right down to beliefs of anti-demonic properties. So much so, in fact, that the rabbis on today’s page engage in a debate about its placement, in order to avoid accusations from their gentile neighbors, and the Roman government, of being involved in witchcraft or sorcery.
  • 4/23/21, Page 12 – No take backs, no stepping back, always up and forward. The general theme of today’s page centers around what happens to either the High Priest or his substitute (there’s always an understudy waiting in the wings) jumps into the role, but then for one reason or another, cannot or is not allowed to complete their duties. This leads to a discussion over whether one can ever really go back to being common after having been raised up to a higher level, and the consensus of the rabbis is a resounding no. If you’ve been at the top, you can’t go back. There are too many concerns about egos, jealousies, regrets, and the like. Given that a High Priest can only serve once, if I’m reading this right, their career in the priesthood is over – I’m wondering where this heads, and if it’s part of the rumors that swirled around Page 6 about the High Priest dying within a year of their service – is that literal or metaphorical?
  • 4/24/21, Page 13 – Remember that for the duration of the seven days’ sequestration, the High Priest gets married to a second wife, just in case his first wife dies? Today’s page discusses how divorce is handled in order that at the moment he performs the Yom Kippur ritual, he’s only married to one of them. Basically he gives them each contingent divorce decrees, one conditional on whether or not she herself dies, and one conditional on whether the other wife dies, but that can’t work because divorce decrees can’t be subject to actions outside their control, so he has to include that she voluntarily agree not to enter the synagogue unless his first wife dies, in which case, the divorce takes effect – and what happens if she enters it anyway? I can’t do justice to the way this argument unfolds – you’d have to read it to get just how convoluted they get. Schrödinger’s Wife?
  • 4/25/21, Page 14 – The “Water of Lustration”, the mystical concoction made from the ashes of a red heifer, is apparently a binary switch. If you are ritually impure and a priest sprinkles it on you, you become ritually pure. But, if you’re already ritually pure and you get sprinkled, you become impure – and no, you can’t just get a second immediate sprinkling to reverse it, you stay impure “until the evening”. Apparently, so does the priest doing the sprinkling. After performing this chore on whomever needs it for the day, the priest is considered impure until that night. By the way, sidebar, it occurred to me that I didn’t know precisely what a “heifer” was. Turns out it’s a cow which has given birth to zero or one calves.
  • 4/26/21, Page 15 – We’re back to sprinkling sacrificial blood again today. It’s a discussion over direction and method. In which order does the priest have to sprinkle the blood on the various corners and/or sides of the beautiful, shiny, golden altar? It seems working around in a clockwise fashion, always to the right, is the approach, though the starting point is in question. And the method… is it a flick of the fingers? A flick of the wrist? Two flicks? Or a whipping of the whole arm? Unbidden, what suddenly comes to mind is “the bend and snap” from Legally Blonde.
  • 4/27/21, Page 16 – Surrounding the altar room in the Temple were four smaller chambers. Two different sources offer disparate, but related, opinions on what those chambers were used for. They agree the northwest chamber was the entry to the ritual baths, though one says for priests, the other for lepers. To the southwest one says was where sacrificial lambs were kept, the other says sacred wines and oils. The southeast, one says baking sacred breads, the other simply sacred cooking. The northeast chamber is, perhaps, most interesting, as while the second source says it was a room for priests to store and examine sacrificial firewood, the other posits a not mutually exclusive, but more thought provoking use – the storage and study of altar stones that had been desecrated by conquerors in the destruction of the first Temple.
  • 4/28/21, Page 17 – A dozen loaves of bread have been baked and offered up to the Temple priests. How do they divvy those up? Well, the High Priest gets first pick. The rabbis feel that in truth, he’s only entitled to a bit less than half a loaf of bread, but, not wanting to appear stingy, they grudgingly accord him the choice of one loaf for himself, though making clear that he’s getting more than twice what they feel he deserves. Given how little regard there seems to be for the lives of the Temple priests, there’s got to be some big resumé building advantage for after having served your commitment to the Temple, because there sure doesn’t seem to be any upside to actually being one.
  • 4/29/21, Page 18 – Despite claims upon tasting a particular dish as to it’s orgasmic-ness, and lots of food anime series watched, I’m pretty sure I’ve never met someone who has actually had a “foodgasm”. I know I haven’t. But the rabbis beg to differ, and a section of today’s page is devoted to enumerating the foodstuffs not to be fed to the High Priest the day before Yom Kippur, as they might cause him to spontaneously… erupt. Also recommended, don’t eat them when you’re a guest at someone’s home, as you might embarrass yourself. The candidates proposed are: milk, cheese, eggs, bean soup, fatty meat, pickled fish, garlic, cress, purslane, arugula, and white wine. Me, I’m thinking up a recipe as an experiment… now, where’s my seductive glass of Chardonnay?
  • 4/30/21, Page 19 – Having spent the day before Yom Kippur avoiding spontaneous ejaculation, the High Priest spends the night before staying awake. In order to keep him so, rotating teams of priests and others take turns having him read to them or vice versa from scripture, taking walks, singing, and more. Then a series of ritual tasks during the day, a lot of incense and water involved, plus pancakes. And then, a conundrum I hadn’t thought about. He has to take an oath, swearing that he’ll correctly perform the rituals inside the “Holy of Holies”. Because… he’s the only person who is allowed to enter that room and no one else knows what he actually does while he’s inside. Interestingly, examples are given of High Priests who the rabbis suspected of not having carried out their duties had a tendency to turn up dead shortly thereafter, always with a mark on their body that the rabbis would interpret as a sign of being struck by an angel.
  • 5/1/21, Page 20 – Sound. The sages come at it from three perspectives; literal, sociological, and philosophical. The first, we meet Gevini the Crier, who called the Temple priests to prayer and could be heard as far away as “3 parasangs”, a bit over 10 miles, a dubious proposition. The second, a rather classist idea that music is for those with the sophistication to appreciate it, not for the masses. The third, that if we could truly listen to the world, over the background noise (of what, we are not really told, but an implication of all the things going on in our heads), we could, across the world, hear the sound of the sun, the bustle of people in Rome (odd choice, why not Jerusalem?), the sound of a soul as it leaves the body at death, and the sound of a soul as it enters the body at birth. I’m still a little stuck on the second one, but then, these guys lived in a very caste-oriented society.
  • 5/2/21, Page 21 – The wrap-up to Chapter 1 is a litany of the supposed miracles that would occur during the annual Yom Kippur pilgrimage to the Temple. I say supposed, because the rabbis make it clear that they’re not buying a lot of it – bread that stays hot for a week, the earth itself cleaning up the refuse from thousands of pilgrims, or that the 4′ wide Ark fit into a 20′ wide space with 10′ of room on each side for 2 angels with 30′ wingspans. I always have to remind myself that the rabbis talking about the Temple and its priests are living hundreds of years after the fact and in a different part of the world. Basically, they’re historical anthropologists. I also did not know that Judaism has angels of rain – Matriel, Zelebsel, and noted in this passage, Ridya, in charge of agricultural rain.
  • 5/3/21, Page 22, Chapter 2 – Was cleaning up the ashes from all the sacrifices in the Temple the last task of the day, or the first task of the new day? It made a difference, because the priest assigned to the task would, I gather, become ritually impure until the end of the day. So if it was the first thing they did for the day, they were basically excused from doing any other work until sundown and their evening ritual bath. Needless to say, it was apparently a coveted job, and the priests actually used to race over obstacles and up a ramp to be the first one close to the altar and get the assignment. It was all fun and games until someone got shoved off the ramp and broke a leg. After that, the Sages made them play roshambo for the privilege. It would seem to make more spiritual impact to simply declare it the last task of the day, negating the “benefit”.
  • 5/4/21, Page 23 – Too much weird stuff on today’s page… how to sum it up? Forgive but don’t forget, or, maybe don’t do either, just don’t act on it. Don’t cheat at roshambo. Cooks should change their aprons to clean ones when serving food. And, the biggie. If you stab someone and kill them, but remove the knife before they actually die, does the knife remain ritually pure, since it hasn’t been in contact with a dead body, which would mean having to destroy it? Apparently this was of serious enough concern to the priests and sages and even the father of a young priest to argue about while was lying on the ground, convulsing in his last moments of life, after being stabbed by a fellow priest who was pissed off about being beaten to the end of the obstacle course to the altar.
  • 5/5/21, Page 24 – It’s a given that there were things around the Temple that needed to be done by non-priests – mostly related to repair work of maintaining the building. We encountered that way back when there was a discussion about how a repairman could enter the holy room of the Ark to effect repairs, without violating the precept that only the High Priest could safely enter the space. Today the rabbis carry on a discussion about what to do if someone oversteps their bounds and does something that only priests are supposed to do. In particular, it is decided that the death penalty will be incurred by any non-priest who performs a sacrifice on, sprinkles blood on, or removes the sacrificial ashes from, the altar. The death penalty. As we’ve seen over the last few pages, those ashes are serious business!
  • 5/6/21, Page 25 – I should note that the priests weren’t really playing roshambo for the lottery (after the Jerusalem Ninja Warrior games were stopped due to injuries), but actually odds and evens, a similar game with only two options. But today adds to the fun, by letting us know that it’s actually a game of strip odds and evens as the losers remove their clothing until they’re left in just their underpants. The winner strips and then redresses in only a sacred robe, and goes off to do the assigned chore – it turns out that there were four lotteries throughout the day for different tasks, not just the removal of the ashes. But I’ve now got a very different visual going on in my head for how this all plays out.
  • 5/7/21, Page 26 – Sometimes it’s a small piece of information that suddenly brings a whole new focus to a topic. Today’s page noted that each priest can only offer the weekly Sabbath ritual of burning incense in the Temple once in their life, because of the high honor it brought them. “Wait,” I thought, “how many priests are there living in this Temple?” Which led to some online searching and discovering that the priests didn’t live at the Temple long-term. There were literally hundreds, if not thousands of them, scattered throughout the lands, and they came in from their normal, daily lives, for a week at a time, in groups of 60 (during the Second Temple, only 18 during the First), to perform the rituals on behalf of the Jewish people, everywhere. Then they went back home and resumed their normal lives until the next time they were up on rotation. Kind of like a religious National Guard.
  • 5/8/21, Page 27 – Yesterday’s revelation that the priests aren’t the long-term residents of the Temple, but rather serve on an as needed basis, brought some of the other passages of this tract into focus as well. We know there were non-priests who performed special tasks and were there all the time – the callers and weavers and cooks and candlemakers, etc. In many ways, these were the true caretakers of the Temple, even if they didn’t get credit. Those who serve day in and day out, without recognition, sometimes step up or step in when they see something that needs doing that those responsible for, the priests, have forgotten, missed, or done badly. Now, while the death penalty still seems extreme, it brings a new light on the arguments over non-priests performing priestly duties.
  • 5/9/21, Page 28, Chapter 3 – In a time before clocks and watches, it’s not surprising that the hour of the day would be estimated by looking to see what the sun, or moon, was doing at that given moment. Just exactly where in the sky it was became a determining point for various rituals performed at the Temple, and each morning a priest was assigned to go outside repeatedly throughout the day, figure it all out, and come back inside and announce the hour. It put a lot of responsibility on one priest to get it right. I suppose it also gave one priest the power to determine the schedule of the day for everyone else.
  • 5/10/21, Page 29 – At times a priest got the hour wrong and mistook the last gasps of moonlight for the first rays of sunrise, and the ritual schedule was therefore wrong, wrong, wrong. So the rabbis share some “comparable” life alerts: vinegar seems stronger when you first open a bottle than when it’s been sitting out; hot days seem hotter at the end of the summer than at other times of the year; the aroma of roasting meat seems more appetizing than eating it; relearning forgotten knowledge seems harder than learning new things; thinking about sinning seems worse than committing the sin; and because your body is colder in winter, if you have a fever, it seems worse one than in summer, simply to raise your body temperature that much extra. I get the comparison of seems versus reality, but they leave it for readers to figure it out. I imagine not everyone does.
  • 5/11/21, Page 30 – Wash your hands after going to the bathroom. Now, from a modern day sanitation perspective, that seems like simple, sensible advice. From the perspective of a culture that squatted over an open hole to do their business, and didn’t have rolls of Charmin hoarded in their closet, it was more philosophical. See, if you have drops of urine on your legs or feet, it might be because you “had a condition” as opposed to lack of hygiene, and people might speculate that your children… weren’t yours. If you have bits of splattered excrement on your legs or feet, just as if you have mud splattered over them, a sign of ritual impurity, you are not permitted to recite the Shema, the holiest prayer of the day. So, brush yourself off, and then, publicly wash your hands to make sure everyone knows you cleaned off your lower extremities, because why else would you be washing your hands?
  • 5/12/21, Page 31 – We’re finally back to the High Priest and his preparations for Yom Kippur. Having spent the whole night awake, as we saw in Chapter 1, he now launches the big day with a series of five ritual bath immersions. For those, he strips off his robes and dips into the pool, then gets dressed in golden robes and proceeds to perform all those various tasks we’ve read about over the last weeks himself – from slaughtering the sheep of the day, to sprinkling blood on the altar, lighting the incense, removing the ashes, to burning the various parts of the sheep on the altar, even to making the griddle cakes. Really, you’d think they’d want him to do all that before donning the golden robes, but here we are.
  • 5/13/21, Page 32 – Costume change! As usual, if I just wait, the various threads from the tract’s passages start to come together. We have back and forth robe changes between white and gold robes, we have immersions and sanctifications between each doffing and donning, we have rules about which of the priestly tasks must be performed in white and which in gold, we have rules about making sure the High Priest’s legs are clean of all filth (and, he washed his hands, proof!), and we have rules about exactly what time of day, based on solar position, each of those things occurs. Choreography is key, even in sacred ritual.
  • 5/14/21, Page 33 – As the rabbis argue over the arrangement of logs for the sacrificial fires, it is worth remembering again that they are living 300 years after the Second Temple was destroyed. I realize they were living in hope that one day there would be a Third Temple, but the idea that the architectural plans would be the same seems unlikely. They were already well past a period where blood sacrifices were common, and they had to know those weren’t likely to come back. The entire existence of a rabbinic caste such as themselves was a change from what existed during the Temple’s duration, the priestly caste was, in essence, gone, and I can’t imagine they had any plans to go back to such a different style of living. I find myself wishing they’d spend more time on “how do the things that they did back then apply to us now?”
  • 5/15/21, Page 34 – After the burnt offering of the lamb each day and before the lighting of the incense, is, what I now have to refer to as The Sacrifice Of The Griddle-Cake. Yes, the priest assigned the task of the day has to crumble one up and burn it on the altar. I mean, it’s bad enough that someone decided that the only way to get God to eat his meals is to send them up to heaven as flame and smoke, and that every day it’s lamb, lamb, lamb, but we’re now talking about immolating pancakes! As far as I’m concerned, if he wants breakfast he can wash his hands, straighten up his jammies, come to the table, and eat his short stack like a normal deity.
  • 5/16/21, Page 35 – I just knew that one day we’d return to the Zoroastrian Fire Priests that we encountered in Shabbat 45 & 139, and, we have, indirectly. One of the High Priest’s immersions on Yom Kippur takes place in the Hall of Parva, a chamber outside of the Temple proper. It’s named after one of those ZFPs, a “sorcerer”, who dug a tunnel under the Temple walls in order to observe the priests’ rituals. We also find that those gold and white robes that the High Priest is changing in and out of are expensive – costing in modern day purchasing power around $14,000. And, the High Priest could supplement the communal funds in order to buy even finer ones, sometimes as much as double or triple that amount.
  • 5/17/21, Page 36 – The development of language is constantly fascinating to me. There was a pagan ritual, traceable back to at least the 24th century BCE, of communities sending a goat out into the wilderness after transferring all the sins of the community into it. This was, down the line, adopted by the Jewish community into a Yom Kippur ritual of putting the sins of the community into one of two goats and then throwing it off a cliff, while the other was sacrificed on the Temple altar to God. The cliff-tossed goat was called a la-azazel, meaning scapegoat, one who carried the sins of others. Centuries later, Christian and then Islamic bible translators, to support a new narrative pretending that pagan rituals weren’t a part of their past, turned this into Azazel, a fallen angel, a goat-headed demon, responsible for the sins, and later, the evil, of the world.
  • 5/18/21, Page 37 – On Page 26 I zeroed on the short-term nature of priestly duties, and noted that those who served as priests come from other occupations. On today’s page we meet High Priest ben Katin, who was apparently quite the metalworker and engineer. He designed a variety of things to make ritual life easier for the priests in the Temple, and we’re introduced to his “muchni”, a combination of a huge copper laver, or kettle that held the holy water for purification purposes during each day, and a pully wheel system for raising and lowering it from the pool of holy water under the Temple, ideal for both refilling it quickly, and also to prevent contamination during the night. He gave it twelve spigots as well so that all the shift’s priests could purify themselves at one time, rather than one by one.
  • 5/19/21, Page 38 – This chapter winds up with a look at some of the master craftsmen that service the Temple. Each vignette starts with pointing out that the secrets of their crafts were kept within their family or guild, and not shared with others. At one point, the Sages decide they’ve had enough of this and fire the various tradespeople, bringing in others to replace them. To their surprise, the quality of the work drops, despite that they’re paying more. In the end, they bring back the original guilds, but at a far higher price. “If you would have just shared your knowledge…” they start their refrains, only to repeatedly receive the response, “We didn’t reveal our secrets because some day the Temple will no longer exist, and they might be used for evil, and we could never permit that.” Sometimes, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
  • 5/20/21, Page 39, Chapter 4 – Way back in Yoma 12 I was unsure of how to interpret that the High Priest could only serve once and then would leave the priesthood and go home to die within the following year. I mused, as had others, that it sounded a bit nefarious. Reading now about High Priest Shimon HaTzaddik serving for forty years, and talking about how each year when he entered the inner sanctuary he had a vision of being accompanied by a figure in white, and then one year, the figure was in black, and he knew it was time to retire as Head Priest and go home to die, it all makes more sense. It’s more a lifetime appointment – each High Priest only served once, from the time they were chosen until the time they knew they were going to die.
  • 5/21/21, Page 40 – For appearances’ sake, or, because other people think it is the proper thing to do. The rabbis discuss the order and form of the High Priest’s rituals with regard to the sacrifices at the altar, and the scapegoat. Is the exact sequence and manner critical to accomplishing the Yom Kippur sacrifices? No, and yes, they conclude. No, because, in their view, the accomplishment of the tasks is what’s important. Yes, because there are those pesky heretics, the Sadducees, who are vying for acknowledgment as the religious authority, who believe that the Torah must be followed to the letter. So in order to avoid appearing lax in attention to detail… the rabbis and priests have to do it just right, for appearances’ sake. Point, Sadducees.
  • 5/22/21, Page 41 – Sometimes, greed rears its ugly head. A double standard discussion. The rabbis argue over whether a person who made a promise of a contribution while poor, owes a correspondingly great amount if he has become rich by the time he is to pay; and, in turn, whether a person who was rich when he made the promise, still owes that amount even if he’s become poor. It reminds me of an argument in a pizzeria here years ago. They offered a small, medium, and large, respectively cut in 4, 6, and 8 pieces. There were four of us, and we ordered several different medium pies, and I asked if they could cut those in 8, just to make equal sharing easier. They argued that if they were to do so, they had to charge me for large pizzas, because… 8 slices. Funny, they didn’t accept my counteroffer of cutting them in 4 slices and charging us for small pizzas.
  • 5/23/21, Page 42 – There’s a legend floating around Jewish mysticism about 36 tzaddikim, righteous souls, alive at any one time in the world, and who exist to keep the world in balance. When one dies, someone is born immediately to replace them. And, we meet one of them in today’s reading, in a brief paragraph, when Ravya bar Kisi dies, thus atoning for the sins of his generation, much like a scapegoat. It’s part of our Messiah legends, and it has been posited by some as the basis for the Christian belief in Jesus dying for the sins of the people. If you delve in you find that different texts specify 15, 30, 36, 45 – the settling on 36 came later in kabalistic history, and in some readings is a minimum, rather than exact count. The legend has spilled over into pop culture in numerous novels, and the TV series Touch, starring Kiefer Sutherland and David Mazouz, and Kevin (Probably) Saves the World, starring Jason Ritter.
  • 5/24/21, Page 43 – Most languages of the world are gendered, i.e., all nouns are either masculine or feminine. English is mostly non-gendered, even if the current woke movement asserts otherwise. Though it’s changing, the masculine is ofttimes used as the all encompassing term, such as talking about “mankind”. In a gendered language like Hebrew, the term “man”, particularly in ritual texts, is very specific to an adult non-slave male, often resulting in blatant discrimination of roles. Yet, the same conversations as we’re having today were being had back in the day – as the rabbis argue whether a passage which refers to “a man who is pure”, in context, includes women, minors, persons who identify as non-binary (or intersex or transgender or…), persons with intellectual disability, or persons who are hard of hearing and/or non-verbal (okay, they said, respectively, hermaphrodites, imbeciles, and deaf-mutes).
  • 5/25/21, Page 44 – How much coal would a High Priest scoop if a High Priest could scoop coal…? (Said to the rhythm of the woodchuck tongue twister.) Seriously, it’s the only thing that the entire passage today brought to mind, other than a discussion about why the High Priest uses a gold coal scooping pan rather than the silver coal scooping pan that the other priests use.
  • 5/26/21, Page 45 – We’re still stuck on that golden coal pan today, with a discussion of the various grades of gold – there’s a regular, a green gold, a red gold, a spun gold, and a glistening gold. Apparently red gold is the most appropriate for a coal pan, maybe because it goes with the whole glowing coals thing. All that glitters is not gold and all that.
  • 5/27/21, Page 46 – When I think about removing coals from a fire, I think about waiting for them to have extinguished themselves naturally. But, the coals on the altar are part of an “eternal flame”, which can’t be allowed to go out, so they’re regularly refreshed, and the older ones being removed are often still glowing. As part of the eternal flame, the question argued is whether extinguishing them constitutes putting out part of that flame. The general consensus is that if you separate the still glowing coal from its source by dedicating it to a new task, such as lighting candelabra or another fire, you can then extinguish it, otherwise, it remains part of the whole and you can’t. Sometimes you need to cut ties and/or create new ones in order to move on.
  • 5/28/21, Page 47, Chapter 5 – I have said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again, these rabbis need to stay out of the kitchen. They’re not actually in it this time, they’re still mucking about the fires of the altar, but their conversation has turned to measurements and fuels. While admitting that different High Priests have small or large hands (and one of them, apparently, exceptionally large, wink wink), they use “handfuls” as equivalent to “spoonfuls” in scooping out incense. Do not try this when baking a cake. And then they announce that while flour and honey cannot be burned as offerings on the altar, they can certainly be dumped atop the firewood. While the former certainly is combustible, it makes for questionable tinder and I would not use the latter in place of lighter fluid.
  • 5/29/21, Page 48 – Today’s page contains what are called in Talmudic study sugyas. They’re a series of statements or questions from a single authority, that aren’t debated on, and are left to be considered by future scholars, invariably ending in what’s called a tekyu, or a challenge to those who come. Some have referred to it as a Talmudic throwing up of the hands with a “who knows?” feel to it. In this case, Rav Pappa, one of the sages we’ve met in many past readings, throws out nine “what ifs” or “what abouts” around the whole coal scooping, incense burning, sacrificing series of rituals, two of them on yesterday’s page and seven more today, and then leaves them all unresolved, with a shrug.
  • 5/30/21, Page 49 – If you get kicked by a white mule, you won’t recover. Or, will you? Rav Hanina, an elderly medical expert among the sages, notes, seemingly without prompting, that in all his years, no one who has consulted him after being kicked by a white mule has survived. But, announce others, we’ve seen people recover after being kicked by a mule, even a white one. Hanina doubles down on his claim. I can’t tell whether he’s being arrogant and presumptive, or Yoda-like, and why no one asks what seems the obvious question – is he claiming that no one survives a white mule kick, or is he just noting a random statistic in his own medical practice?
  • 5/31/21, Page 50 – The bull has been slaughtered. Its fat has been sizzled. Its limbs have been burnt. Its blood has been sprinkled. “Remove the bull from the altar” the call goes out. But wait, Rabbi Ami demands that we not call it a bull anymore, because its essence is no longer that of a bull, nor would it identify as a bull any longer, instead, it must be called either “the remains” or “the carcass”. Who says woke language is a new movement?
  • 6/1/21, Page 51 – We’ve read about the “Holy of Holies”, the “Inner Sanctum” in the Temple before, and if you’re like me, you’ve imagined some sealed chamber that only the High Priest and either Indiana Jones or Lara Croft could possibly get into. The former, likely, has some sort of key, hanging on his person, that is never out of his grasp. It turns out that the entrance to this most sacred of chambers is fronted by… a curtain. Possibly two, but, a curtain. And we’re expected to believe that no one ever entered the room except for once a year on Yom Kippur, a single person. I get the power of superstition, but I’m still having trouble buying that one. I’m also now having a flashback to The Wizard of Oz.
  • 6/2/21, Page 52 – It’s not uncommon for people to have arguments over the meaning of biblical passages, as do our friends the Talmudic rabbis today over where a comma ought to be, and how it changes the meaning of a passage. We see it today, particularly in regard to hot button issues like homosexuality and abortion. Complicating translation from the original is that biblical Hebrew had no punctuation and was written without chapter or verse. Those were added in the 9th century, creating what’s known as the Masoretic Text, still used today. In the same vein, the New Testament was originally written in Greek without chapter and verse, and with minimal punctuation, a form to the text not created until the 13th century. Those were both made up structures by historians and religious scholars trying to put order on an unordered text.
  • 6/3/21, Page 53 – The herbs for the incense burned on the Temple’s altar were a bit of a secret, but we do know they included ma’aleh ashan, the smoke-raising herb (thought to be Leptadenia pyrotechnica). Using both the plant’s leaves and roots created a thick column of smoke that would rise straight up to the heavens. Not including that herb, and allowing the smoke to drift about, formless, was not only not desired, but punishable by death. Serious about smoke signals. And yet, there’s a whole discussion about whether the death penalty should be applied to a priest who accidentally burns the incense mixture that doesn’t include this plant. I find myself wondering, given the severity of the punishment, why anyone’s even mixing up batches of incense that doesn’t include it?
  • 6/4/21, Page 54 – I love when these readings take me on a tangent. There was an ancient tribe called the Jebusites, who lived in Jebus, which for many years historians thought was an earlier name for Jerusalem, though that seems to be changing, and may have referred to a mountainous area outside of the city. The bible is apparently the only text in which that term appears, so it also may have simply been a colloquial name for them (they’re the ones that Joshua defeated in order to conquer Jerusalem). The tangent is the origin of the name Jerusalem, apparently Urusalim, or the “cornerstone of Shalim”, the Canaanite god of the netherworld, the setting sun, completion, and peace. Also the origin of the place name Salem, and the origin of the Hebrew word “shalom” and Arabic “salaam”, meaning “peace”, as a greeting.
  • 6/5/21, Page 55 – Back in Pesachim we had pages that talked about the manner of casting blood on the sacrificial altar, so it’s not a surprise that we revisit that with the High Priest inside the sanctuary. Unlike the wanton manner that the priests employed in the general sacrifice, the High Priest has a very specific ritual – splattering the blood upward once, followed by the same, downward. Then up once, twice down, repeated, each time increasing the downward casting by one, until he hits seven. At the same time, he is to avoid getting any blood on the Ark covering. Of course, no one else is allowed into the sanctuary, ever, so who knows what he really did in there?
  • 6/6/21, Page 56 – Honestly, all I got out of today’s page was that the rabbis acknowledge that keeping the High Priest awake all night by peppering him with questions and singing songs and the like, while he doesn’t eat or drink, and then giving him a full day’s worth of tedious, exacting rituals to perform, is likely to cause mental fatigue. Ya think?
  • 6/7/21, Page 57 – The blood trails start to come together. Since there are basins of bull’s and goat’s blood, and the now addled High Priest (p56) might have mixed them up, he repeats the blood whipping three times through that cycle of seven, alternating basins, to ensure he does bull before goat at some point (and it’s in front of the curtain that enters the inner sanctuary (p51), not the one in front of the Ark, so people could see it, I got that wrong the other day (p55)). Then he mixes the “leftovers” (p50) together and pours them around the altar (shades of Pesachim 64). Tangent: Did you know that blood sacrifices didn’t begin with hunter-gatherer societies, but rather agricultural ones, ritualizing the act of the hunt from myths of the past?
  • 6/8/21, Page 58 – If you put the bowl of goat’s blood into the bowl of bull’s blood, the actual bowl, have you mixed the two bloods? Well, no, the rabbis argue, because the bowl is not porous. They compare this to using a sponge, or leaves, to keep the liquids separate, and discuss the different porosity of the materials, density of the liquids, and how that affects the mixing process. It seems a bit obvious. It’s not clear why they don’t just mix the two without any interpositions. Then they note that it’s just like if the High Priest were to be standing on another priest’s feet, he’s no longer in direct contact with the earth, and therefore violating the bare feet to earth precept. Well yeah, that, and it’s a bit rude, and uncomfortable for the other priest.
  • 6/9/21, Page 59 – The Rabbis and Sages are worried that we, the people, might be concerned about all this blood being splashed about back in the era of the Temple. Not the actual splashing, but what happens to these lakes of blood flowing around the altar. I mean, I wasn’t, but maybe you were. The altars were washed, and the bloodied water ended up in the Kidron River, where farmers were charged fees to use the river water as fertilizer, a financial transaction negating the consecrated nature of the blood. Of course there were severe punishments for using the river water without paying. Today, the Kidron River is a sewage discharge system for Jerusalem and its cleanup is a joint Israeli-Palestinian project.
  • 6/10/21, Page 60 – It’s always nice to have a summation and a checklist of the tasks one needs to perform, and the exact order in which they’re to be performed. Especially for the High Priest, befuddled as he is by lack of sleep and food. Also, added to the list, all the white robes he wears during the performance of his tasks are considered one use only… well, they’re all completely soaked with blood spatter… and need to be buried. Interestingly, the same is apparently not true for those expensive gold robes, but then, maybe he doesn’t wear those when whipping blood about the room.
  • 6/11/21, Page 61 – The topic of “leprosy” has come up in Talmudic and Biblical readings before and I hadn’t stopped to think about why it was treated as a spiritual issue rather than a medical one. Off on a tangent, it turns out that it’s a sort of telephone game of mistranslation, and what in modern versions of these writings is referred to as leprosy is not the medical condition Hansen’s disease. In fact, archaeological remains analysis has not revealed evidence of that condition in the region. Various maladies, including psoriasis and skin cancer have been proposed as candidates, but whatever it was, at the time, was believed to be the result of having sinned.
  • 6/12/21, Page 62, Chapter 6 – We’re back to our scapegoat from page 36, selected by lottery between two goats, one of whom is dedicated to God and sacrificed on the altar inside the Temple, the other, dedicated to carry the sins of the people is shoved off a cliff outside the Temple. Fitting in with the wrap-up theme of recent pages, everything being done in proper order, the powers that be want to make sure that the scapegoat has been tossed to its death along with all the sins of the past year, before the High Priest takes the other one inside to rededicate the people’s commitment to the divine. If he does it before the scapegoat has been dispatched, they have to start over again with two new goats. No rushing the timeline!
  • 6/13/21, Page 63 – Yesterday’s discussion continues with more “what ifs?” in regard to the High Priest performing the goat sacrifices either out of order or in the wrong spot. It’s been pointed out repeatedly that the High Priest has been kept awake and fasted all night, but lots of people manage to pull all-nighters and skip eating and still do things all day, especially when surrounded by colleagues who know the timetable of what needs to get done. I find myself wondering, did one or another High Priest actually screw this up or are the Talmudic rabbis just once again engaging in late night riffing on obscure possibilities?
  • 6/14/21, Page 64 – A quandary has arisen among the what ifs, but then, that’s what what ifs are for. When the pair of goats are selected to be the sacrifices on the altar and the cliff, part of the selection is choosing two that are as similar as possible. There’s also a second pair selected on the same basis and kept in waiting, just in case. If something happens to one of the first pair, the question arises as to whether to replace just the one goat that is no longer able to be sacrificed, or both, in order to keep the symmetry. If you’ve got two leads in a play, and one can’t perform, do you replace just that actor with his/her understudy, or put in both understudies because they’ve been working together?
  • 6/15/21, Page 65 – What do we do with the extra goat? That’s the question on everyone’s lips after yesterday’s conundrum. Regardless of whether we followed the path of using one goat from the original sacrificial pair and one from the backup pair, or both from the backup, we now have an extra goat. Turn it loose and let it graze or pen it up and wait for it to die or re-consecrate it for a different sacrifice? This gets related back to the argument at the start of chapter 2 of Shekalim of whether or not lost and recovered tax payments can be rolled over to the next year’s taxes. I guess it actually makes sense, given that the donation and sacrifice of the goats is a form of a tax on the community. Have they considered using it for goat yoga?
  • 6/16/21, Page 66 – There is a tradition in Judaism to never speak the true name of God, what’s referred to as the tetragrammaton, four Hebrew letters that transliterate to YHWH, in English usually rendered as “Yahweh” (or, Latinized to Jehovah). In place of that, when speaking “to” God, we say “Adonai” (Lord) and when speaking “about” God we say “HaShem” (The Name). Today’s passage reveals the one exception to this, that on Yom Kippur, the High Priest finishes his sacrificial duties with a recitation that concludes with “Yahweh”, and this is how people knew that the rituals were complete. Turns out the prohibition was a rabbinical decision after the death of High Priest Simeon the Just, who served for 40 years in The Second Temple, in homage to his piety. Prior to that, anyone was free to say God’s true name, without reproval.
  • 6/17/21, Page 67 – Back on page 36 I talked about the origins of the scapegoat ritual, which in its pagan, i.e., pre-Jewish tradition times was simply sent off into the wilderness to die. By the time of the Second Temple this was ritualized into the goat being led to a nearby cliff and thrown off. Today’s page covers the whole process, from the procession to the cliff – it’s not specified where, but the distance is roughly 8.5 miles outside of Jerusalem, which if they went east would put them at the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea. There were ten (maybe fewer, there’s disagreement) booths set up along the way where the goat’s escort can stop and have food and water, with others accompanying each stage. But why so many in such a short distance? Because of the prohibitions on traveling too far from home on the holiday! By creating a series of temporary homes, each not too far from the next, he could hopscotch from one to the next without violating the letter of the law.
  • 6/18/21, Page 68 – How did the folk back in the Temple know that the scapegoat had reached the cliff and plunged to its demise? Three methods are posited. The first, a signaling system, with raised platforms at each of the waystations mentioned yesterday, being close enough to each other to see what was happening at the next and pass the word along. The second, based on how long it took the groups of escorts to walk to and from each station, including the time they spent chatting and resting, and then extrapolating that over the whole distance. The last, tying a piece of scarlet ribbon around the goat’s horns and keeping a twin piece back at the sanctuary, relying on the divine to turn both pieces white when the goat died, simultaneously. I’d venture that only the first gives any accuracy, but maybe that’s just me.
  • 6/19/21, Page 69, Chapter 7 – The rituals are over, the sacrifices have been burned, the white robes of the High Priest have been buried, he’s back in those fine, fine gold robes. He walks, he talks, he eats, he reads, he greets, he meets, he sleeps… whoa, no, not that. No, the High Priest may not sleep in his fine, fine gold robes. He must remove them, fold them neatly, and use them for a pillow, or next to his pillow. And why? Because, my friends, he might fart during his sleep, thus tainting his fine, fine gold robes. I mean, there’s no possibility that he could fart during any of those other activities, right?
  • 6/20/21, Page 70 – The Torah is a double scroll, and moving from one section to another requires a lot of “furling” as it’s called. On Yom Kippur, there are three sections that are read at the end of the day, two of them near to each other in Leviticus, and one further along in Numbers. Today’s passage talks about that it’s permissible to quickly furl between the first two while the translators translate for the people, but then for the third, because of the time involved, the High Priest recites it from memory so that people don’t have to wait after the translators finish. What struck me was that there was a need for a translator, in ancient Jerusalem, that Hebrew was no longer the spoken language. A little research uncovers that beginning after the destruction of the first Temple (586 BCE), the populace gradually shifted from speaking Hebrew to Aramaic and other local languages.
  • 6/21/21, Page 71 – Another display of rabbinic creativity with rules, as they argue over, well, the thread count of the various garments that the High Priest wears. They go through each item, but picking one, they decided that the breastplate he wears is woven out of 28 twined strands of linen. A difficulty arises when they note the biblical text asserts the use of three colors – red, purple, and blue, twined together in equal numbers. It’s pointed out that with three colors, there’s no way to get to 28 with equal numbers of strands. Rather than modify the 28, a number they just made up, they decide the text simply doesn’t mention that, of course, there are golden strands woven in to the cloth as well, and now with four colors, 28 is achievable.
  • 6/22/21, Page 72 – The Torah, self-referentially, talks about its own design, coverings, and the ark in which it is to be placed. The ark is adorned with a crown, the Hebrew word in the description using the two letters ZR (remember, ancient Hebrew, no written vowels). It’s pointed out that depending on which vowel is placed there, this either means crown, or it means strange/foreign, and what are we to make of that? Rabbi Yohanan opines that if one approaches Torah study deservingly, as a person with good intentions, he will be crowned with the knowledge of the Torah, while if he approaches it with bad intentions, he will be a stranger to its knowledge. These guys do love their verbal gymnastics, and ancient Hebrew leaves itself open for that.
  • 6/23/21, Page 73 – Oracle: 1) “a priest or priestess acting as a medium through whom advice or prophecy was sought from the gods in classical antiquity”; 2) “a response or message given by an oracle, especially an ambiguous one”. The High Priest acts as an oracle, the Urim v’Tummim, literally, the Words of Fulfillment, for the Jewish people, and like every oracle in every storybook, one needs to be precise in asking questions. Why, for example, it’s asked, does he tell the commanders of the army to attack the tribe of Benjamin, not just once, but three times, the first two times resulting in being decisive losses? The sages respond that all that was asked was whether to attack. Had the commanders been sharp enough they might have asked when, where, and how.
  • 6/24/21, Page 74, Chapter 8 – Different halakha, the laws from the Torah and the rabbis, have different punishments for violating them. Ostensibly the worst is karet, which in simplistic terms is “being cut off” – it’s sort of like the Jewish version of excommunication, but more severe, in that it cuts off your soul from any connection with God, in essence, condemning you to purgatory for eternity. Out of the hundreds of halakha, there are just 36 that carry the punishment of karet. 36 again, that magic number. 15 of them relate to prohibited sexual activities, and 8 relate to prohibited eating activities – though interestingly, not the ones that more liberal forms of Judaism have adopted as the most important virtue signaling, not eating pork or shellfish.
  • 6/25/21, Page 75 – Manna is the everlasting gobstopper of heaven. The rabbis attempt to resolve the various ways in which the manna which fell from Heaven during the exodus is referred to in the bible. Are the white pearls that fall a bread, cake, or grain? If you’re righteous it fell as already baked bread right at their doorstep, if you’re average, as unbaked cakes just outside camp, and if wicked, as grain that fell further afield and needed to be processed in order to eat it, as different levels of heavenly reward or punishment. Is it bread, oil, or honey? If you’re an adult, it’s bread, if elderly, oil, if a child, honey, because those are what you need in your diet. Did if fall upon the morning dew, or did the dew fall atop it? Both, there is dew below and above, no philosophical reason is given. They’re just making sh*t up at this point to reconcile disparate texts. And speaking of sh*t, apparently manna is completely absorbed into all “248 limbs” of the body and has no waste product. 248 limbs?
  • 6/26/21, Page 76 – In the course of discussing the prohibition of eating and drinking on Yom Kippur, the sages spend some time quibbling over what was apparently a well known sauce, called anigron, a “sauce made of oil, beet juice, garum, and wine” – garum being, essentially, fish sauce, or the Mediterranean version of it anyway. Something new to experiment with in the kitchen, because that actually sounds pretty interesting.
  • 6/27/21, Page 77 – One of the things we’ve seen over and over again in reading through the Talmud is the use of metaphor when it comes to determining rabbinic laws. The rabbis will select a passage from the Torah and give it an interpretative spin to apply to whatever issue they are considering, often drawing out a series of leaps that while logical when considered individually, are quite the stretch when taken as a series. Kind of a telephone game of message passing. This is one of the big divides between more modernistic (Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative) and more traditional (Orthodox, Haredi, Hassidic) Judaism. Is the stretch that was created nearly two thousand years ago binding in modern life, or was it simply a way of enforcing mores of the era and subject to revision because of the changing world we inhabit today?
  • 6/28/21, Page 78 – When we think of Yom Kippur, we think of fasting. No eating or drinking from sunset to sunset. But there are other rules, none of which, at least in the Jewish communities I’ve been around, are observed in modern times. One of those is a requirement to go barefoot for the entire period. But clearly that wasn’t sitting well with the rabbis even back in the Talmudic period, as they came up with exceptions to the rule that include such notable hardships as “my feet will be cold” and “my feet might get wet”, as well as arguments over what exactly constitutes being barefoot… socks? sandals? a wooden leg? It’s no wonder that one’s been left in the past, along with the admonition to spend the day naked – which first got “interpreted” as “dress in rags”, and then “don’t dress up”, and nowadays, “dress in your best”.
  • 6/29/21, Page 79 – In continuance of the rabbinical search for loopholes in the rules, the rabbis debate over just how much food triggers the “affliction” of violating the Yom Kippur fast. Now, when I was growing up, it was simply “no food”, period, for the day. The Talmudic folk apparently weren’t so stringent with themselves, as they argue over whether the amount of food equivalent to an “olive bulk”, “date bulk”, or “egg bulk”, is a step over the snacking during fasting line. What is clear is that they have a line of tolerance, though they don’t settle the matter for the quantity, and “how often” didn’t come up, at least on today’s page. All I know is that Yom Kippur fasting would have been a lot easier if we’d have been able to snack on and off all day long as, apparently, they did.
  • 6/30/21, Page 80 – We continue with measures of violation of the Yom Kippur fast. First is how much liquid you can drink, which is “a cheekful”, though there is a debate on whether that means one cheek or two. Secondly the rabbis address “how often?” As best I can tell from the convoluted reasoning, you can eat a “chicken egg’s bulk” worth a food within the time period that it would normally take “to eat a half loaf of bread”, a time measure that has come up repeatedly before in the Talmud but hasn’t been defined, except in relation to how long it takes to eat other things. Modern scholars have suggested various periods that seem to settle “around nine minutes”, which seems oddly specific and loose at the same time. Even taking into account some of the rabbis’ suggestion that time be added for “Yom Kippur reflection”, that seems more like grazing small plates than fasting.
  • 7/1/21, Page 81 – Well now, here’s something they never taught us in Hebrew School. The whole fasting thing on Yom Kippur that we’ve been reading about for pages and pages? Made up. Not made up like “the Bible is a bunch of stories that are strung together to teach moral lessons” kind of made up. Made up like, there is no mention of fasting on Yom Kippur in the Torah. The Rabbis Made It Up, as they “interpreted” what God meant by “thou shalt practice self-affliction”. Basically, they decided, and then justified, using other passages from the Torah, what would constitute “self-affliction”, and one of the things they picked was “don’t eat”. No wonder half of them are trying to find loopholes for snacking.
  • 7/2/21, Page 82 – Crispy skinned crackling on a suckling pig, glistening glazed roast ham, falling off the bone barbecued ribs, sizzling bacon. These are among the wafting aromas of things that a kosher-observant Jew will only ever inhale, but never taste. Or will she? Because women who are preggers and their cravings, you know? In keeping with our past few days of exploring ways to get around fasting on Yom Kippur, we find today that if a woman is in a family way, and demands a triple bacon cheeseburger at five in the morning, she is to be allowed to sip its juices through a reed, or perhaps even get a bite or three, until her desire is sated. Large fries and a shake with that?
  • 7/3/21, Page 83 – Protection of one’s own life, and the lives of others, is a guiding tenant in Judaism, and often overrides various Torah and rabbinic law. Sometimes it’s simply practical considerations – like you can’t have your police, fire, and EMS services refuse to work on the Sabbath or holidays. Saving yourself or others from a burning house, a rock slide, or other catastrophes is permitted even on the Sabbath. The military sometimes need to take someone’s life, and the same is true in a self-defense situation. Numerous other circumstances pop up in various parts of the Talmud. When it comes to Yom Kippur, the rabbis bow to personal assessment – if you don’t feel up to fasting because you’re ill, then don’t fast – trust your intuition. On the flipside, if you want to fast, but your doctor tells you you shouldn’t, take the medical advice of the expert, and eat something.
  • 7/4/21, Page 84 – If you are bitten by a rabid dog, the remedy is simple, write a specified incantation on a male hyena skin, bury the clothes you were wearing when you were bit in a cemetery for a year, then burn them and scatter the ashes at a crossroads, and during that year only drink water from a copper tube. Of course, without rabies anti-serum you’ll be dead before the year is up, but someone must have survived rabies having done this for it to have become enshrined. Scurvy? A list of remedies is available, from a yeast, salt, and olive oil mixture, to goose wing bone marrow, to burnt olive pits. Of course, given that it was “known” that scurvy occurred when you limited your diet to fried fish and bread, perhaps changing that had some effect? The relationship to this tractate is whether or not you can use these remedies on Yom Kippur or have to wait a day.
  • 7/5/21, Page 85 – In the “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission” category, we get the metaphor “one spicy pepper is better than a whole basket of squash, since its flavor is more powerful than all the others”. While I simply like the metaphor, the impetus is that it’s better to violate a Yom Kippur (or Sabbath) prohibition and save a life or livelihood than just to blandly go along with the prohibition and lose or ruin someone’s (including your own) life.
  • 7/6/21, Page 86 – There is a hierarchy for absolution when violating prohibitions, like some of what has come up in the last pages, that are set right by accomplishing a more important positive deed. There are those that require some form of repentance, restitution, atonement, and/or punishment.  And almost anything, including those with the most severe punishments, either excommunication or the death penalty, can be absolved by a combination of repentance specifically on Yom Kippur along with an appropriate punishment. And then there’s violating the third commandment, taking God’s name in vain, for which nothing will absolve you for the rest of your life. In Jewish tradition, “taking God’s name in vain” doesn’t mean swearing, or something of that sort, but rather falsely presenting yourself as doing something in God’s name when you’re just out to benefit yourself.
  • 7/7/21, Page 87 – In the contemporary Yom Kippur service there is a ritualized recitation of sins, the Ashanu, several times throughout the day, asking for atonement for each of them (the same is said in daily prayers, but silently). It’s rather extensive (24 lines), and in more religious congregations is often accompanied by a bit of melodramatic beating of the chest, and wailing with repentance. It’s very formulaic. It’s entirely possible that neither you nor anyone you know has committed all of the sins listed over the course of the year. The general teaching is that one is confessing and asking for forgiveness on behalf of the entire Jewish people, which seems a huge undertaking. In more ancient times the confession was of your own sins, publicly, in front of your community. While more immediate and personal, that’s certainly a more daunting venture, and no doubt the impetus behind a ritualized version that just covers everything without having to cop to having done anything yourself.
  • 7/8/21, Page 88 – It’s hard to keep a straight face with the wrap-up to both this chapter and the entire Yoma tractate, as the rabbis tackle the pernicious issue of wet dreams. Yes, among the Yom Kippur prohibitions is bathing during the day, though various exceptions are made for freshening up, pregnant women, menstruating women, lepers, and… men who have had an involuntary semenal emission. A discussion ensues over just when and in what circumstance the man notices that he’s had one. My recollection from teen and young adult years is that one notices immediately upon waking up. And there we land, with an in-depth conversation among the wise ones about not only why it’s okay to bathe upon noticing, but justifying it on the basis of having a spontaneous orgasm on such a holy day being clearly a just as holy sign from God that the man is blessed. End scene.

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