“Covenant and Conversation: Leviticus: The Book of Holiness” by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

This is the third book in Sacks’ series of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Sacks, in the past, has made much of the mirror imaging of scripture, so, as the middle book in the Torah, Sacks sees Leviticus, or as he calls it Vayikra, as the pinnacle in the ABCBA format of the Bible. Sacks describes Vayikra as the book dedicated to the priesthood. Unlike the kingly and prophetic traditions, Sacks sees priesthood as representing the eternal, the seasonal, the reoccurring, and the constant. The role of the priest is to be a returning reminder of the obligations of the original Covenant. Vayikra has relatively little action, taking place in only one month, and all of that stationary, near Mount Sinai. The word Vayikra, itself, means “to call, beckon, or summon in love.” Sacks sees this as an entreaty by God, rather than as a command. It starts the willing relationship between one another, which will include holy sacrifice and the Sabbath. Vayikra moves beyond the role ascribed to the priesthood to all the Jewish peoples with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. No longer were the Jews to have a single sanctuary, priestly rites, and animal sacrifice. The destruction of these formal rituals of a peoples could have led to their eventual demoralization and disintegration. Instead, the Jews turned tragedy into a blessing- a democratization of the holy: with every person transforming into the roles and obligations of the priesthood, with the sanctuary replaced by synagogues wherever Jews may live, and with the Torah being the civil law uniting the people until the eventual return to political power in the Holy Land. In these essays, Sacks interweaves the spiritual with the moral and political and evokes the freedom and responsibility of personal choice while living in a community of others in covenant with God.