Leviticus 16:1-18:30

An Alternate Temple

At the beginning of this week’s reading, the Holy One commands Moses: “Tell your brother Aaron not to enter the Holy of Holies (the most sacred part of the sanctuary) at any time… lest he die.”

This of course doesn’t mean that Aaron is never to enter the Holy of Holies. On the contrary, the passage goes on to describe how Aaron himself, and all the High Priests who will follow him in history, are in fact required to enter the Holy of Holies—but only once a year, on the Day of Atonement. The words “not to enter at any time” thus really mean “not to enter at any time that he (Aaron) might choose.”

But understood in this fashion, the statement is even more surprising. What if there is some emergency? Even then, according to this passage, the High Priest has no right to intrude into God’s space and stand before Him.

Then where did this leave the rest of the people? If the High Priest himself was allowed to stand directly before God only once a year, and all the other kohanim (priests) in the sanctuary were not allowed even that, while ordinary Israelites were kept at a still greater distance and could not even come close to where the priests and Levites stood… then what sort of access to God did ordinary Israelites have? They were, at best, spectators, three jumps away from God’s real presence. Was the mishkan (and later, the Jerusalem temple) the only avenue to God’s presence?

It seems that, from the very beginning, the Torah had presented an alternate form of proximity to God—one might even say, an alternate Temple. When, following the exodus from Egypt, God first approached the people of Israel at Mount Sinai (in Exodus chapter 19), He offered them an extraordinary deal: If you just obey Me and keep the conditions of My covenant—that is, the laws that I am about to give you—then you will be My ‘am segullah (“treasured possession”) from among all peoples. The text then adds: “And you will be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

Scholars have wrestled with the meaning of this last sentence. Is a “kingdom of priests” a kingdom in which the priests are kings? This seems unlikely: there is no trace of such an idea in the rest of the Torah. In fact, even the words “you will be to Me a kingdom of priests” seem to undercut such a notion. God is saying that you won’t actually be priests—there will still be real priests to offer sacrifices on the altar—but to Me you will be like priests, that is, “a holy nation,” How will this come about? The verse itself says this will happen “if you obey Me and keep the conditions of My covenant.”

In other words, if you keep My commandments and do what they say, it will be as if you were priests in a sanctuary. This verse thus describes a kind of alternate temple, a sanctuary made out of mitzvot (commandments). Keep My commandments and you will enter this other kind of sanctuary, in fact, you will stand directly before Me whenever you do what I have said. And this went on to become one of the most basic ideas in Judaism. The blessings that we recite before carrying out a mitzvah always start off, “Blessed are You…who have made us holy through Your commandments”—as holy as priests in a sanctuary.

The big difference between the sanctuary of the High Priest and the sanctuary of all Israel, that is, the sanctuary of mitzvot, has to do with accessibility. Not even the High Priest can stand in God’s presence anytime he chooses; he gets to do that only once a year. But the ordinary Israelite can enter the sanctuary of mitzvot anytime he or she likes: it is right there, “in your mouth and in your heart to do it.”

Shabbat shalom!