EXOD1042 The rabbis further restricted this to cases where "the children continue the sins of the parents" (Rashi [Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki; 1040-1105], this verse]. Jeremiah (31:28) and Ezekiel (18:2) both said that no one would say any more, "The parents have eaten sour grapes and their children's teeth are set on edge." The transfer of sins across the generations is problematic, Jewishly and ethically.

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EXOD1069 See [[EXOD1008]] Exodus 33:8 gaze SACKS 145-6

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EXOD1070 See [[NUM214]] Numbers 16:15 taken SACKS 146-7

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LEV17 The laws of sacrifices that dominate the early chapters of the book of Leviticus are among the hardest in the Torah to relate to in the present. It has been almost two thousand years since the Temple was destroyed and the sacrificial system came to an end. But Jewish thinkers, especially the more mystical among them, strove to understand the inner significance of the sacrifices and the statement they made about the relationship between humanity and God. They were thus able to rescue their spirit even if their physical enactment was no longer possible. Among the simplest yet most profound was the comment made by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Laidi, the first Rebbi of Lubavitch. He noticed a grammatical oddity about the second line of this parasha: "Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them: "When one of you offers a sacrifice to the Lord, the sacrifice must be taken from the cattle, sheep, or goats." [this verse]. Or so the verse would read if it were constructed according to the normal rules of grammar. However, in Hebrew, the word order of the sentence is strange and unexpected. We would expect to read: adam mikem ki yakriv, "when one of you offers a sacrifice." Instead, what it says is adam ki yakriv mikem, "when one offers a sacrifice of you." The essence of sacrifice, said Rabbi Shneur Zalman, is that we offer ourselves. We bring to God our faculties, our energies, our thoughts and emotions. The physical form of sacrifice--an animal offered on the altar--is only an external manifestation of an inner act. The real sacrifice is mikem, "of you." We give God something of ourselves. ... [Lengthy discussion omitted] ... We can redirect our animal instincts. We can rise above mere survival. ... By bringing that which is animal within us close to God, we allow the material to be suffused with the spiritual and we become something else: no longer slaves of nature but servants of the living God.

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LEV82 If civilization is to be guided by love, justice, and respect for the integrity of creation, there must be moments in which we leave the "I" behind and encounter the fullness of being in all its glory. That is the function of the holy – – the point at which "I am" is silent in the overwhelming presence of "There is." That is what Nadav and Avihu forgot – – that to enter holy space or time requires ontological humility, the total renunciation of human initiative and desire. The significance of this fact cannot be over-estimated. When we confuse God's will with our will, we turn the Holy – – the source of life--into something unholy and a source of death. The classic example of this is "holy war," jihad, Crusades – – investing imperialism (the desire to rule over other people) with the cloak of sanctity as if conquest and forced conversion were God's will. The story of Nadal and Avihu reminds us yet again of the warning first spelled out in the days of Cain and Abel. The first act of worship led to the first murder. Like nuclear fission, worship generates power, which can be benign but can also be profoundly dangerous. The episode of Nadav and Avihu is written in three kinds of fire. First there is fire from heaven: [this verse] This was the fire of favour, consummating the service of the Sanctuary. Then came the "unauthorized fire" offered by the two sons (Leviticus 10:1). Then there was the counter-fire from heaven: (Leviticus 10:2). The message is simple and intensely serious: Religion is not what the European Enlightenment thought it would become: mute, marginal, and mild. It is fire – – and like fire, it warms but it also burns. And we are the guardians of the flame.

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LEV83 See [[LEV92]] Leviticus 9:24 fire SACKS 168-9

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LEV85 See [[LEV82]] Leviticus 9:24 fire SACKS 168-9

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LEV143 These are quintessential expressions of shame. First is the stigma, the public marks of disgrace or dishonor (the torn clothes, the unkempt hair). Then comes the ostracism, temporary exclusion from the normal affairs of society. These have nothing to do with illness and everything to do with social disapproval. This is what makes the laws of tzaraat so hard to understand at first: it is one of the rare appearances of public shame in a non-shame-based culture, a guilt-based culture. It happened, though, not because society had expressed its disapproval but because God was signaling that it should do so. Why specifically in the case of lashon hara, "evil speech"? Because speech is what holds society together. Anthropologists have argued that language evolved among humans precisely in order to strengthen the bonds between them so that they could cooperate in larger groupings than any other animal. What sustains cooperation is trust. This allows and encourages me to make sacrifices for the group, knowing that others can be relied on to do likewise. This is precisely why lashon hara is so destructive. It undermines trust. It makes people suspicious about one another. It weakens the bonds that hold the group together. If unchecked, lashon hara will destroy any group it attacks -- a family, a team, a community, even a nation. Hence its uniquely malicious character; it uses the power of language to weaken the very thing language was brought into being to create, namely, the trust that sustains the social bond. That is why the punishment for lashon hara was to be temporarily excluded from society by public exposure (the signs that appear on walls, furniture, clothes, and skin), stigmatism and shame (the torn clothes, etc.), and ostracism (being forced to live outside the camp). It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to punish the malicious gossiper using the normal conventions of law – – courts and the establishment of guilt. This can be done in the case of motzi shem ra, libel or slander, because these are all cases of making a false statement. Lashon hara is more subtle. It is done not by falsehood but by insinuation. There are many ways of harming a person's reputation without actually telling a lie. Someone accused of lashon hara can easily say, "I didn't say it, I didn't mean it, and even if I did, I did not say anything that was untrue." The best way of dealing with people who poison relationships without actually ordering falsehoods is by naming, shaming, and shunning them. That, according to the sages, is what tzarrat miraculously did in ancient times. It no longer exist in the form described in the Torah. But the use of the Internet and social media as instruments of public shaming illustrates both the power and the danger of a culture of shame. Only rarely does the Torah invoke it, and in the case of the metzora only by an act of God, not Society. Yet the moral of the metzora remains. Malicious gossip, lashon hara, undermines relationships, erodes the social bond, and damages trust. It deserves to be exposed and shamed. Never speak ill of others, and stay far from those who do.

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LEV153 (Continued from [[LEV175]] Leviticus 16:9 offering SACKS 185-7) The psychology of shame is quite different to that of guilt. We can discharge guilt by achieving forgiveness--and forgiveness can only be granted by the object of our wrongdoing, which is why Yom Kippur only atones for sins against God. Even God cannot--logically, cannot – – forgive sins committed against our fellow humans until they themselves have forgiven us. Shame cannot be removed by forgiveness. The victim of our crime may have forgiven us, but we still feel defiled by the knowledge that our name has been disgraced, our reputation harmed, our standing damaged. We still feel the stigma, the dishonor, the degradation. That is why an immensely powerful and dramatic ceremony had to take place during which people could feel and symbolically see their sins carried away to the desert, to no-man's-land [referring to the ceremony of the scapegoat, Leviticus 16:7-22]. A similar ceremony took place when a leper was cleansed. The priest took two birds, killed one, and released the other to fly away across the open fields [Leviticus 14:4-7]. Again, the act was one of cleansing, not atoning, and had to do with shame, not guilt. Judaism is a religion of hope, and its great rituals of repentance and atonement are part of that hope. We are not condemned to live endlessly with the mistakes and errors of our past. That is the great difference between a guilt culture and a shame culture. But Judaism also acknowledges the existence of shame. Hence the elaborate ritual of the scapegoat that seemed to carry away the tum'a, the defilement that is the mark of shame. It could only be done on Yom Kippur because that was the one day of the year in which everyone shared, at least vicariously, in the process of confession, repentance, atonement, and purification. When a whole society confesses its guilt, individuals can be redeemed from shame.

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LEV175 Expiation demands a ritual, some dramatic representation of the removal of sin and the wiping cleaning of the past. That is clear. Yet Rambam [Maimonides] does not explain why Yom Kippur demanded a rite not used on other days of the year when sin or guilt offerings were brought. Why was the first goat, the one on which the lot "To the Lord" fell and which was offered as a sin offering [this verse] not sufficient? The answer lies in the dual character of the day. The Torah states: (Leviticus 16:29-30). Two quite distinct processes were involved on Yom Kippur. First there was kappara, atonement. This is the normal function of a sin offering. Second, there was tahara, purification, something normally done in a different context altogether, namely the removal of tum'a, ritual defilement, which could arise from a number of different causes, among them contact with a dead body, skin disease, or nocturnal discharge. Atonement has to do with guilt. Purification has to do with contamination or pollution. These are usually two separate worlds. On Yom Kippur they were brought together. Why? As we have already noted, we owe to anthropologists like Ruth Benedict the distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures. [Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 1946] Shame is a social phenomenon. It is what we feel when our wrongdoing is exposed to others. It may even be something we feel when we merely imagine other people knowing or seeing what we have done. Shame is the feeling of being found out, and our first instinct is to hide. That is what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden after they had eaten the forbidden fruit. They were ashamed of their nakedness and they hid. Guilt is a personal phenomenon. It has nothing to do with what others might say if they knew what we had done, and everything to do with what we say to ourselves. Guilt is the voice of conscience, and it is inescapable. You may be able to avoid shame by hiding or not being found out, but you cannot avoid guilt. Guilt is self-knowledge. There is another difference, which explains why Judaism is overwhelmingly a guilt rather than a shame culture. Shame attaches to the person. Guilt attaches to the act. It is almost impossible to remove shame once you have been publicly disgraced. It is like an indelible stain on your skin. Shakespeare has Macbeth say, after his crime, "Will these hands ne'er be clean?" In shame cultures, wrongdoers tend either to go into exile, where no one knows their past, or to commit suicide. Playwrights have them die. Guilt makes a clear distinction between the act of wrongdoing and the person of the wrongdoer. The act was wrong, but the agent remains, in principle, intact. That is why guilt can be removed, "atoned for," by confession, remorse, and restitution. "Hate not the sinner, but the sin" is the basic axiom of a guilt culture. Normally, sin and guilt offerings, as their name imply, are about guilt. They atone. But Yom Kippur deals not only with our sins as individuals. It also confronts our sins as a community bound by mutual responsibility. It deals, another words, with the social as well as the personal dimension of wrongdoing. Yom Kippur is about shame as well as guilt. Hence their has to be purification (the removal of the stain) as well as atonement. (continued at [[LEV153]] Leviticus 14:7 open SACKS 187).

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