{Originally posted at author’s website www.createconnectprotect.com}
In Judaism, there is a traditional request for forgiveness prior to Yom Kippur. We want to go into our Day of Judgment with as clean a slate as possible. Those we have hurt are the only ones who can provide us with forgiveness for our sins against them and so we must ask them for that forgiveness.
Every year for the past 20 years, I’ve written an Annual Yom Kippur greeting. But my Yom Kippur greetings tend to go a little further than the typical request.
I hope you both enjoy the below and find it inspirational. I also know that many readers of this are not religious and/or not Jewish. Despite the initial content, I believe you will enjoy the write-up.
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In Leviticus, the Torah states: “Whichever man there is of the house of Israel, who kills an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or who kills it out of the camp, and brings it not to the door of the Tent of Meeting, to offer an offering to the Lord before the tabernacle of the Lord; blood shall be joined to that man; he has shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from among his people;”
The punishment is extremely unusual. What does it mean to have the man joined to the blood of the animal? And why is he cut off from his people?
To begin to understand this, we must start with an understanding of blood itself. The Torah has a fascination with blood. One of the key references is Hashem’s command to the Jewish people to put blood on their doorposts in order to distinguish them from the Egyptians. The commanded blood set them apart from the Egyptians. But it also defined them as a group. Just as blood connects the cells in our bodies, blood connected their homes and families and made them cells in the body of the Jewish nation.
In other places, we see blood being described as the soul. Not the timeless soul, but the animating soul; the thing which gives our bodies physical life – and which can misdirect them. Many natural human acts are punished because the sinner’s blood was upon them – it controlled them when it should not have been allowed to. Grapes are described as having blood – they change the animation of a person and can thus undermine them.
Blood is animating. It gives us life. And with that life, it gives us something far more fundamental. It gives us potential.
In the verse above, we can see that the slaughtered animal can have its blood spent – or it can have itself dedicated in the Tabernacle. It can be poured onto the ground, or it can be used to help connect our world to the world of the timeless.
If you deny the animal the opportunity to serve this positive role, then your blood is tied to its blood. You are cut off from the people and you are denied your own opportunity to connect to the unchanging, the peaceful and the timeless.
You have wasted the animal’s potential and so yours is wasted as well.
This applies to animals, but it applies even more strongly to people. If a murdered person is found in the countryside, an elaborate ritual – representing the destruction of the Jewish people – is carried out. We place tremendous value on the preservation of potential. Failing to preserve potential can undermine our purpose as a nation.
What is potential? We can get an idea from the story of Genesis, G-d creates things and then deems them ‘good.’ It is an assessment of something new that has been created. But when Adam was created, he was deemed ‘not good.’ The bar for a flower or an animal is in the goodness of its form. But for mankind, the bar is higher. Goodness comes from our imitation of G-d; and this imitation starts with the act of creation itself. Adam, and in time, Eve were not creators. In order to be driven to create, they had to experience fear and loss and uncertainty. They had to know evil in order to know good.