Behar-Bekhukosay and Rebuke / בהר־בחקתי און תּוחכה

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim written by a frum, atheist, transsexual anarchist. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make us more comfortable) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

An appeal

My friend Kamal needs help to leave Gaza. He is trying to immigrate to Greece to search for his missing son, who in desperation took a small and dangerous lifeboat across the Mediterranean. Please donate what you can.

Content note: mentions of homophobia and genocide

I'm having a crisis of theology

which is pretty standard Jewish fare in troubled times. After a year of frumkeyt and faithfully living an orthodox lifestyle—and enduring homophobic harassment at shul and on the streets from frumers, and antisemitism in leftist spaces—I'm giving up. Or maybe taking a break. This week I shaved my beard into a handlebar mustache and then sat down to read the parsha, which spoke directly to my feelings, as it often does.

Parsha summary

We have two parshas this week, and they include my favorite piece of liturgical poetry. Parsha Behar is primarily about Shmita—the "Jubilee" year of resting the land and releasing all debts which happens every 7 years. It discusses our relationship to land and agriculture, and kinship responsibility when your family is in financial straits. Blow the Shofar on Yom Kipur. Don't make idols. Keep Shabos.

Parsha Bekhukosay is the last parsha of Vayikro. It begins with promises of divine favor should we faithfully follow all of Hashem's commandments: we will have food, peace, and security, and Hashem will be "ever-present" in our midst. But if we do not observe all of Hashem's rules and thus break the covenant, then we will know misery. The bulk of the parsha is Tokhokho, or rebuke—promise of what will happen to us should we deviate even slightly from Hashem's laws: starvation, disease, military defeat, a scattering of our people among our enemies, hard work and no reward, anxiety, and a profound disconnect between us and all that is divine.

Why do we participate in ritual—in these, specific Jewish rituals?

I'm not driven to do Torah mitsves right now. My initial inclination years ago was to participate on the obvious merits of, for example, making a separate day for rest and sharing a meal with my loved ones.

Then I was increasingly driven to deassimilation for its own sake: to divest from whiteness, its violences and the empty hole where culture should be. Judaism was my inherited tradition and I threw myself into it.

I'm an atheist—I'm not motivated by faith. I don't believe there is a divine purpose or significance to life, and I don't believe that Hashem is commanding me to do anything, but if He was, then I would answer that demand with resentment.

In the absence of belief, I was driven by lineage and community, which I see as the same things. Jewishness is a culture, and culture requires a group of people to participate and produce. I am in community with the Jews of the past and future, and the Jews of the present, the majority of whom are unfortunately very invested in perpetuating a genocide right now. I've tried to liberate Judaism from the recent parasite of Zionism—to strip off the globs of landlord-white paint and reveal original wood and beautiful brass fixtures. But instead I'm finding rot. How can I enthusiastically do Torah mitsves when one of them is "Don't be gay"? Why should I look to this text for ethical guidance when it tells me it's fine to keep slaves as long as they're not Jewish; or that women, children, and older people are literally worth less than men ages 20–60?

Torah has a simple answer: Do as I say, or else. It's a compelling argument if only for how beautifully written it is.

Normally I try to keep the Torah quotes short, but the Tokhokho is too striking to redact. I've highlighted my favorite lines. Please enjoy it fully.

As my good friend Joe summarized when I read this to her,

Hashem was like, "I'll make it so your enemies will trip on their dicks." And then Hashem was like, "But if you don't do what I say, then you're gonna trip on your dicks, and your enemies—they won't trip on their dicks."

These punishments are not only poetry. They feel like guarantees from the past which we are now witnessing. Today's Jews are not proud or glorious—we are anxious and neurotic, scattered among the nations, plagued with disease, heartsick over iniquity. My people—the Jews, the queers, the left—have been delivered into enemy hands. We are losing.

Though Hashem promises punishment for failing to observe all the commandments, there is a focus on specific transgressions: cultic idol worship and negligence in Shmita. If we mistreat it, we will be removed from the land. The land shall rest regardless.

But we may atone and return, to the land and to divinity. Some people hold that we must only read the Tokhokho together with the prior promises for obedience and the subsequent promise of rehabilitation. We are to read the Tokhokho in a lower voice than the cheerier parts before and after it. We must keep it in context, lest we forget that tshuva is always possible.

In an earlier line (26:9), Rashi and Sforno disagree about the nature of the covenant: is Hashem maintaining this special relationship with us (Rashi), or constantly renewing it (Sforno)? As a recently OTD yid, I am not in a strong position to speak on Hashem's relationship with us—but I side with Sforno. Our relationship to Torah is constantly produced and reproduced anew in our ever-shifting contexts. It's hard not to see the punishments in action today. Would doing Torah mitsves bring us closer to Hashem? Can we usher in Moshiakh and a better world to come by counting the shekels on a child's head?

"Why do I want to be Jewish like this:"

Last year when I was preparing for my conversion from not-halakhikally-Jewish to halakhikally-Jewish, I wrestled with the question of why: Why did it matter to me to be halakhikally Jewish? Why did I care about frumkeyt if I don't believe in Hashem? I came up with the following answers in a list:

Because I’m irrational! It’s all khukim [laws without reason]! Let me be irrationally, lovingly Jewish!

I care about preserving Yiddishkeyt. Anti-assimilation. I am (irrationally) trying to make sense of the Khurbn by becoming more traditional, more like how people used to be before the genocide, so I can better understand—and grope for—what was lost.

Understanding Yiddish requires understanding frumkeyt (and the rejection of frumkeyt, i.e. haskala), and I can’t understand it if I don’t live it.

I am trying to do tshuva—literally return—from my family's secularism to our once-upon-a-time frumkeyt.

Davening is awesome, Shabbos is awesome, the rituals are awesome, the calendar is great, the food is good.

It’s already my culture, and has been since I was born.

I love studying the texts, wrestling with Hashem and Torah. I love learning loshn-kodesh and being a student forever.

I love being around other Jews. I struggle in the frum community because of social issues and politics, but I love being forced to practice ahavos yisroel with them. (I don’t love it when they’re cruel to me.)

Jewish anarchism is the framework for justice that makes the most sense to me.

Judaism is obsessed with death and so am I. But it’s also obsessed with life.

These answers are not currently sufficient. I'm not davening, or wrapping tefilin, or counting the Omer, or making a single brukha. I'm not sure if I will keep Shabos this week.

But to the question of "Why read and comment on Torah?" I have a simple answer: it's beautiful, and it's ours. I am not the first yid to feel this way and I won't be the last. The questions are our canon.