You did what?!

Not only is it a newly weekly portion in front of us, it’s a new book of the Torah. Yup, we’ve begun Vayikra, Leviticus, the book known for its lists of dos and do nots and the corrective actions to take along the way. To me, Vayikra often reads as a law text, proscribing and prescribing the way things ought to be; it’s sort of like case law for the Torah.

There’s something about case law, though. If you’re familiar with the judicial idea of stare decisis, you know that that doctrine means we should let precedents stand; that is not, however, the way law always works. While some case law certainly stands as precedent, other law is overturned, and over time, certainly, laws adjust to fit the society in which they are enforced rather than the society in which they were enacted.

You might think you know where I’m going: perhaps it sounds like I’m going to say that the rules in Leviticus no longer apply since the society we live in is so different from the society these laws come from, there being 3500 years difference there. I suppose that would be one way to answer the question. But I don’t think it’s that easy. While I am not of the opinion that we need to follow the rules laid forth in Vayikra simply because they’re there, I also don’t think that we can toss them all out because of when they come from. To me, there’s a middle ground, and to me, that middle ground involves what the laws are telling us about living.

This first weekly portion deals so much with sacrifices of one kind or another, for instance, and I don’t think the point is the sacrifices themselves. Instead it’s the idea that underlies the sacrifices that’s important. In this first parsha, you see thanksgiving sacrifices, offerings for unintentional sin, offerings for possible sin, for individual wrongs, and communal wrongs, among others. To me, the point is that we are responsible for what we do; our actions, whether intentional or not, communal or single, definitive or possible, all have consequences, and that we need to be responsible for those actions—and responsibility means more than just feeling bad. Responsibility means getting up and doing something about it.

Certainly, society now finds it more fitting to go and speak to a person you’ve wronged, for example (the Torah does, too; sacrifices are only one part of the process), but the idea remains the same: when you do something you shouldn’t, whether you mean to or not, do something to rectify the situation, something definitive, so you and everyone else can get on with life. That’s the spirit, in my view, of this portion of Vayikra: we’re all gonna mess up. It’s how we handle it that’s important.