“The most intriguing covenant ritual in the Hebrew Bible”, as it has been described by the scholar Theodore J. Lewis, is to be found in this week’s portion. In Exodus 34, Moses tells the people about God’s commands and rules, and then he writes them down.
After this performance of both the oral and the written Torah, Moses sets up an altar at the foot of the mountain, with twelve pillars representing the tribes of Israel. He then has burnt offerings sacrificed and bulls slaughtered.
The next three verses of this dramatic account are mysterious and resonant: “Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and the other half of the blood he dashed against the altar. Then he took the record of the covenant and read it aloud to the people. And they said, ‘All that God has spoken we will faithfully do!’
“Moses took the blood and dashed it on the people and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant...’”
The phrase na’aseh venishmah, translated as “we will faithfully do” or “we will do and we will listen”, has become a watchword for pious obedience. The symbolic and ritual aspects of the ceremony are obscure. Blood and covenant are connected elsewhere in the Bible, for example in the ritual of circumcision, but never in the manner described here.
Moses presides over a staged reading of sections of the Torah, interspersed with a ceremony in which blood is sprayed both in the direction of God, as it were, and in the direction of the people.
In his book Pachad Yitzchak, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, one of the greatest Orthodox rabbis of the 20th century, offered the ingenious suggestion that the division of blood – half towards heaven, half towards the people – mirrors the structure of the Ten Commandments, half of which are centred on God, and half of which are primarily concerned with relations between humans.
This week an extra reading from later in the Book of Exodus is added, since we mark the first in a series of special Sabbaths designed to remind us that Passover is on its way. In the special reading for Shabbat Shekalim, all eligible Israelites are enjoined to renew their membership to the collective and pay the sum of half a shekel.
The money is to be used for the upkeep of the sacred precinct, but there is significance to be found in the universal fee of half a shekel. Each of us is called to pay their half, while remembering that it is not the whole.
Jewish life is often lived in the tension between two paradigms. The two equal portions of the ritual blood, however gory they may seem to us, seem to represent the bond between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human. The half portion of the registration fee symbolises all that is incomplete, all that still remains to be done. Torah, we are being reminded, is a game of two halves.
Image; Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness (The Bible and Its Story/Wikimedia Commons)
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