“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[1]
These are the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If anybody understood human complexity, it was him. Solzhenitsyn wrote these words from inside a gulag – one of Stalin’s forced labour camps – in the second half of the 20th Century. In this space, he experienced what any impassive arbiter would be forced to term evil: show trials, exile, slavery, massacres, and torture. His documentation of these events helped expose to the world the sheer cruelty taking place in the Soviet gulag system.
Yet, as we heard, Solzhenitsyn was adamant that evil was not something external to himself, nor exclusively the domain of Stalin’s henchmen, but something that could be found in the heart of every human being. How could he arrive at such a conclusion?
He knew the evil in the heart of humanity because he, too, was a war criminal. As a commander for a battery in the Red Army, Solzhenitsyn oversaw atrocities. He witnessed gang rape and murder of civilians. He saw his armies enter Germany not to liberate it but to seek revenge. He felt, yes, that the Nazis and the gulags and the western powers were guilty, but did not believe that he was any better.
Solzhenitsyn eventually found a reconciliation between the evil he had committed and that which was done to him in the form of religion. I do not know enough about the Russian Orthodox Christianity to which he converted to comment on how it might have helped him, but I can see outlines of such a theology in the Jewish tradition. I see it in the traditional Torah readings for Yom Kippur.
Ordinarily, Liberal Jews do not read the parashah concerning the slaughter of goats by the High Priest on Yom Kippur. Many of our founders felt that this text fetishised ritual over ethics, and gave too much weight to a practice that was defunct and that, in any case, we had no desire to reintroduce. In his final words, published in LJ Today, Rabbi David Goldberg, z”l, bemoaned that many of the younger Liberal rabbis were turning their backs on the radicalism that he had embraced. For him, that meant cutting out parts of the Scripture that were distasteful or outdated.
While I greatly admire the sincerity of Rabbi Goldberg’s convictions and his pioneering approach to our movement, reading a text is not the same as rehabilitating it. We can engage with a Torah text to see what wisdom it can offer to the present generation without imagining that we have to then institute the arcane rituals it describes. The text that will be read today by Reform, Masorti and Orthodox Jews need not be read as an instruction manual. Instead, let us treat it as an effort by our forebearers to psychologically grapple with the same issues that face us today.
Leviticus 16 is the description of the High Priest’s ritual on Yom Kippur. Here, Aaron is instructed to bring two male goats before God at the Tent of Meeting. He will take lots for the goats – one will be assigned for sacrifice to God; the other will be sent off into the wilderness for Azazel.[2] Having carried out atonement rituals for himself, Aaron will then lay his hands on the goat that has been assigned to Azazel. He will recite over this goat all the sins that had been committed by the Israelites in the previous year and send the goat, carrying all of these iniquities, off into the desert, where it shall be set free.[3]
It is only natural to wonder what these two goats are doing, why one has been assigned to Azazel, and who Azazel even is. Rabbinic tradition furnishes us with some explanations. In some traditions, Azazel is identified with a demon, parallel to God, who has no power over the Jews unless they have committed sins beyond redemption. Then, on Yom Kippur, Azazel will be able to take hold over us.[4] In another tractate, Azazel is identified with the fallen angels, Uzza and Azael, who caused humanity to sin by teaching them violence and brought on the Flood in Genesis.[5]
Whichever of these interpretations we adopt, Azazel is clearly a representative of some demonological tradition within Judaism. This figure represents utmost evil. It is either the cause of all violence in the world or an evil spirit, waiting to take control over us if we are not sufficiently well-behaved. The goat assigned to Azazel, then, is laden with all the parts of the Israelites they do not like, and sent off to be dealt with by this wilderness demon.
By contrast, the other goat, arbitrarily selected for God, acts as an expiation offering. In its sacrifice, the Israelite’s purity and devotion are symbolically offered. This ritual, then, is a demonstration of that need to split the human psyche. Everything in ourselves we do not like can be pushed out into the desert and sent away. Whatever we do like can be ceremoniously paraded in the centre of our communal space.
We have hopefully come a long way from our belief in demons and deities that desire animal blood, but how different are we from our ancient ancestors, who sought to divide the world into good and evil? Today, we do not impose all our fears on goats and hand them over to monsters. Instead, we perform that same psychological distancing with other human beings.
We project onto them the things we fear most in ourselves. They, our inversions, are stupid, ignorant and hateful. They, the opponents we imagine, are conceited, conniving and immoral. We turn anyone we do not know into a container for our fears. The term ‘scapegoat’ is derived from this parashah, and it is a perfectly apt description of how human beings can be transformed into symbolic representatives of all that is in us that we hate.
You may hear this and think, yes, they do that. The others, whoever we perceive them to be, surely think and act in this way. By imagining others in this way, we fall prey to exactly the trap I am describing. Yom Kippur does not call on us to examine the lives of others, but to engage in inspection of ourselves. Yom Kippur asks us, as individuals, how we will improve.
The challenge this parashah poses to us, then, is to consider who we scapegoat. Who is it that we imagine is out there, holding the views we find contemptible and acting in ways we find objectionable? What is it about them that we fear, and hate? And what is it within us, that in making these assumptions about others, we are seeking to ignore or erase?
Solzhenitsyn learnt from bitter experience that the line between good and evil does not run between different parts of humanity but cuts right through the human heart. We cannot do away with the parts of our heart that seek to hate and destroy. We can only examine them and ask ourselves what has really motivated these feelings.
As much as this teaching pushes us to acknowledge our own wrongdoing, it also teaches us that, within all of us, there is goodness. We cannot deny all that is noble and kind and just within us any more than we can deny our own wickedness. It is, in fact, the basis of all growth and change that we accept that there is much within us to love.
While Azazel helps us to think about the monsters inside us we would like to hide, our relationship with the other goat, that which is given over to God, prompts us to remember all that is good within us. Judaism teaches us that we are, whatever our imperfections, fundamentally lovable and worthy.
If we were not, we would never be able to improve. Few of us believe that we are wholly evil, but many of us turn our mistakes into character traits. How often have you heard somebody apologise for being late by saying that they always are? Or, for that matter, excuse themselves for letting you down by saying that they are a bad friend? When we define ourselves by the mistakes we make, we cut off our potential to make better choices.
The ritual of the two goats reminds us that we are not the stories we tell about ourselves. We are neither wholly bad, destined to be consumed by a demon in the wilderness; nor are we wholly good, perfect to be presented before God. We are all of our flaws and all of our successes. We are complete human beings, capable of trying and capable of failing; capable of improving and capable of succeeding.
As we fast and pray our way through Yom Kippur, let us work to embrace all of who we are. Let us seek to remember that the flaws we see in others may also be true of ourselves. Equally, may we not forget that even those we dislike contain the positive attributes to which we aspire. Let us remind ourselves that the flaws we see in ourselves are also balanced by the traits of which we are proud. Solzhenitsyn warned us not to split up the human heart. This Yom Kippur, may we unite it and help it to grow.
May you be sealed for good. Gmar chatimah tovah.
I gave this sermon for Yom Kippur morning at Lincoln Jewish Community.
[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
[2] Leviticus 16:7-10
[3] Leviticus 16:21-22
[4] Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 46:9
[5] BT Yoma 67b
Sim Lev 