Leviticus is a pause in our rush forward in our ambitions. It reminds us to tend within us the fire which powers our love for higher service. View the study sheet here. View the zoom recording here.
One hundred thirty. That is the number of mass shootings that have occurred in the United States in the first 80 days of 2023, according to the nonprofit research group Gun Violence Archive. As broken-hearted families mourn and shattered communities seek healing, policy makers explore and debate to what extent legislation might interrupt these daily tragedies that tear at both the human heart and the communal fabric.
At its highest expression, politics is an enterprise designed to cohere a community through managing its members’ public affairs. As a human activity, it involves both benevolent and self-serving intentions, both anticipated and unanticipated outcomes. The study of politics is an exploration of power relations, its impact on public policy, and both short and long-term trends for various groups and their respective social agendas.
In 2007 a group of policy experts published the book Canadian Politics in the 21st Century, which comments on political trends in that country. On the cover is a painting by Israeli-born Canadian artist Osnat Tzadok. She was an interesting choice for a cover design. Tzadok is an abstract painter. For her, art seeks not so much to provide certainty and clarity as to deepen mystery. Her approach is to go “where the subconscious is leading the conscious, and where the apparent is giving way tothe hidden.”
Pictured here is her painting Fire Within. The medium is acrylic paint, which she has worked upon with a palette knife, giving it a raised, thick texture. Tzadok takes us to depths within each of us that are both complex and rarely explored. It is a subterranean dimension; yet that is where divine light dwells: “The soul of a person is God’s candle” (Proverbs 20:27).
Torah’s journey reaches its midpoint with the book of Leviticus. Not in terms of the chronological flow of the narrative but in terms of the actual construct of Torah. Leviticus lies at the very heart of Torah. And it is there that we encounter images thick with fire.
As readers we can cross through the realm of Leviticus viewing it as a relic from a different time, constructed out of the powerful self-interests of the priestly class. The altar, upon which sacrifices were offered, can be seen as mere artifact, literally “that which is human made.” Or we can see there an image of something that is not artifact but natural: a fire that burns within each of us, embers from a divine combustion, aflame with love for all creation and its Source.
Of all the books, Leviticus pauses us in our rush to the next waypoint. Its fires and its renderings of material life into smoke remind us that the promise of a fulfilling, nourishing and peaceful world requires us to explore the fire within and to learn how to use that power not for destruction and death but for goodness and life.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) Thursday March 30 as we explore where the apparent gives way to the hidden.
Acrylic on canvass Fire Within by Osnat Tzadok
