Photo by Grant Durr on Unsplash
Parashat Tzav concludes with a detailed description of the opening section of the ceremony of investing Moses’ brother Aaron as the High Priest, along with Aaron’s sons, Moses’ nephews, as the priestly family. After an interlude where Leviticus sets out the procedures for different kinds of sacrifices, the Torah now returns us to the narrative. We ended Exodus reading about how the Israelites crafted all the items needed for sacrifices, notably including the clothes that the priests would wear. Now we hear about how all these items were put to use for the first time, starting a new system for worshipping God in a formal, ceremonial way.
A prominent feature of this consecration ceremony is that somebody slaughters a number of animals. It’s probably Moses, but the text of Leviticus chapter 8 does not exactly specify. There are several verses that start with ‘And he slaughtered’, (just one word in Hebrew), in contexts that mention both Aaron and Moses, so that either could be the ‘he’. The word seems to stand alone, disconnected from the rest of the sentence according to reading tradition. The most interesting is the final instance of this, referring to the ram of consecration, in verse 23. This word not only stands alone, it is adorned with the ‘shalshelet’ note, the rarest type of cantillation mark in the Torah, sung as a long drawn out, wavering melody.
We chant the Torah with a shalshelet three times in Genesis, never in Exodus, Numbers or Deuteronomy, and just this once in Leviticus. In the first year of my rabbinic studies, I took a class on chanting the Torah with the wonderful Dr Chani Smith. Not only was Dr Chani endlessly patient with my struggles to master complex musical sequences like the shalshelet, she also taught all kinds of wonderful interpretations of how the Masoretic tradition of chanting adds meaning to the text. We learned about a tradition recorded by the 14th century commentator ibn Caspi that the three Genesis shalshelet verses all indicate hesitation, the wavering sound and the zigzag shape of the mark representing someone who goes back and forth between two options. The most famous example is in Genesis 39:8 where Joseph ‘refused’ the advances of Potiphar’s wife, but perhaps he wasn’t quite certain, he almost succumbed.
But what about the shalshelet here in Parashat Tzav? On the face of it, there should be no reason for Moses (if it is he) to hesitate. He’s simply carrying out detailed instructions from God. Everything has been prepared carefully in advance, and the ceremony should just proceed smoothly. Once the tradition was established that all the shalshelet words in Genesis relate to hesitation, people started coming up with Midrashic reasons why Leviticus 8:23 might fit the pattern. It would be nice to think that Moses hesitated to kill a poor innocent ram, but that’s not likely, since the whole of Torah is full of people ritually slaughtering animals without a second thought.
One possibility is that this is the last time that Moses will carry out a sacrifice on behalf of the people. This is the ram of consecration; from the moment it is slaughtered, Aaron becomes the High Priest and he and his descendants will be in charge of all future sacrifices. We know that Moses struggles with delegating; in Exodus his father-in-law has to give him a very stern lecture about not trying to judge every single case and dispute for all 600,000 Israelites personally. We might imagine that he was reluctant to give up part of what had been his job. If Moses did hesitate for that reason, I imagine it was because he was afraid that he was the only one who could get the job done properly; I don’t think this famously humble prophet would have envied the role of High Priest because he wanted to keep all the power and glory for himself! In fact, when Moses was first called at the Burning Bush, he didn’t want to be a prophet at all, and begged God to send someone – anyone – else! R Shimon ben Yohai in tractate Zevahim discussed God’s anger at Moses’ reluctance, and speculated that it was at this moment that God decided that Aaron, not Moses, should be the High Priest. Perhaps, then, Moses wavered at the moment of finalizing his brother’s installation, because he knew it was a response to a time when he had fallen short.
Or perhaps Moses’ hesitation is about more than just handing on his temporary role to the person who was always intended for that job. The moment at which Aaron becomes the High Priest is the moment at which the Israelites become fully committed to a religious life based on priests making public sacrifices on behalf of all. Nowadays we are very distant from priests, altars, sacrifices and the eventually to be built, and later destroyed, Temples. We might well follow the view of Maimonides that sacrifices were just a temporary stage to help our people to move on from the primitive forms of religion to something more sophisticated. And yet, the many centuries when sacrifices were a central part of how religion worked have irrevocably shaped Judaism and the effects continue to reverberate today. I speculate that in that moment Moses saw, with the eye of prophecy, just how significant sacrifices would become for future generations, how we would continue to structure our liturgy around the place where sacrifices should be. He wavered for the space of a few notes, a few heartbeats, trying to decide whether that was really the future he wanted for our people.
(If you’re wondering about the tortoise, it’s a pun on the name of the Parashah, as the Hebrew word for ‘tortoise’ sounds like the word for ‘command’. It represents the slow, painstaking work of a musically ungifted student gradually learning how to sing shalshelet, which I finally did this year for Joseph’s hesitant refusal.)
Dr Rachel Berkson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.