Parashat Tzav details the offerings of Aaron and his sons, the priesthood, and their sacred consecration to the Divine service. As I studied Zohar Tzav today, my eye was caught by a teaching that launches from the first words of Leviticus 6:13: “This is the offering of Aaron and his sons ….”
Rabbi Hizkiyah begins his teaching — which never explicitly engages that verse in Leviticus — with a somber reflection upon Psalms 145:17: “Righteous is the Lord in all His ways.”
How carefully should people consider the awe of their Lord and not stray from their paths, for every single day Judgment impends upon the world, because the world was created by, and is based upon, Judgment.
Zohar 3:30bTranslation adapted from Daniel Matt.
Rabbi Hizkiyah’s reading is driven by the psalm’s use of the word righteous, tzedek which also means justice, which inspires him to highlight the pervasiveness of divine judgment in the world. Hizkiyah next reflects on how we should live in a world with a constant propensity to punish:
One does not know when Judgment may arrive, settling upon one. Sitting in one’s house, Judgment settles upon one; going outside, Judgment settles upon one — and one does not know if one will return home or not … Therefore, one should hasten to ask for mercy … and be saved from Judgment when it prevails in the world. For every single day Judgment prevails in the world, as is written: “And God (El) rages every day.” (Psalms 7:12)
Zohar 3:30b
In the face of radical uncertainty and constantly impending punishment, Rabbi Hizkiyah insists, one must act rightly and pray for mercy. We never know if today will be our Day of Judgment. But every day presents opportunities to do good and to look beyond what is to what we want things to be.
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So far, this doesn’t sound all that much like Kabbalah, but Rabbi Hizkiyah has not forgotten that he’s in the Zohar. The stability of sefirotic symbolism is at stake as he continues to interpret the verse:
“And God (El) rages every day” — Really? How could this be? After all, the Companions [his fellow kabbalists] have educed that [the Divine Name] El is always [a reference to the sefira] Hesed (Compassion). Either we should establish it as [corresponding to the sefira of] Judgment or [to the sefira of] Compassion.
Zohar 3:30b
The divine name El is familiar from the liturgical expression ha-El ha-gadol, the great God (Deuteronomy 10:17). Gadol, in turn, comes from the same root as Gedulah (Greatness), an interchangeable appellation for Hesed, the sefira of compassion. On the kabbalistic tree, it is directly below Hokhmah (Wisdom), which makes it “the radiance of supernal Wisdom.”
The problem is this: If El is really Hesed, how can the psalmist say that El rages every day? Indeed, the expression “mighty God (El gibbor)” of Isaiah 9:5 seems to cast El as the expression of a different sefira — Gevurah! The stable relationships between various names and attributes and the ten sefirot thus seem undermined. This cannot be, he asserts. “Either we should establish it as Judgment or as Compassion.”
Hizkiyah resolves the apparent contradiction by invoking another kabbalistic axiom: Each sefira contains all ten, and each has the capacity to manifest as any other. Elis Hesed, yes, but when people fail to do good and do its opposite, their actions turn it into its opposite, Gevurah.
Rabbi Yehudah, until now the silent interlocutor, responds that this is fair enough, but it does not account for the phrase, “El rages every day.” After all, “every day” means regardless of human action. Rabbi Hizkiyah has no answer. The two take the question to their master, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai.
El indeed rages every day, Rabbi Shimon tells them, but it is not the kind of raging they are imagining — it is intensity rather than anger. A world governed by virtue one day will benefit from raging compassion, while a world that has strayed from virtue the next will find itself suffering from raging judgment. Either way, El will blaze with passion for the world every day.
El, he also reassures them, nevertheless remains the “radiance of supernal Wisdom” and, as such, carries Divine Love at its core. The system is not governed by a heartless algorithm, or by the scales of justice. And Elis intensely committed to pushing back against judgment and infusing the world with compassion, every single day. In the words of another psalm: “By day, the Lord ordains His love (hasdo).” (Psalms 42:9) As for El Gibbor of Isaiah 9:5, Rabbi Shimon explains it in the context of the entire verse, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace,” where it refers to but one of the sefirot within a harmonious constellation.
This hermeneutical resolution, stressing the harmonious constellation of the sefirot, exemplifies the Zohar’s take on the sacrificial cult as devoted to the restoration of that ideal state of alignment. This view is typically expressed in teachings that play upon the associations between the Hebrew word for sacrifice, korban, and the verb le-karev, to draw near, and between the word for incense, ketoret, and the Aramaic root kuf-tav-resh, meaning connection.
The question of why Rabbi Hizkiyah’s teaching follows the opening words of Leviticus 6:13, however, remains unanswered. I suspect that it subtly engages a classical midrash found in Leviticus Rabbah: “With the term ‘this’ Aaron] was humbled: ‘I cast it into the fire, and this calf emerged’ (Exodus 32:24). With the term ‘this’ Aaron was elevated: ‘This is the offering of Aaron and his sons….’” The midrash uses the word this to connect the lowest and highest moments of Aaron’s life. Like the rage of El, an individual is never stuck in one place and never defined by a worst moment.
The Zohar reminds us of the fragility of our existence; of the darkness that surrounds and threatens to envelop us; of the life-and-death urgency of moral conduct on a global scale; of the necessity to be good and to imagine a reality better than the dystopian one we have accepted and normalized. And, if I’m right about the midrash, it reminds us of the possibility to change course and redeem ourselves and, hopefully, our world.
This piece was originally published as part of A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone, an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria. Sign up for the entire series here.
