Finding the Sacred

This week's Torah portion calls for us to "separate the sacred and the profane, the clean and the unclean." Humans bring order to our chaotic world by defining the sacred, the special, the extraordinary, and we use it to anchor our lives.

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To me, this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Sh’mini, is at the heart of what it means to be Jewish.

I’m talking about one line, Leviticus 10:10, “for you must distinguish between the sacred and the profane, and between the unclean and the clean” 

In his 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane, religious historian Mircea Eliade tries to make sense of humanity’s constant search for the sacred in an otherwise neutral world, suggesting that the universe is a “homogeneous, infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation is established….” 

In order to make sense of existence, human beings must place themselves at the center of that existence. Eliade writes, “if the world is to be lived in, it must be founded, and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space.” 

Sacredness, in Eliade’s view, gives humans an anchor point, a safety line that becomes unescapable, and no matter how hard we try to secularize society, we “never succeed in completely doing away with religious behavior,” because by defining what is sacred we can be bringing order to our chaotic universe.  

Life is hard, and busy, and sometimes everything seems to blur together. We get stuck, mentally, and everything from our perspective becomes about politics, religion, identity, career, family, even time. We need something to stand apart, something to look forward to, something that exists outside of us and our gray, systematic world. Whether it’s a place, or a time, or an object, we need something to be sacred so we can build our lives around it. So we invented religion, to explore experiences of sacredness.

What I love about Judaism, is that despite what you might think, belief in G-d isn’t a requirement. Jewish life, for the most part, isn’t really about our relationship with G-d, but about our relationship with the world G-d created. Traditionally, Jewish law is considered to have 613 mitzvot, or commandments. Some are positive and some are negative, meaning some are things we’re supposed to do, and some are things we’re not supposed to do. They can be incredibly detail oriented. The most famous specific Jewish laws probably have to do with keeping kosher—but if you read this week’s Torah portion, which serves as the basis for many of our kosher laws, you’ll find G-d surprisingly absent.

Jewish law doesn’t bring us directly into contact with G-d. That’s not the point. When you get down to it, mainly Jewish law exists to do what this week’s Torah portion calls for—to look at our spiritual and physical existence and make clear distinctions between the holy and the everyday, between the sacred and the profane. It is our intention that makes Jewish life sacred, it’s the process that’s important to us, not the product.

Judaism, like any religion, is ultimately a construct of the human mind. And because Judaism is so heavily based on rules, the point can easily be blurred, just like any systematic approach to life. The goal becomes more important than the process, and we can easily lose sight of the intentions we bring to our actions as Jews. 

The Mishnah, in Berakhot 5:1 says

“one should not stand up to pray unless they are in a serious frame of mind.” In Berakhot 2, the rabbis discuss reciting the Shema daily, saying that fulfilling the commandment requires a fully focused mind, concluding we “Learn from this that mitzvot require intent, when one performs a mitzva, he must intend to fulfill his obligation.”

Later, when discussing the sounding of the shofar, the rabbis specifically say that a person walking on the street who happens to hear the shofar’s blast has not fulfilled the commandment of hearing the shofar, because they didn’t intend to do so, they just happened to be walking in the street at the time.

Intention is everything in Jewish life. But even with the best of intentions, it can be hard to reconcile a world where the lines between what is special and what is ordinary become blurred, where it becomes harder and harder to identify and hold on to sacred time and space. Prayer, and other Jewish rituals, are vehicles to access that sacredness, but as our tradition teaches us, without the right mindset prayer can be pointless. And finding the right mindset seems to be the hardest part.

I want to end with a quote from a favorite Jewish thinker of mine, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the 20th century scholar whose word continue to resonate profoundly, and speak to how hard it can be to find the right mindset.

“There is a specific difficulty with Jewish prayer. There are laws: fixed texts. On the other hand, prayer is worship of the heart, the outpouring of the soul, a matter of devotion. Thus, Jewish prayer is guided by two opposite principles: order and outburst, regularity and sponteneity, uniformity and individuality, law and freedom. These principles are the two poles about which Jewish prayer revolves. Since each of the two moves in the opposite direction, equilibrium can be maintained only if both are of equal force. However, the pole of regularity usually proves to be stronger than the pole of spontaneity, and as a result, there is a perpetual danger of prayer becoming a mere habit, a mechanical performance, an exercise in repetitiousness. The fixed pattern and regularity of our services tends to stifle the spontaneity of devotion. Our great problem, therefore, is how not to let the principle of regularity impair the power of devotion. It is a problem that concerns not only prayer but the whole sphere of Jewish observance. He who is not aware of this central difficulty is a simpleton; he who offers a simple solution is a quack.”

Shabbat shalom.