A rather unsettling war story in the Book of Judges describes a crack squad of left-handed soldiers with the boast that “every one of them could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.” (Judges 20:16) The Hebrew for ‘miss’ – yakhati – derives from the root khet, tet, alef which also yields the word for ‘sin’ – khet. Think Yom Kippur for a moment – al khet she’khatanu l’fanekha – ‘for the sin which we have committed (literally ‘sinned’) before You.’
Parashat Vayikra introduces a central category of Jewish thought, the unwittingly committed sin or misdeed. Here’s the wording from the Book of Leviticus: “When a person unwittingly incurs guilt in regard to any of the Lord’s commandments about things not to be done, and does one of them—” (4:2). In Hebrew – nefesh ki tekheta bi’sh’gaga. Or, to translate with the stone slinging use of the same term in mind, ‘one who unintentionally misses the mark.’ One, in other words, who inadvertently errs. That kind of mistake, or sin, has consequences, and in the levitical system it must be compensated for with a purification (or ‘sin’) offering known in Hebrew as a khatat.
Now, you might protest, no one errs on purpose! Why would one intend to make mistakes? No basketball player ever launched a last second three pointer aiming to miss. And that missed shot will certainly not be among the highlights of the NCAA tournament flashing across our screens over the next few weeks. The error is always unintended. What, then, could the Torah be describing? And why a penalty for an inadvertent mistake?
Two modern giants of Biblical scholarship, Jacob Milgrom and Richard Elliot Friedman, offer some help. “Inadvertent wrongdoing,” Milgrom writes, “may result from two causes: negligence or ignorance. Either the offender knows the law but involuntarily violates it or he acts knowingly but is unaware he did wrong.” And Friedman adds that “people still feel guilty when they do harm, even if they meant no harm, and so this provides a mechanism for purging the guilt and putting the act in the past.”
We all miss the mark, some of us more often than others, either out of ignorance or negligence. In thinking about this parasha, this week I set out to list my many inadvertent mistakes. I quit after cataloguing just a couple of days’ worth. Too much to tabulate! Even though I meant no harm in each of those instances, I know that I caused harm and I do feel responsible. Putting those acts in the past would be quite a good thing. The Torah means to teach us how. After all, there are many more missed shots to be taken in the days ahead!
Shabbat Shalom.
