Have you ever had this experience? You get into an argument with someone and then, only after you leave, do you think of what you should have said?
That has happened to me, and this week’s Torah portion provides answers to a question that was once asked of me with regard to the sacrificial system in ancient Israel and the important moral lessons that are embedded in it.
Among the sacrifices that are mentioned in the portion is the hattat, the offering that was brought in the case of an unintentional sin. We may be able to understand the idea of a thanksgiving sacrifice. There also is a sin offering that can make sense: a person does something wrong and they atone by offering up a sacrifice. But why should a person have to bring a sacrifice when they have sinned unintentionally?
Dr. Baruch Levine, a great biblical scholar, is a Levi. He once told me that this is why he has dedicated so much of his research to the books of Leviticus and Numbers, and to the ways in which the ancients worshipped. And this is how he explains the hattat offering: “According to ancient belief systems, guilt exists, regardless of the perpetrator’s intention or even his awareness that he has committed a sin. Guilt, as it were, has a life of its own, and only an act of expiation can wipe it away.”
Think of that for a moment. If you do something wrong, whether you intended to or not, you are responsible for what you have done. You have hurt the world; you have diminished the amount of good in the world; you have injured someone and therefore you must do something specific and concrete to make up for the harm you have done, whether you meant to do harm or not.
It is not enough to say to yourself, “I’m sorry.” It is not enough to feel bad. It is not even enough to apologize in words, for words are cheap. Only by doing something — only by taking an animal from your stock, an animal that is worth a lot of money to you, and offering it up there as a sacrifice — only then will you have atoned for your misdeed, and only then will you realize what harm you have done. That is the underlying concept behind the hattat, that even unintentional misdeeds are misdeeds and they must be atoned for.
These days we barely take responsibility for the sins that we commit on purpose, much less the sins that we commit unintentionally. And yet the great confessional that we recite on Yom Kippur requires us to say: “Forgive us for the sins that we have committed before You, whether we did them deliberately or unintentionally.”
We may be cavalier about the harm we do unintentionally; our ancestors were not. They accepted a measure of responsibility for the things that they did that were wrong that they did on purpose, and for the things that they did that were wrong that they did unintentionally.
And perhaps we should too. Perhaps we ought to realize and regret and atone for the harm we do, whether we do it on purpose or by accident, for, either way, there is harm. And perhaps we should come to terms with this truth, so that we may lead more responsible lives than we do.
Rabbi Jack Riemer reminds us that we, who live in a culture in which “It wasn’t my fault” has become the first line of defense, should not be so smug and so arrogant as to judge our ancestors who felt it necessary to bring a hattat even for unintentional sins. Instead, we should learn from them to accept responsibility for all that we do.
Though we do not sacrifice animals in our time, we should at least understand how and why it worked for our ancestors and what were the moral lessons that they learned. Before we judge others and before we boast that we are morally superior to them, let us at least understand what the sacrificial system was about and what it was meant to teach.
Rabbi Larry Raphael is the senior rabbi of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco.