Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, Atonement and Israel
Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, Atonement and Israel



The entire Book of Leviticus covers just one month – the month of Nissan, exactly one year after the Exodus, the month sandwiched between the first of Nissan in the second year after the Exodus (Exodus 40:17) and the first of Iyyar in the same year (Numbers 1:1). Hence G-d gave Aaron and his descendents the mitzvot of the sacrificial service of Yom Kippur, in this week’s Parashah (Leviticus 16), half a year in advance.

This raises an important and obvious question: Since G-d commanded the Yom Kippur sacrificial service in Nissan a year after the Exodus, what had happened six months earlier on the first Yom Kippur, six months after the Exodus?

The Seder Olam (Chapters 5-6) answers this question: the Children of Israel reached the Sinai Desert on the first of Sivan (Exodus 19:1); for either one or two days they were sanctified (v. 10), then followed a three-day period (vs. 11 and 15-16) after which G-d gave them the Ten Commandments. The Talmud (Shabbat 86b, Yoma 4b) cites two opinions – according to the Rabbis, G-d gave the Ten Commandments on the 6th of Sivan, according to the Tanna Yossi ben Halafta on the 7th. That was the day that Moshe ascended Mounted Sinai, and remained there forty days (Exodus 24:18), returning to the Israelite camp on the 17th of Tammuz, the day of the sin of the golden calf, and smashed the two Tablets of Stone that day (Chapter 32). The next day, 18th Tammuz, he re-ascended Mount Sinai, and stayed there for another 40-day period (Deuteronomy 9:25) pleading for mercy for Israel, and returned to the Israelite camp on the 28th of Av. The next day, 29th of Av, he ascended Mount Sinai for the third time (Exodus 34:4), remained up there for another 40 days (Deuteronomy 10:10), and finally returned to the Israelite camp with G-d’s message of forgiveness on the 10th of Tishrei.

Half a year later, G-d decreed that the day on which He had pronounced His forgiveness for the heinous sin of the golden calf was to become the eternal Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

The Yom Kippur sacrificial service involves two male goats, one designated for Azazel (a rocky, desolate place in the desert), the other for G-d. “Aaron shall lean both his hands on the head of the living goat, and will confess over it all the iniquities of the Children of Israel and all their rebellious sins among all their [other] sins; he shall place them on the head of the goat, and drive it out with a designated man to the desert. And the goat will carry all their iniquities upon itself to a desolate land, then he will drive the goat forth into the desert” (Leviticus 16:21-22).

There is a peculiarity in the spelling here: the word yadav (“his hands”) is spelt defectively – the letter yud is missing (in most printed editions of the Torah, there is a Masoretic note in the margin pointing this out).

There are just five places throughout the Tanakh where the word yadav is spelt in the same defective way. The other four are:

  1. “When he approached the camp and saw the [golden] calf and the dances, Moshe’s anger flared up; and he threw down the Tablets from his hands [yadav] and he smashed them below the mountain” (Exodus 32:19);

  2. “Aaron raised his hands [yadav] to the nation and he blessed them; then he descended from performing the sin-offering and the elevation-offering and the peace-offering” (Leviticus 9:22).

  3. “For seven days they shall purify the Altar; they shall cleanse it and fill its hands [yadav]” (Ezekiel 43:26);

  4. “For He inflicts pain and bandages it; He crushes, and His hands [yadav] heal” (Job 5:18).

Whenever the Tanakh spells the word yadav (“his hands”) defectively, without the yud, the context is one where repentance is in the offing. Commenting on Moshe’s casting down the two Tablets of Stone (the first time that the word yadav [“his hands”] appears with this defective spelling), the Ba’al ha-Turim (Rabbi Ya’akov ben Asher, c.1275-1343) writes: “The yud [whose numerical value is 10] is missing because they transgressed the Ten Commandments …and the Book of Proverbs describes ten things as ‘an abomination to HaShem’”. The inference of the Ba’al ha-Turim seems to be that because the nation whom Moshe led out of Egypt transgressed the Ten Commandments, the yud, representing ten, was dropped from his hands.

And in commanding Aaron and his sons after him – the Kohanim throughout the generations – to perform the Yom Kippur sacrificial service and thereby win atonement and forgiveness for the nation, the Torah recalls the sin of the golden calf that would be forgiven on Yom Kippur. Specifically, by spelling the word yadav in the same defective way, it reminds us that sin weakens us all.

As the Ba’al ha-Turim notes, in the Book of Proverbs King Solomon describes ten things as “an abomination to HaShem”: one who deviates (3:32); deceitful scales (11:1); the perverse of heart (11:20); lying lips (12:22); the sacrifice of the wicked (15:8); the way of an evil person (15:9); thoughts of evil (15:26); the arrogant of heart (16:5); justifying an evil person and condemning a just person (17:15); and false weights and measures (20:10, 23).

And significantly, these abominations are precisely what the Torah goes on to warn against in Leviticus Chapter 19, the opening chapter of Parashat Kedoshim, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur sacrificial service.

In most years (as this year), Acharei Mot-Kedoshim is read on the Shabbat immediately after Yom ha-Atzma’ut – the celebration of the restoration of Jewish independence and sovereignty in our ancestral homeland. And after enumerating several perversions, Parashat Acharei Mot concludes with the sobering admonition: “Do not defile yourselves with any of these, because the nations which I am driving out before you were defiled by all these; thus the Land became defiled and I visited its iniquity upon it, and the Land vomited out its inhabitants. So you – you shall keep My decrees and My judgements, and do not commit any of these abominations… thus the Land will not vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation who was before you” (Leviticus 18:24-28).

In the graphic phrase of Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Hertz (Chief Rabbi of Britain 1913-1946), “through pestilence and drought, its inhabitants are vomited out in the same manner as the human system rejects food which is disagreeable to it”.



Rabbi Hertz here echoes the Midrash: “‘Thus the Land will not vomit you out for defiling it’ – the Land of Israel is not like the rest of the world: it does not tolerate sinners. This is comparable to a prince who was fed something which he could not digest, but vomited it out. Such is the Land of Israel, which cannot tolerate sinners” (Sifra, Kedoshim 10:14).

The Ramban (Commentary to Leviticus 18:25) offers a particularly extensive analysis of the special sanctity of the Land of Israel and the obligation that every Jew has to dwell therein. The Land of Israel does not tolerate sins – not even of non-Jews: hence the Torah tells us that G-d drove out the Canaanites because of their sins.

The Ramban cites the additional example of the Cutheans (i.e. the Samaritans), the non-Jews whom Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria, brought in to populate Israel when he conquered the country and exiled the Ten Tribes, scattering them throughout his empire (2 Kings 17:23-32). Because they worshipped idols, G-d sent lions who would eat them, until one of the exiled Kohanim was brought back and instructed them in Torah, which they [partially] accepted. The Ramban observes that “the Cutheans were not punished in their own countries when they worshipped their idols” – but the Land of Israel does not tolerate sins.

In the words of the Ramban, “this is the meaning of the phrase ‘this nation [Israel] will arise and go astray after the gods of the foreigners of the Land’ (Deuteronomy 31:16) – those gods are foreign to HaShem’s Land and inheritance”.

The Ramban cites Ketuvot 110b: “Whoever lives outside the Land of Israel is as one who has no G-d”. He then cites Tosefta, Avodah Zarah 5:5: “[Jacob said, on his way out of Israel]: ‘I will return in peace to my father’s house, and then HaShem will be my G-d’ (Genesis 28:21); and G-d said, ‘I am HaShem your G-d, Who brought you out from the land of Egypt to give you the Land of Canaan, to be your G-d’ (Leviticus 25:38). As long as you are in the Land of Canaan, I am your G-d; when you are not in the Land of Canaan, it is as though I am not your G-d”.

Our ultimate atonement is our return to the Land of Israel, because our return to the Land of Israel is our return to our G-d. Indeed, even Theodor Herzl, usually regarded as the arch-secularist, stated in 1897 that “the return to Zion must be preceded by our return to Judaism”.

And twenty years later, immediately after the Balfour Declaration, Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Hertz wrote: “A land focuses a people, and calls forth, as nothing else can, its spiritual potentialities. The resurrection of the Jewish nation on its own soil will re-open its sacred fountains of creative energy”.

Jewish history of the last 95 years has fully borne out the wisdom of Rabbi Hertz’s almost prophetic words. The greatest Yeshivot in the world are today in Israel: Babylon, Spain, Vilna, Poland, America – these have all had their run, and the Torah has been restored to its ancestral homeland.

On that first Yom Kippur after the Exodus, G-d forgave us for the heinous sin of the golden calf, we returned to our previous loving relationship with G-d, and He decreed that day as the eternal Day of Atonement.

A generation ago we returned to our ancestral homeland, and by doing so we returned to our G-d. As on that Yom Kippur day 3,323 years ago, when G-d showed us His favour, that He would not reject us, so too on the 5th of Iyyar 5708 (14th May 1948), He showed us, and the entire world, that He had not rejected us.