5.7.26 – Cleansing Sacred Spaces, pt. 3: the Tote Goat

 Do you remember my story of picking up dog doo in the public park? When an Israelite—which is who you are if you have been grafted into the olive tree (Rom. 11)—chooses to disregard the responsibility (that is, to not clean up after their dog in our analogy) or fails to bring the appropriate offering, they must clean up the contamination they introduced, and that is something different. What began as a non-ritual impurity now becomes a willful violation of covenant obligation. In Hebrew, this deliberate rebellion is pesha; it means revolt and defiance. It is a breach of trust with God. It is a severe category of sin in the Bible. It describes someone who knows what God requires and instead deliberately chooses to refuse—willful rebellion. These rebellions, along with other grave moral impurities (idolatry, sexual sin, bloodshed), are the things that penetrate all the way into the most sacred space—the Holy of Holies—and take up residence there. There is another Hebrew word we have to consider: avon.

Avon, which captures the results of that kind of moral corruption and lack of integrity, has a root meaning of something bent or crooked. It is out of shape. In Hebrew thought, sin, liability, and punishment are not truly separate concepts. They are a continuous reality. And so when Aaron confesses over the scapegoat on Yom Kippur, he uses the terms avon (iniquity), pesha (rebellion), and chatat (sin). The full weight is there, which leads to a very important understanding of Leviticus 16—Yom Kippur, the largest deployment of blood detergent in the entire system, right?

Once a year, the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies. He works outward from the most contaminated, most sacred area, purging the accumulated contamination from inner to outer—all the impurities that have built up over the course of the year. Even on some level, it seems that some degree of moral offense has penetrated its way in there. Blood purges everything from the sanctuary, representing life. However, the blood of the purification offering, while it removes contamination from the sacred objects (God's house cleaning), cannot accomplish something else that needs doing.

The iniquities, the guilt, the twisted moral wreckage of your year of utter rebellion and failure—these are not the same thing as contamination left on the sanctuary walls. The sanctuary is clean, but those sins have not been carried off. And here is where I learned a beautiful, wonderful new term that I would like to "coin" for you. We hear "scapegoat," right? Yom Kippur is when the scapegoat is identified. But there is a much better term for this goat: the tote goat.

"Scapegoat" has a lot of built-in baggage. The "tote goat" and the image is so right: after the sanctuary has been purged by all this blood, Aaron lays his hands on the live goat and confesses over it. They have a tote—the avon, the shame, and the chata'at of the people, the iniquities, the rebellion, the failures. All of this is Israel's moral failure that has polluted the sanctuary, and the goat just innocently carries it away. Poor tote goat :-) What a load to bear—away from the camp, away from the sacred space, away from the people. The blood purged the contamination from the sanctuary. The tote goat takes the sins that produce the contamination.

This is wonderful, but we have two distinct problems. The purification offering could not do what this tote goat does. The people benefit from the sanctuary being cleansed. They benefit from the guilt being carried off. But even still, they were not personally absolved, and Yom Kippur is a little bit confusing in this regard. The system maintains sacred space, but it did not—could not—erase personal moral accountability for the greatest offenses.

Yom Kippur provides atonement only to those who repent and purify themselves before they come to God for forgiveness. Are you surprised? It is built on the sacrificial system, and a deep understanding reveals that Yom Kippur provides atonement only to those who repent and purify themselves before they come to God to request forgiveness. In other words, there is a ceiling. Yom Kippur has a limit. The chata'at, the sacrifices they made, were limited. This is probably the most important thing about this.

If Yom Kippur could handle everything—if blood and goats could handle the deep clean, if that could take care of all the moral stuff and absorb all this rebellion and keep functioning forever—we have to ask one simple question: Why exile? Why would they be eradicated from the land? Why would they be vomited out of the land? If there is a total fix, there is a very misguided idea that Judaism puts all its eggs into one basket, claiming Yom Kippur is the ultimate antidote to everything that ails the interaction between God and humanity. There is no biblical basis for this. This is not what Judaism believes. It is not what the disciples believed. If the Day of Atonement could take care of it all—if that is the system God built—then how incredibly unfair is it of God to remove His presence from there if they are following all the rules? Why would the inhabitants be vomited out?

Have you ever wondered why our sin pollutes the land? More to come!

Happy 33rd day of counting the Omer.

Shalom,
Alan