The Randomness of Life and the Choice for Holiness

The first of this week’s Torah portions, Acharei Mot, details the Yom Kippur service in the Tabernacle. The entire Jewish people would gather at the Temple in Jerusalem to watch and listen as the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, performed the Yom Kippur service, and on this one day a year entered the Holy of Holies to pronounce the ineffable name of God and atone for the Jewish people through a very exacting and detailed sacrificial service that is described in our parsha.

The most central part of the Temple Yom Kippur service was that in which two identical goats, which had been bought at the same time and for the same price, were brought to the Temple in Jerusalem. The High Priest then reached into a container which held two identical lots and randomly cast them upon the two goats. On one lot was written, “For the Lord,” and on the other, “For Azazel,” which roughly translates as “for the wilderness,” or “for naught.”

Following this lottery, the goat upon which the lot for God fell was sacrificed and its blood sprinkled in the holiest place, the Holy of Holies. Then the goat upon which the lot for Azazel fell would be led, in a truly strange, seemingly un-Jewish act of wanton destruction, into the desert wilderness and pushed off a cliff to its death. Two identical goats, one no more deserving than the other, no more holy, no more attractive -but with dramatically different, perhaps opposite ends.

This service almost seems as if it were engineered by a cynic attempting to highlight, through an eccentric act of performance art, the seemingly banal randomness of good and evil, the arbitrary meaninglessness of life, of will and destiny. Though exactly the same, one goat is randomly chosen for God, for holiness, for a sacrifice in the holiest place, and one is randomly chosen to be thrown off a forsaken cliff in a barren desert, alone, witnessed by no one, not even by its executioner, who had to turn his back to push it off the cliff to its death, torn limb from limb, unnoticed.

Why is such a thing performed? How in the world does such a ceremony so seemingly cruel in its randomness, bring atonement for the Jewish people? Indeed, it seems to fly in the face of everything we believe in and hold sacred.

The message of the two goats is a profoundly important one, central to Yom Kippur. Imagine for a moment that you are one of these two goats in the Holy Temple, destined for, you logically assume, a Temple sacrifice. Then your fellow goat is randomly chosen in a lottery, “for God.” You watch as your twin is led to the ritual slaughter. You are relieved; you are led out of the Temple, you imagine, to freedom; you are calm and smug, only to be thrown from a cliff in the wilderness, in a surprise Jewish ritual act unprecedented throughout the year.

In the end both goats die, much like in human life, seemingly randomly. What matters, though, is which has lived the nobler life. This is the lesson of the goats and the lesson of the teshuva (return and repentance) process we are engaged in on Yom Kippur. Not to escape death for another year, not to pray for a physically good year, but to live what we have “for God” and holiness and not “for Azazel.”

Often we wish to escape from responsibility into an imagined freedom. But in this world in which we have no control over, or freedom from, life and death, freedom and control are an illusion. What we can do though, is aim, within all the seeming randomness of our universe, to live a life of holiness and meaning – a life, “for God,” and not for “Azazel.”