Should you be inclined to tell someone to go to hell, you’ll find the source in today’s parasha, Acharei Mot. We don’t really have a phrase that is its equivalent, but lech l’azazel is the closest.
We read about the High Priest and his responsibility on Yom Kippur. As most know, while Rosh Hashanah is not found in the Torah, the ritual for the Day of Atonement is. In fact, it is very elaborate, and as far as I’m concerned, is filled with more magic and, quite frankly, hooey. He is instructed to enter the Holy of Holies and pronounce the name of God.
Please raise your hand if you know the name of God, and with the destruction of the Jeriusalem Temples, all I can offer you is to come up to the bimah, stick your head into the Aron Hakodesh, and whisper that ineffable name or say it out loud. Of course, the moment you agree that the name is ineffable and you still want to pronounce the name, there’s a bit of an oxymoron here. Ineffable means not pronounceable, in fact not even known. The best we can say is that the letters with which we are familiar, yod, hay, vav, hay, can be pronounced Yahweh but that’s a guess, and we say Adonai, “my Master.”
Now about Azazel. The High Priest takes the sins of the community and places them on a goat. The goat is taken to the hills of Judea in the desert and tossed over a cliff. See, first he pronounces God’s name (oh, did I mention that no one else is in the Holy of Holies with him?)…a bit of hocus pocus hooey. And then magically the sins of the people fall on the goat, and with the most sincere kindness the goat is tossed. Wheeeee!
For the goat to drop that far seems parallel to what some feel hell is all about. Of course what makes more sense is the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem, on the far side of the Old City, a very, very deep valley which in the summer is, pardon the expression, hotter than hell, far hotter than the city itself. People tossed their garbage from the Old City into the Valley. All kinds of interesting notions about what went on down there have emerged since it seemed to both Jerusalemites, Jews and others, that this is not a pleasant place to be. No kidding. So hell – something we don’t believe in from a theological perspective – has a rich history in the imaginations of many people.
One of my former congregants said that Tish’a b’Av which commemorates the destruction of the Temples should be made into a holiday, not a day of sadness. He
said that without the demise of these institutions the synagogue would never have come to pass, thus rejoice and don’t cry every year. For me, the end of these priestly rituals and the evolution of Yom Kippur to what we recognize it to be today, is reason enough to rejoice