The Sexual Codes of Leviticus Sow the Seeds of a Fruitful Culture

By the second millennium CE, most of America was ready to close the book of Leviticus for good. Sure, Genesis and Exodus contain enduring stories that grapple with what’s right and wrong for men, and women, to do in their struggle to live meaningful lives. But the modern attitude reserved for the third—and therefore central—book of the Torah may have best been captured in a supersessionist tirade delivered by Aaron Sorkin’s fictional American president in a year-2000 episode of The West Wing. At the climax of his speech (the real subject of which is tolerance of homosexuality), he asks: “Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?”

These rhetorical questions sum up the contemporary American understanding of Leviticus pretty well, insofar as they combine gross distortion and studied ignorance with the presumption of well-deserved ridicule. Of course, the Torah does not mandate the death penalty for wearing sha’atnez, a forbidden fabric of blended wool and linen, but who cares? It might as well do so, as the very idea of forbidding such clothing is absurd to begin with. And anyway, we all know Leviticus does preach the execution of gays, and that is self-evidently why no civilized person should pay it much mind, unless it’s to mine it for more zingers condemning religion on another enlightened TV drama.

The most obvious (and quintessentially American) mistake in such an approach to the text is that it trips headlong over Judaic particularism. The themes of Genesis and Exodus are sufficiently universal that it is easy enough to treat them as old storehouses of moral teaching for a post-Christian liberal order, but Leviticus is full of laws specifically intended for the nation that will thrive in the Land of Israel. As Sorkin’s—that is, turn-of-the-century American liberalism’s—accusation against Leviticus goes, though, crying particularism is no defense.