After Nadav and Avihu were punished with death because they showed too much familiarity by eating and drinking in God’s presence, Aharon and each Kohen Gadol after him are warned not to come into the inner sanctuary whenever they want. God resides there and, unlike the angels, man cannot see God and live. Only once a year, on Yom Kippur, when the Kohen Gadol is no longer in danger of showing familiarity by eating and drinking because he is fasting, is he allowed to enter God’s inner chamber.
The Kohen Gadol enters the inner sanctuary in order to offer up the sacrifices that will procure atonement for his and the Jews’ violations of both the negative and positive commandments. The central part of the sacrifice is the sprinkling of the blood of the slaughtered animal on the altar. Blood is the essence of life. Without it, we die. The person bringing the sacrifice needs to identify with the animal whose life blood is being taken in his stead and understand that but for the grace of God, he would have suffered the same fate.
But before the Kohen Gadol could come into God’s chamber with the blood of the sacrifice, there was a barrier to entry. That barrier is called lashon hara, slander. God cannot abide the presence of slanderers. Indeed, we are told that the Second Temple was destroyed on account of the petty hatred that slander engenders. And so, before entering with the blood of atonement, the Kohen Gadol must first deodorize himself from the odor of slander. He must first bring the ketoret, the finely pulverized perfumed incense which, we are told, atones for the sin of slander. There was one foul smelling ingredient in the ketoret recipe called chelbona. But its foul odor was covered up by the sweet smell of the other ingredients, to show us that the way to persuade the sinner to mend his ways is not by talking ill of him and ruining his reputation, but by welcoming him into society and surrounding him with sweetness.
In addition to the bull sacrifice, Aharon took two identical looking he-goats and placed them in the Temple courtyard facing the sanctuary. One of them was chosen by lot to be offered up on the altar to atone for the sin of entering the Temple in a state of impurity. The other he-goat was chosen by lot to be sent to Azazel in the wilderness to atone for all of the sins of the Jews.
The word Azazel is a combination of the names of two angels, Uza and Azael. These two angels pointed to man’s sins and argued that man was not worthy of being entrusted with the safekeeping of God’s Torah. If we angels were human, they said, we would never lose sight of God’s presence and we would never sin. So God told them to put their money where their mouth was. He sent them down to earth to see how they would fare. No sooner had they landed on earth than they succumbed to the sin of adultery. They did not sin because they denied the existence of God. They sinned because they were human, because that is how God created man, with an evil inclination. The he-goat that was chosen for the Azazel was sent into the desert, to show that it is the temptations of society that entice a person to sin and that if he were to live in the desert, in total isolation, he would likely not succumb to sin. It is these two mitigating factors — the evil inclination that God planted within us and the pressure of society that surrounds us — that God takes into account on the Day of Judgment and of which He is reminded by the he-goat chosen for Azazel.
Why was it that one of the two identical he-goats atoned only for the one sin of entering the temple in a state of impurity whereas the other identical he-goat atoned for all of the Jews’ sins? The answer is that the Mishkan resides within us. “You must warn Bnei Yisrael about their impurity so that they will not …defile the Tabernacle that I have placed among them” (Vayikra 15:31). A lack of awe and respect for God, which allows one to enter into His presence in a state of oblivious impurity, results in the collapse of the whole structure of the 613 mitzvot, which are designed to remind us of God’s constant presence in our lives. One leads to the other and therefore the two identical he-goats were of equal importance.
On Yom Kippur, the Kohen Gadol was to remove his golden garments and enter the Holy of Holies in pure white linen garments. The trappings of wealth that lead one to sin had to be discarded and the white cloths in which we ultimately are returned to God had to be worn to remind us of our ultimate vulnerability.
The avnet, the girdle with which the Kohen Gadol girded himself during the year, was made up of a shatnez mixture containing the colors blue, purple and scarlet, which symbolized different shades and degrees of sin. That was acceptable for the Temple service during the year when God had to accept the mixed bag of good and bad that constitutes the human being on earth. But on Yom Kippur, when we most closely resemble angels, when our good intentions are not colored by our roving thoughts, the Kohen Gadol wore a pure white, linen girdle. The Satan, who works hard to mislead us 364 days of the year (equal to the numerical value of the word HaSatan) has no power over our minds and thoughts on that one day of the year called Yom Kippur.
Raphael Grunfeld, a partner at the Wall Street law firm of Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP, received Semichah in Yoreh Yoreh from Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem of America and in Yadin Yadin from Harav Haga’on Dovid Feinstein, Zt”l from whose Shiurim, which he attended for twenty years, many of these ideas are taken.
