The Nazir

[This first appeared on my Livejournal on 5/6/2008]

This week’s sedra includes the laws of the nazir or nazirite. In Temple times, a nazir was someone who vowed not to drink wine or intoxicants, eat grapes, cut his hair or come into contact with a dead body, usually for a month. This is described as making him holy to God, yet at the end of the period he brings a sin offering, as if becoming a nazir was sinful.

There is much debate about the nature of this sin offering and what it indicates about the nazir. To Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman) his sin lies in his return to the mundane world after his ascetic retreat. However, in the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer Hakappar states that his status as a nazir is the sin. By becoming a nazir, he denies himself legitimate pleasures such as wine, and this, in Rabbi Eliezer’s opinion, is a sin. I would suggest that the position of the laws of the nazir in the Torah cast some light on this problem.

We might expect the laws of the nazir to be in the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) with the other rules of ritual purity and impurity, especially for the priests, who, like the nazir, are forbidden to have contact with corpses. Instead the laws of the nazir are in Bamidbar (Numbers), which largely concentrates on the narrative of the Israelites’ time in the wilderness, and especially the sins and rebellions of the Israelites and their leaders. While Vayikra describes an ideal world of human spirituality, Bamidbar is more concerned with the flawed nature of human society and our gradual, stumbling attempts to build utopia. This theme can be found throughout the book. For example, in describing another commandment we might expect to find in Vayikra but instead find in Bamidbar, the ritual of the red heifer, the process of purification for someone who came into contact with a corpse, Chief Rabbi Sacks notes its proximity to the stories of the death of Miriam and the sin of Moshe and Aharon (Moses and Aaron) which caused them to die in the wilderness. “Law and narrative are here intricately interwoven in a set of variations on the inevitability of death and the continuity of life. For each of us, there is a Jordan we will not cross, however long we live, however far we travel… But this is not inherently tragic. What we begin, others will complete – if we have taught them how.” We make mistakes, but life goes on. We can be purified.

The laws of the nazir immediately follow the laws concerning a woman suspected of adultery. The Talmud explains this by saying that a person who saw an adulterer would become a nazir. Seeing someone who could not control her passions, he would vow to control his own desires. As in much of this book, law and narrative, the ideal and the actual, are linked. The nazir is not an ideal situation, but a temporary measure in response to human frailty. As Rabbi Avraham Kook said, “At times we see that people of deep spirituality, the tzaddikim of the generation, are inclined to asceticism and to solitude, and that they show disdain for material existence. But this is an indication that the world has become corrupt, and in order to heal themselves of this corruption they are using radical medication. The healthy person has no need of these at all.” The nazir is responding to his understanding of his own weaknesses; ideally he would not need a period of self-denial. If the law appeared in Vayikra, next to the laws of the kohanim (priests) this nuance might be lost.

As if to emphasise the point, immediately after the law of the nazir we find another passage that would seem to belong with the priestly laws in Vayikra: the blessings with which the priests would bless the Israelites. In the Chief Rabbi’s interpretation, the blessings are for material benefits: food, protection, feeling valued, the ability to be an agent for good in others and peace. It is as if after reading of the nazir’s return to the world we are reminded that we must focus on this world, not withdraw from it like the nazir.