By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel
CHULA VISTA, Caliornia — The ritual of the scapegoat persists even to this day in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. When I was a young Orthodox teen, I recall how we would all get up early in the morning and go to the slaughterhouse backyard, and we would take a chicken and wave it over their heads. According to the Artscroll Machzor for Yom Kippur:
- Men must take a rooster, while women must take a hen. Take a rooster in the right hand and afterward say, “This is my exchange, this is my salvation, and this is my atonement. This rooster shall go to its death, while I will enter and proceed to a good long life and to peace.”
- Then revolve the chicken around your head, swinging it over your head. Some authorities argue that this should be done three times others say once is sufficient. If you are an expecting mother, it is customary to use two chickens for atonement, one for the mother and one for the unborn child.
The custom of Kapparot has some peculiar similarities to the ancient pagan and black magic rituals. As early as the 16th century, R. Joseph Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch condemned it as pagan superstition. In addition, the custom implies that the unborn infant also needs atonement — this is not a Jewish belief, but it is one of the basic tenets of Christianity.
Today, several leading Haredi rabbis have complained for the first time about the problems with animal cruelty and have now banned it. Some scholars thought it was better to give food gifts or money to the poorer.
In the streets of Brooklyn, or Los Angeles, Hassidic Jews no longer give the chickens away to the poor as Jewish Law prescribes. State Law requires that chickens be slaughtered in a clean environment by professionals. As a result, the dead chickens are placed in large plastic bags and taken to the garbage.
Yet, despite rabbinic reservations, folk religion often follows customs because of tradition. I would imagine that being able to transfer our collective and individual sins unto the poor chicken must be a really exhilarating experience.
I mention this odd piece of Jewish folk religion because in some ways, it highlights man’s eternal desire to seek some symbolic way of banishing our sins. Even though we no longer have a Temple to perform these ancient rites, we nevertheless yearn for personal purification rituals.
Historically, this is not only true of the Bible, it was true in Late Antiquity.
SCAPEGOAT IN ANTIQUITY
Sir James Frazer illustrates in his famous work, The Golden Bough, how the ancient Greeks and Romans utilized the scapegoat. On every March 14 in the calendar year, the poor homeless man was dressed in sacred garments, decked with holy branches, and led through the whole city, while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people might fall on his head. He was then cast out of the city or stoned to death by the people outside of the walls. (I believe this type of story probably inspired several Stephen King horror novels.)
Frazer also describes how primitive societies throughout the world have relied on scapegoats and other ritual purification ceremonies, usually performed annually and seasonally, to purge their communities of evil and epidemics, demons and natural disasters. “To effect,” Frazer writes, “a total clearance of all the ills that have been infesting a people.”
Yes, our forbearers were not terribly sophisticated; their world was steeped in magic and superstition. The scapegoat reflected their need to purify themselves as a society — but often it came at the expense of an innocent victim—quite often the poorest and most vulnerable elements of society.
SCAPEGOAT IN MODERN TIMES
The Jew has long been the world’s perennial scapegoat.
Modern society is much more subtle about its use of scapegoats. Psychologists Alice Miller and Robert Coles explain that scapegoats are targets that “absorb our pain, our feelings of hopelessness.” And I would add: we crave scapegoats to absorb our hypocrisy and moral duplicity.
The scapegoat is also often applied to individuals and groups who are accused of causing misfortune; they are identified with evil, blamed and then cast out of the family or community so that the remaining members are left with a feeling of guiltlessness.
And in Modern Times:
The political arena tends to promote class warfare, pitting the rich vs. the poor, when the real problem is the lack of accountability regarding how government monies are spent. Democrats will blame Republicans, and Republicans will blame Democrats; you have heard the story many times before. Rather than exposing the crooked and dishonest politicians, we often see our political leaders create scapegoats so that nobody will notice the real source of our problems — namely, our own leaders’ moral corruption.
Minorities will often blame the white man; feminism often blames men for the problems they experience. People who see themselves as life’s victims tend to see somebody else to blame. The phenomena of frivolous lawsuits are empirical evidence of how ordinary people sue large companies no matter how silly the claim might be.
Personal responsibility is seldom ever taught as a virtue worth cultivating in schools.
The philosopher Ayn Rand really gets to the heart of our reticence to accept personal responsibility:
“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality . . .” Rand is correct. Yom Kippur teaches us that we must stop acting in ways that are so self-destructive. We have nobody else to blame but ourselves for failing to think and act responsibly–which, I might add, is the hallmark of spiritual adulthood. It is also the key to unlocking our human potential and actualizing our life purpose in this temporal world.
Freud understood this human problem and observed, “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” Is it any wonder why people seek to blame others for life’s injustices?
There is a light-hearted story that really captures the essence of this article:
Linus asks Lucy, “Why are you always so anxious to criticize me?”
Lucy responds, “I just think I have a knack for seeing other people’s faults.”
“What about your own faults?”
“I have a knack for overlooking them.”
Instead of being eager to dish out criticism all the time, take the humane, sensible approach. We need to fix the world starting with ourselves. It is high time that we consider letting our scapegoats go; we have been holding on to them long enough.
Be a good-finder, not a fault-finder, and may you all be blessed with a year of blessing that only comes when we take the lessons of Yom Kippur seriously to heart.
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Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista and the author of numerous books on biblical subjects. He may be contacted via michael.samuel@sdjewishworld.com