My first experience with the word Azazel was as an epithet in Hebrew – Lech LeAzazel, meaning, “Go to hell.” I don’t know where I heard this, though most likely from my father. And I’m pretty sure I confused it with Azriel, the name of Gargamel’s cat on the Smurfs.
Recently in Bible study we came across the Azazel references in Leviticus 16, where it describes the ancient version of Yom Kippur, as opposed to the 25-hour fast and pray and self-flagellate fiesta we have today. In this ancient ritual, two goats of equal size and worth are chosen, and then, by lots, one goat is marked for God, as a sacrifice, and one is marked for “Azazel,” to be sent into the wilderness.
The goat chosen to be sacrificed to God is a familiar ritual, especially in Leviticus where we’ve just learned, in extremely boring detail, how animals are chosen and prepared and sacrificed to God on the altar by the High Priest. But this sending of a goat “to Azazel” is something altogether different. And before the goat is sent away, the High Priest lays both hands on the head of the goat and transfers all of the sins of the Israelite people onto the goat, so that the goat can take the sins away from the community with him.
In English we translate the “Azazel” goat as the “scapegoat.”
One interpretation of the word Azazel is that it was the name of a Pagan God, the God who goes beyond civilization, and so this goat would be sent to a demon God that predates the Israelite religion. This seems unlikely, given the constant drumbeat of God as the only God in the Hebrew Bible. But this idea of a god-who-goes-beyond-civilization made me think about how our vision of hell isn’t other people, as Sartre would have it, but as a life without other people in it. And what we call evil, or the devil, is what happens when we stop valuing civilization or mutual responsibility. Hell isn’t a separate place, it’s a different mindset that people can fall into, one that takes them outside of the human social contract.
The other, and more common, way of interpreting the word Azazel is as two Hebrew words stuck together – Az and Azel – meaning, “the goat” that “goes away.” In the Hebrew Bible itself, the scapegoat is only sent away, though later commentators say that the goat was not just sent into the wilderness but thrown off a cliff. The reality, though, is that being sent out of community would have been a death sentence in itself in the Ancient Near East, with no one to provide food or water or shelter, either for a goat or for a human being.
Maimonides, a Medieval Jewish sage (1134-1204), makes sure to remind us that you can’t really transfer your sins to someone or something else, and that this ritual is symbolic; and of course it’s symbolic, but it is a powerful symbol because it taps into some of our deepest feelings and wishes. We want to imagine that our sins can be transferred out of our own bodies and into someone or something else. And we really want to be able to blame someone else for what we’ve done.
There’s a lot of resonance for me in this idea of a scapegoat, because my father actively tried to transfer his own feelings of guilt and self-loathing, from his own abusive childhood, onto me. And that transfer was emotional, intellectual, and physical in nature. He literally put his hands on me, but he also tried to convince me of my own guilt with his words. He did a very thorough job of it, so much so that many years later I’m still dealing with the aftermath of all of the pain and mistrust and guilt he transferred onto me and created in me.
I think, usually, when we think of a scapegoat we think in more societal terms, like African American slaves being made the scapegoats of all of the self-loathing and guilt felt by their white enslavers, so that the “master” class could feel superior and divorce itself from any of the feeling of helplessness or guilt or vulnerability they were feeling in the new world. Or when Jews were scapegoated in Germany, and blamed for the economic crises in the country, to the point where Germans really believed that if they got rid of all the Jews their lives and their economy would flourish.
But I’m really interested in this idea that we can transfer emotions or deeds through touch, the way the High Priest puts his hands on the head of the goat and transfers the sins of the people through his hands. We tend to dismiss touch as every day and meaningless: we shake hands with strangers, and hug our friends hello without a thought. Even sex, in our culture, is often minimized and treated as a sport or a casual pursuit. But the Azazel ritual recognizes that when we touch each other we literally or figuratively leave something of ourselves in the hands of the other.
We rely on each other, for basics like food and shelter and protection, but also for human touch and connection. And if there’s anything this scapegoat ritual tells us, it’s that the worst thing that can happen to us, or that we think can happen to us, is to be sent outside of the community to survive alone. It’s not death that we fear most, but excommunication and isolation. Even today, when it’s much easier to move from one community to another, and to leave a family of origin behind in search of a family of choice, we still feel these cutoffs viscerally.
I am still very sensitive to touch, very aware of it and resistant to initiating it. I don’t hug easily. I don’t even shake hands easily. And with my dogs, I can see how important touch can be in creating a shared emotion, in communicating love and security and care – or inspiring fear.
I wonder what it was like for the goat who was sent to Azazel, if there was a sense of freedom at first, before the reality of exile kicked in, or if he felt the burden of the sins on his head right away and understood his fate. I hope he didn’t understand. I hope that for as long as possible, he believed that he was the lucky one, the one who got away.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
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