Mishnah Yoma Chapter 3 Mishnah 5 Pt. 1

Deep in the day-to-day of the High Priest, we have been a bit on repeat, reviewing the orders of the rituals of the sacrifices. Today we were brought into the ritual incense burning of the morning which takes place between the splattering of the blood and the burning of the limbs. Hey, look, we all have our morning rituals—mine includes a gigantic cup of coffee and responding to my screaming cats who have empty food bowls. (And just to clarify, them food bowls are not empty, it’s all about perception.) So in all this repetition, what’s the point? What makes one moment different than any other? Why did our queer rabbinic ancestors give us so much seemingly repetitive detail?

The amazing thing, friends, is that there’s always something new to discover. One of the big questions that y’all brought up was about the messiness of this rituals. While at different points we have ritual immersions described, y’all aptly noted that with all the blood splattering and the incense burning and the limb burning that the priests’ hands must have been coated in a thick combo of blood and ash on the regular. How come we don’t have mentions of the High Priest(s) washing their hands between ritual acts? Wouldn’t that mean that the incense was probably bloody, that the blood had traces of ash in it, etc.?

Despite my pushing of the word שחר for “morning” as a point of interest, I didn’t have a lot of takers amongst this group LOL—but no worries, I still get to have the last word here. I think it’s significant that the root for “morning” here comes from the concept to “break through” or puncture. Our lives are messy, are they not? The way one wrestles in sleeps touches the first meetings of the mornings which color the lunch hangout with your friends which unsettle your stomach over dinner which then churn your sleep that night and on and on and on. The “break through” of the morning, I believe, is a reminder of both this reality—that everything breaks through itself and effects the next thing, and simultaneously that we’re never stuck in just one moment, one reality, and that a break through and a break-away is possible. For the High Priest to really do these rituals with meaning, I think they had to believe in the potency of this tactile experience to offer larger learnings about the nature of life itself. Maybe in the mundane repetition the mind could be trained to meditate, to contemplate, to prepare for the bigger, more frightening things of life. I know that sometimes the warmth of my mug of coffee in the morning against my cold hands reminds me of my own warm center in a world that feels colder and colder a lot of days. Is there something of your daily rituals that you could imagine connecting to something larger, nourishing in your life? Hope we, like the priests of the ancient Temple, can get to hevruta our sacred rituals some time <3