Levitical Pastoral Care

Last updated on: March 23, 2016 at 12:00 am by Peter Leithart

Levitical Pastoral Care 2016-03-23T00:00:00+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Maps and Meanings by Nancy Wiener and Jo Hirschmann aims to apply insights drawn from the book of Leviticus to contemporary pastoral care. The authors lay out the Levitical mapping of reality, centered on the sanctuary, and then focus on the Levitical category of michutz lamachaneh, “outside the camp,” the place where various types of people are placed there – “lepers” and soldiers and others. By examining the experience of dislocation and decentering in Leviticus, and the rituals of reintegration, they hope to shed light on the experiences of people in hospitals, nursing homes, and military bases, all “outside the camp” locations.

They ask, “What can we learn from the Bible about our human propensity to orient ourselves to geography, time, and self, and to remain aware of the transcendent? How can our experiences of the metzora [“leper”] and other biblical figures who spent time separated from the community at large help us understand the impact of losing one or more of the axes of orientation? How does a person transition from one state of being, or one understanding of self, to another?

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They draw some of their founding assumptions from neuroscientific discoveries about the importance of mental mapping, the role of disorienting experiences in redrawing our brain maps, and the role of communal rituals and stories in enabling people to make safe passage through disturbing experiences. They pay particular attention to the mirroring work of certain neurons. They claim that “Whether we play a game of tennis ourselves or watch someone else play, the same areas of the brain and the same neural pathways are engaged. This means that the brains of both the viewer and the player record and store the images and the muscular reactions.” Mirror neurons affect both individual and communal experience: “On an individual level, our mirror neurons connect us to the people around us, allowing us to imitate their actions, to create relationship maps, and to imagine what is going on inside their minds. On a communal level, mirror neurons create what [Daniel] Siegel calls ‘we-maps,’ which ‘enable us to look beyond our immediate and individually focused survival needs, and even beyond the present version of our relationship maps, to a vision of a larger and interconnected whole.’”

How does the Bible shed light on these experiences? In general, the authors point to the community-forming power of ritual: “ritual and repetition are central mechanisms for teaching a social group’s newest members its value system and behavioral and social norms. Religious rituals the world over provide multisensory experiences that engage mind and body, punctuated with times of quiet and introspection. Because they simultaneously engage many different regions of our brains, such religious activities can have the same impact as meditation but on a collective rather than an individual scale. Patrick McNamara uses the term ‘de-centering’ to describe this sense of being unbounded and of transcending the limits of ordinary experience. . . . the individual has entered a ‘liminal state,’ which is perhaps similar to what happened to the metzora as he traveled from the camp to michutz lamachaneh.

” Ritual itself includes a moment of disturbing dislocation, which ultimately assists in forming people with new maps and a fresh sense of self-and-world.

Leviticus provides “we-maps” for Israel that “explicated the roles and functions of each individual, family, and tribe, and they enabled each one of these entities to understand itself as a component of the larger whole.

” Priests were at the heart of this system, and Wiener and Hirschmann rightly point out that this meant they were in the middle of the mess of life: “There was nothing rarefied about the priests’ work. They oversaw rituals intended to manage life’s messiness—but these rituals were steeped in precisely that same messiness. The priests were in intimate contact with human and animal bodies; they conducted their work amid the blood and guts of sacrificial animals and the suppurating sores of undiagnosed skin conditions.

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More specifically, the authors point to the central role of the priest in dealing with lepers. Lepers were judged lepers only by priests, could be pronounced clean only by priests, and were restored to Israel in a ritual that was conducted by the priest. They follow Mary Douglas in arguing that skin disease was a matter of boundaries, bodily and social-bodily: “What was supposed to remain contained within the human body had emerged to mingle with the world beyond it. As the solid and bounded became fluid and mottled, the metzora’s skin eruptions called into question the essential nature of the human form and rendered him tamei [unclean]. These eruptions also threatened the well-being of the ‘body’ of the community as a whole.”

Priests didn’t heal, but they guided the leper through the experience of dissolution (bodily and communal) and renewal. Wiener and Hirschmann suggest that during the leper’s exile from the camp, the priest visited him regularly to assess the state of his condition. In this way, the priest played the role of “shepherd,” which in Hebrew is punning related to the verb for “see”: The priest “sees” and assesses; and as a “seer” he is also a shepherd, leading the excluded leper back toward the flock. Thus the priest also played a prophetic role, giving hope for a future self that would be restored to full participation in the life of Israel: “The metzora was separated from the community and might have been experiencing steady loss of health and eventual death. Only the priest accompanied him on this journey.

” In the ritual of purification, a bird is killed and another bird released, portraying the liberation of the leper.

As they summarize, “Illness, the breakdown of the body, death, the breach of social norms, and going to war are all inevitable parts of life. Leviticus’s mental maps offer a model for how we might navigate transitions between the known and the unknown, integrate new experiences, and create a livable future for ourselves.

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Bible - OT - Leviticus

Pastoral theology

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