The Sin That Consecrates

The Hook

In the first line of these three chapters the Rambam does something the rest of the Mishneh Torah almost never does. He tells you that a man is flogged for speaking. The man stood in his own yard, looked at an animal he had already given to the altar, looked at an ordinary animal grazing beside it, and said that this one should stand in for that one. He touched nothing. Forty lashes.

And then, almost in the same breath, the law informs him that his sentence was effective. The consecrated animal is still consecrated. The ordinary animal is consecrated now as well. He has not moved anything. He has doubled it. Three chapters follow from that, and every one of them is working out the consequences of a rule that punishes a man for a transfer while insisting the transfer went through.

Temurah 1: The Mouth That Cannot Be Argued With

Chapter one opens with the verse and with an oddity the Rambam clearly enjoys. Leviticus says do not exchange it and do not transfer its holiness, and by the Oral Tradition a negative commandment that involves no deed carries no lashes. There are exactly three exceptions in the whole Torah. One who swears falsely or needlessly, one who transfers the holiness of a sacrificial animal, and one who curses a colleague using God's name. These three, the Rambam says, can never involve a deed at all, and all three are flogged. Notice what they have in common. They are all mouth. Speech that reaches into the world and shifts something, and the law treats the shifting as an act because that is what it is.

He raises the obvious objection himself. This is a negative commandment that can be corrected by a positive one, since the same chapter of Leviticus says that if he does transfer its holiness, it and the animal receiving it shall both be holy, and ordinarily such a prohibition is not flogged. Here it is, for two reasons: the matter carries one positive commandment and two negative ones, and the negative commandment is not of the same nature as the positive. Which is a technical way of saying something not technical at all. The positive commandment is not a repair. It ratifies what he did.

The rest of the chapter is spent on who has the power. A partner cannot make the transfer stick, and neither can the community; if a partner tries, he takes the lashes and the second animal stays ordinary. A man who consecrated an animal so that somebody else would receive atonement through it, the way one might buy the offerings a nazirite owes, cannot transfer its holiness at all. The nazirite can. The power belongs to the one being atoned for, not to the one who paid. A single heir can transfer; two heirs cannot, because two heirs are partners. The High Priest can transfer the holiness of his ram and not of his bull, because his priestly brethren gain atonement through the bull, and that makes them partners in it.

Then the boundaries of what can receive. Not fowl and not meal offerings, since the verses speak only of animals. Not animals consecrated for the upkeep of the building, only those destined for the altar. Not a hybrid and not a tereifah, since these can never serve as sacrifices and pointing at one is like pointing at a camel. But a blemished animal can receive, because blemished animals belong to a category that does reach the altar.

One ruling here is worth carrying around. The holiness of an animal that received a transfer cannot itself be passed onward. The verse says it and its substitute shall be holy, and the Rambam reads the pronouns strictly: it, and not its offspring; its substitute, and not the substitute of its substitute. Yet from the original animal a man may transfer again and again, a thousand times, and every time it takes and every time he is flogged. The second animal is a dead end. The first is an inexhaustible source.

Temurah 2: Which Animal Your Hand Was On

Chapter two is about the exact words, and it is shorter than you expect and stranger than you expect. The act is the owner standing over an ordinary animal of his own and saying, this should be substituted for this, or, this is a replacement for this. He may name the offering: substituted for this sin offering, substituted for the burnt offering I have at home. But if he says that his ordinary animal should be substituted for a burnt offering, with no particular burnt offering in view, his words are of no consequence. And if he says that the holiness of this is conveyed to this, nothing happens at all. The sentence has to point at something. Holiness does not answer to a category. It answers to a particular animal standing in a particular place.

Then comes a case that decides more than it appears to. Two animals stand before a man, one ordinary and one consecrated animal that has become blemished and is therefore waiting to be redeemed. He puts his hand on one of them and says, this one is substituted for this. Everything now depends on which back his hand was resting on. Hand on the ordinary animal, and he has made a forbidden exchange and is flogged for it. Hand on the consecrated animal, and he has done something entirely permitted: he has redeemed the blemished animal with the ordinary one, which is exactly what a blemished animal is waiting for. The same six words, the same two animals, and holiness ending up on the same ewe either way. The difference is which animal he was addressing, and it is the difference between a sin and a mitzvah.

The Rambam then presses that observation into a rule of astonishing generosity. Three animals consecrated for the altar stand before a man, one of them blemished and awaiting redemption, and three unblemished ordinary animals stand with them. He says, once, these are substituted for these. How many sets of lashes? Not three. Two. Two of the ordinary animals receive holiness by way of temurah, which is forbidden, and the third is paired off with the blemished one by way of chillul, redemption, which is permitted, and we assume that is the convention he meant. Why? Because a person will not abandon a permitted course of action and follow a forbidden one. Ten against ten with a single blemished animal in the group: nine sets of lashes, not ten.

Sit with that a moment. The presumption is not being extended to a stranger. It is being extended to a man in the middle of committing the offense nine times over in one breath, and the court still says that on this one animal, where a permitted road existed, we assume he took it.

Temurah 3: The Animal With Nowhere to Put It

Chapter three asks what becomes of the second animal, and the answers read like a catalogue of ways holiness refuses to be discarded. The substitute of a burnt offering, if male, is offered as a burnt offering. If it is female or blemished it cannot be offered, so it pastures until it develops a disqualifying blemish, is sold, and a burnt offering is brought with the proceeds. The substitute of a guilt offering pastures, is sold, and the money buys freewill offerings. The substitute of a peace offering is a peace offering in every respect, with the leaning of hands and the waving of the breast and the thigh. The substitute of a sin offering is consigned to death.

The Paschal lamb keeps time. If the transfer was made before noon on the fourteenth of Nisan, the substitute is not offered; it pastures, is sold, and a peace offering is brought with the proceeds. If it was made after noon, the substitute is itself brought as a peace offering. One hour decides what the animal becomes. And the substitute of a firstborn or of a tithe offering is never offered at all, because the verse says of the firstborn that it is God's, and the Oral Tradition hears a restriction inside that word: it is sacrificed, and its substitute is not.

And then the case that should stop anyone reading quickly. A man consecrates an unblemished animal. Later it contracts a permanent blemish and it is redeemed, which releases it into ordinary use. After all of that he stands over a second animal and says, this one is substituted for that one. The transfer is binding. And the animal that received it can never be offered, because the holiness that reached it had already been deferred once, and it can never be redeemed, because that holiness is not strong enough to encompass the money that would redeem it. So it is left alone until it dies, carrying something that has no outlet.

Set that beside the animal a few lines later that was permanently blemished from the outset. That one is redeemed, and even after redemption it may not be sheared and no work may be done with it. The verse authorized transferring holiness from the good to the bad, and having called the animal bad it turned around and called it consecrated anyway.

The Unifying Principle

Three chapters, and not one of them is really about livestock. What the Rambam is legislating is the behavior of holiness when a human being tries to relocate it. The finding is uniform. It does not relocate. It stays where it was and it appears where you pointed. It can be added to and it cannot be subtracted from. It survives even its own dead ends, sitting inside an animal that will never approach the altar and will never be sold.

The Alter Rebbe teaches that thought, speech and action are the garments of the soul, and that speech is not a report on the inner life but a vessel carrying it outward, making it present somewhere it was not before. Read the three exceptions again in that light. The oath, the curse, the exchange. Nowhere else is a man flogged for a prohibition with no deed in it, because nowhere else has his mouth actually built something. He is not punished for expressing an intention. He is punished for constructing, out of nothing but breath, a second holy animal that he now has to feed.

The Baal Shem Tov's reading of the verse that God's word stands firm in the heavens, unfolded at length by the Alter Rebbe in Shaar HaYichud, is that the divine speech which made the world has never once stopped speaking it. Creation is not an event that occurred. It is a sentence still being said. A person made in the image of that kind of speaker inherits a trace of the property, and temurah is the one place in halachah where you can watch the trace operate in the open. He says a sentence about an animal, the animal changes category, and he cannot take it back. Neither can the One who is still saying the world.

And the Rebbe returned constantly to the principle that in holiness we ascend and never descend, ma'alin bakodesh v'ein moridin, insisting this is not a rule of etiquette but a description of how the thing behaves. The difficulty of chapter one, a negative commandment corrected by a positive commandment that corrects nothing, dissolves the moment you stop reading that positive commandment as a remedy. It is a report. He transferred, and both are holy. The Torah is not repairing his mistake. It is telling him what his mistake produced.

Modern Application

A great deal of what we call trading up is temurah. A man decides the commitment he made is the wrong shape now. He was going to give a certain amount and he has found a worthier cause. He undertook something in a burst of clarity in the spring and by autumn he can see a cleverer version of it. So he stands in his own yard and says, quietly, this for that.

The Rambam's answer is not that the substitution is forbidden and therefore fails. It is that the substitution is forbidden and succeeds, and that he now owes both. The evening he promised is still promised. The evening he offered instead is promised now too. Nothing was released. The category expanded, which is why this is a punishable act rather than a neutral one, because a person who does it habitually ends up carrying more obligation than he can possibly discharge and calls the resulting exhaustion bad luck. There is an animal in chapter three carrying real holiness with nowhere to put it, and that is what an unkept, quietly substituted commitment looks like from the inside.

Then chapter two turns around and shows us how we are meant to be judged. The court is looking at a man in the middle of nine violations and it is still asking whether the tenth might have a permitted reading. Not because it doubts what he did. Because it holds a settled view of what people are like: given a permitted road and a forbidden one to the same destination, a person takes the permitted road. That is the presumption the halachah extends, and it is considerably more generous than what most of us extend to a neighbor, let alone to ourselves at three in the morning.

The Closing

It is worth noticing where in the year these chapters land. The first of Elul. The Alter Rebbe's image for this month is a king who has left the palace and come out into the field, where anyone at all may approach him and he receives every one of them with a pleasant face. It is the month for going back over what we undertook and did not do, and the temptation of such a month is precisely temurah: to trade the specific for the impressive and feel the account settled.

These chapters say the account does not settle that way. What you consecrated stays consecrated. What you offered instead is consecrated now as well. You cannot move holiness sideways and you cannot move it downward, and the only direction left open is the one the King in the field is standing in. Not a different animal. The same one, brought.