On Wednesday, I noticed a small brown and black dog running at full speed across our front lawn.
I sighed.
We live near a highway rest area. Some people go to that location to drop off unwanted pets. But when I got on a jacket and went out to look, the dog was gone.
The next day, when my husband, Ralf, and I came home from work, we saw the same dog in our front garden.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Honey, I think we have a stray.”
My husband does not much like dogs. He worked as a security guard to help pay college costs when he was young and had to deal with aggressive dogs, who attacked and bit him. When Ralf is around other people’s canines he is polite, but distant. He does not pet their animals, he avoids them.
So it was odd – even strange – that after collecting our mail I turned to see him crouching down and calling to the strange animal.
Life as I knew it then turned upside down. The dog headed toward my husband and literally climbed onto his lap. He murmured softly to the creature, who repeatedly tried to lick his face.
I moved closer. The animal was starved to the bone. Her pink collar was frayed. She ran off to pick up the cadaver of a squirrel, then dropped it and came back to the house. I went inside to get her a bowl of water and cat food and then to call the appropriate authorities.
I came out to take turns with Ralf. Between wolfing down bowlfuls of cat food she sidled up to me to be petted and loved.
“Little Girl,” I said, “you smell pretty ripe.”
Over the next half hour we found a rope to tie to Little Girl’s collar and promptly fell utterly, completely in love.
She was not a pretty dog. She was, however, the very soul of love.
Nevertheless: our cat was not happy that she was outside his window. My husband has allergies, and we knew we couldn’t keep her.
“I feel guilty,” he said.
Watching her being taken away was painful. That night, I lay awake thinking of her beautiful, loving, smelly and starved self on my husband’s lap. I woke several times to worry about whether she would eventually be put down because no one would have her. In the morning, I called the shelter.
Little Girl, they told me, already had a possible home. I shouldn’t worry, they told me. “She is so lovable,” I was told, “we can guarantee she won’t be put down.”
Still, I gave them my number. “Please call me if she doesn’t find a home,” I said. “I’ll find her one if I have to.”
And then I sat down to reread my birth parsha, Acharei Mot.
Two goats, I read. One for the sacrifice and one to be sent to Azazel. I thought back to every Yom Kippur, when I chant about how we found, every year, the scapegoat for Israel.
As Jonathan Sacks explains in his book, Covenant and Conversation, some commentators have claimed that the name is actually a compound noun: It means “the goat (ez) that was sent away (azal). And when an William Tyndale produced the very first English translation of Tanakh, he rendered Azazel as “the escapegoat.” So, Sacks says, we have come to our present-day iteration of that word.
Every year I chant about an all-too human practice: making animals bear our burdens. Animals are there for our sake, to comfort and to surprise us. They offer their playful or sleepy selves to be stroked because, in such great part, we are calmed, we are made happier by petting them.
In this parsha, the escapegoat carries our burdens and bad behaviors away for us. We have atoned, we are cleansed.
Little Girl was sent away from whoever owned her as the very expression of human, ugly behavior. She was sent into a wilderness and she was starved of food and comfort and safety. She was a scapegoat.
All of us are engaged in banishing animals in one way or another: we destroy their habitats, poison them with our own products, and hunt them down – even now – for their body parts. They are bearing our burdens.
Just now I want to chant this passage, imagine those two goats, reimagine their fate and set them free.
May there be no scapegoats for Israel.
