‘He Gives Food To All The Creatures He Created’: Sod Of The Scapegoat’s Portion
“He gives food to all the creatures He created.”
Begin there, with that single, almost casual line in the Amidah — a line that, if you lean into it, opens into a moral cosmos. All. The word spans the world like a net: not only those we esteem, not only the lovely and the useful, but every creature whatsoever. Even what repels our eye, even what we name malign. The prayer says it straightaway, without apology: the Divine feeds everything. The sentence is a program. It is theology in miniature and an ethical compact: life is given, and nothing is absolutely outside the ordering hand of Providence. Yet the sentence also admits a paradox, and it is this paradox — the scapegoat ritual — the Zohar, the Arizal and the chasidic masters all feel their way toward — the paradox that the world needs a place for the ugly, for freedom’s darkness; that even malevolence must have a crust of bread lest the whole architecture of choice collapse into either nihilism or tyranny.
If “all” is absolute, then either the world would be ungoverned — sustaining everything without proportion — or some careful economy must be at work. The pious imagination has always chosen economy: the Divine gives, yes, but the measure is not arbitrary. The classical synagogue prayerbook makes the statement of provision and lets it sit, but the mystical tradition reads it like a chord that connects to the most secret machinery of being. From that machinery issue two closely related theses, both of them attempting to reconcile three stubborn facts: (1) evil exists and has efficacy; (2) free will is real and precious; (3) the Divine is, at the same time, sovereign and merciful. The solution they propose — and the one we will follow — is an economy of nourishment: evil is permitted a ration, and that ration is calibrated so as to enable autonomy without allowing domination. Evil receives only a minimum: a crumb to do its appointed work — to test, to provoke, to make choice meaningful — but not so much that it swallows the world.
In the simplicity of that model there is a delicate lightness: the world remains a moral workshop rather than a stage for eternal defeat. But the drama of Genesis complicates everything. When our first parents ate prematurely — when they took the fruit of knowledge before the appointed ordering of the world had matured — they performed not merely a moral transgression but a metaphysical piercing. The tradition that hears this as literal, allegorical, or mythic will agree on one thing: they violated a boundary. That boundary is the ingenious membrane — call it the peel that separates fruit from seed, the measure that keeps goodness from being consumed by its own revelation. Before the break, good and evil were kept in a relation of ordered difference. Post-fall, the membrane is torn. The ancient image in the Zohar and in later kabbalah is not merely a psychological one but a cosmological breach: the fruit’s sweetness leaks; what was interior spills into the exterior; the delineation between measure and appetite, between the spark and the husk, is muddied. The result is disastrous in a technical and moral sense: once the peel is broken, the evil that formerly had only a slender ration now has access to a greater banquet that comes from the confusion of human appetites and the misdirected exercise of knowledge.
Read the Torah’s law of the Day of Atonement — the Leviticus text that performs the scapegoat rite — with that calamity in one’s ear. The high priest, robed in measured sanctity, takes two goats. For one he pronounces the Name of blessing and offers sacrifice to draw near; the other, bearing the word Azazel, is sent away into the wilderness. The two goats are not symmetrical: one draws the community toward healing; the other carries — in the Rif, the Rambam, the medieval commentators, and in the Zoharic imagination — the burden that must be expatriated. The rite stages a drama of distribution. The community speaks the diverse confessions, the high priest places them upon the goat, and the goat departs. The very act of exile is an enactment of the primordial economics: we refuse to let the malignant element fester amongst us any longer. We choose expulsion, or at least controlled relocation, over absorption.
The Zohar watches this rite as if it were the hinge of worlds. It observes the twin movement: confession — and removal; inward naming — and outward disposal. In the Zohar’s voice the scapegoat is more than a symbol; it is a living agent in the spiritual polity. The goat is a mediator between two polities, a border patrol that takes with it certain forces that must be dispatched beyond the circuits of ordinary life. The Zohar’s language is fantastical and literal at once: forces of impurity that cling to the community are passed to the wilderness where their power is diminished. But the Zohar, true to its dialectic, also intimates that the wilderness is not the sterile negation of God’s domain — the void is not utterly outside the economy of the Divine — and so the rite is not a triumphal purging but a careful handing-off, so that the accuser is distracted from accusing Klal Israel. The scapegoat is given space to be what it is, and in that giving of place it is contained. The balance is preserved.
Maimonides and later halakhic sources will dress the ceremonies in legal cloth and practical guidance, and the medieval mind will fret over who is responsible for what. But the mystics — the Zohar foremost, then the Lurianic corpus — read the ritual on a different register. The Arizal, in his luminous reconstruction of the cosmic drama, hears in the two goats an echo of the whole process of emanation, fracture and repair. In the Lurianic schema the primordial light burst, the vessels shattered, sparks were scattered into husks, and the work of tikkun — the long, patient recovery — began. Azazel in that frame is not merely devil or demon but the name of the alien dimension where sparks are disastrously hidden. Sending the goat toward Azazel is not a naïve handover; it is a cosmological maneuver: the community recognizes that certain shards cannot be immediately integrated and must be handled in a particular way to allow the more delicate operations of ascent to proceed.
Here the Arizal’s refinement is crucial. He does not simply rehearse the binary of good and evil; he maps a functional ecology of hidden powers. In the prelapsarian plan, we said, evil had a ration. In Luria’s map, that ration is located within the economy of the worlds: the klipot — the husks — have a certain minimal life. They need some tonus, a trickle of life, because their very existence is the condition of freedom. If there were nothing outside the light there could be no meaningful turning toward it. So the rabbis and the kabbalists suppose a limit: malevolence must have a measure that allows contest without usurpation. But the sin destroyed homeostasis. By transgressing the right sequence the first humans allowed sparks to leak into coarser vessels, and the klipot that were supposed to be lean found fresh incrementation in human craving and misused knowledge. The klipot do not merely test us; after the fall they are nourished by the very defeats that should summon repair. The cosmos becomes a place where the nourishment of evil can be multiplied by human error. The sinner’s meal fattens the demon; the goad becomes a feedbag.
This is precisely why Yom Kippur’s scapegoat is not only about communal repentance but about strategy. When the community confesses and the priest projects names upon the goat, he is not only performing a conscious ethical act; he is staging an operation against the soul-economy of the world. The goat’s departure to the wilderness is an attempt to retake the economy of nourishment. The community gives away, in symbol and in ritual, the excess that would otherwise feed the klipot. The goat departs with what has been apportioned and thus carries off a certain entitlement. In one reading — and here the chasidic masters are particularly plaintive and inventive — the goat’s function is to distract, to occupy, even to over-sate the ravenous angles of darkness so that they cannot forage within the community’s substance. The gesture is paradoxical: we do not destroy the malignant; we feed it at a remove so that it stops feeding on our missteps. The practice is not moral abandonment but tactical containment.
This is the paradox the Lurianic school and chasidic thought luxuriate in: sometimes the most radical way to disarm a force is to give it a measure of its desire at a distance. In telling the goat to carry our confessed sins beyond the camp, the community offers the klipot appointed food, but appointed at a distance and with a limit. The wilderness is the goat’s stomach. The goat’s path is deliberate and finite. We neither annihilate the hostile powers nor permit them unfettered appetite; we manage them. In that management the scapegoat is not an exorcist who banishes evil by force, nor merely a scapegoat in the vulgar sense who takes the blame; it is, in the kabbalistic imagination, a sacrificial mechanic of psycho-spiritual ecology. The goal is to keep evil dieted, not engorged.
The chasidic masters deepen the drama further still by collapsing cosmology into psychology. To them, the sent-away goat is not only a goat; it is the internal shadow. Every person carries within them an Azazel — a restless appetite, a voice that corrupts knowledge into arrogance. The chasidic approach insists that Yom Kippur’s public rite must have its private analogue. When the public exile occurs, the inner exile should follow: the worshiper must, through prayer and teshuvah, make available a place for the shadow on the edge of consciousness and refuse to let it feast upon daily errors. The practice of confession, humility, and self-denial, in this view, is a way of managing one’s inner Azazel: let the inclination be recognized, named, and given a scheduled place, so it does not find its meal in hidden slips and small cruelties. The scapegoat is, at once, social economy and ethical pedagogy.
This motif resolves into a bitter-sweet lesson about the first violation. Before the transgression the boundary functioned. Creation’s provision was generous but measured: evil had its ration. After the transgression, human appetite — not merely for bread or for fruit, but for premature sovereignty — allowed the klipot to be nourished in unintended ways. Yom Kippur’s rite is therefore an attempt to repair not only the communal ledger but the macro-economy: to reassert the limit, re-fasten the peel, and to protect the fruit from its own peel being eaten away by reckless mouths.
The Zohar gives the ritual its mythic edges; the Arizal gives it algorithmic specificity; chasidic masters give it the human face and the everyday method. Their voices stitch together into a single liturgy of repair. The Zohar sees the goat as an outer agent that carries impurity to its appointed exile — a drama of forces beyond the human. The Arizal shows how that exile functions in the great narrative of shevirah and tikkun: dispatching certain forces, calibrating the streams through which light may return. Chasidic teaching, soft and anthropic, says: practice the exile within your own heart so that the outer rite performs no mere theater but is mirrored in actual character.
But let us not sentimentalize. This ritual economy has a dark logic. If the scapegoat’s meat — its symbolic meal — is misapplied or misunderstood, the result can be moral license. If one thinks that sending the goat away is equivalent to moral abdication — “the goat has it, so I can do as I like” — then the ritual is inverted and the klipot are fed anew by human negligence. The careful tradition insists, therefore, that the sacrament of dispatch be paired with conversion. The goat can carry, but the carrier must also change. The scapegoat, in other words, is not an insurance policy against conscience but a tool to be used by a penitent polity. The ritual works only if the community reforms the very conditions that allowed the klipot to be fattened in the first place: measure, discipline, and the re-ordering of appetites.
I want to pause here and make an ethical point of naked tenderness. The claim that evil must be fed a little so free will may remain is not, as some will think, a vindication of cruelty. Rather it is a refusal of two false alternatives: either to annihilate the possibility of error (and with it the possibility of growth), or to let error run rampant and unmeasured. The religious imagination refuses both extremes and chooses a third way: a bounded arena for trial, for the tension that produces moral character. This economy is not cruel; it is, in its own fierce way, compassionate: compassion for the reality of choice, even when that reality produces suffering.
And yet the primordial breach teaches us the price of irresponsibility. When knowledge is drunk as sovereignty, when understanding becomes intoxication rather than stewardship, even the best measures atrophy. The ripeness of the fruit becomes a temptation too sharp, and the peel that was meant to regulate delight becomes the very thing that is eaten away. This is the catastrophe that underlies the theology of the scapegoat: the ritual attempts to put the world back in order, but it must reckon with the fact that the ordering is not a single act but a continuous practice. The goat is sent once a year; the repair is sustained by a lifetime.
