Harvey Savage
In preparing for this dvar I was confronted with the possible relevance of giving a dvar Torah on sacrifices when the challenge today is to get people to attend synagogues, let alone into the sanctuary to make sacrifices.
Before trying to address the issue of modern relevance, we should consider the relevance of sacrifices to an earlier age in which they were made.
Rabbi Eli Munk, a modern commentator on the book of Leviticus, sees the love for God as both reflective of the rationale behind sacrifices and also for prayer which was its later substitute - and he states that is the reason why b'ahava (with love) appears so often in our prayer service.
Early sacrifices support this premise - before the building of the sanctuary and God's command to the community to bring highly ritualized sacrifices, sacrifices were often individual and spontaneous expressions of deep love for God. They co-incided with peak experiences in communicating with God.
There are a number of such examples in the Torah.
When God first promised an obscure revolutionary called Abram with a grand destiny for his offspring, Abram built an altar and sacrificed to mark this experience; Abraham did this several times to mark such experiences.
At Beersheba, after God revealed to Isaac that for the merit of Abraham God would bless and increase the offspring of Isaac, he built an altar and offered sacrifice.
Jacob marked the occasion of God communicating with him when he was fleeing from Esau, and he built an altar and named the site Beth-El to commemorate this.
The pattern was similar each time - God would reveal Godself - a great destiny would be promised - the patriarch in question marked the epiphanous experience of the communication with the offering up of a sacrifice on an altar.
The sacrifice was spontaneous and purely voluntary - there was no commandment to offer sacrifices.
When and why were sacrifices institutionalized in the form of prescribed offering from the community, and what references do these archaic practices have for modern Jews who read about them in Leviticus?
The when and the why coincide. in the event of the golden calf.
This was a case of the outpouring of acting on undisciplined mob emotions.
It was an act of spontaneity, but very unlike the spontaneous individual acts of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob who performed a sacrifice on an altar as gratitude for God appearing to them. it was easier for them; they had a tangible experience of God addressing them - they responded with appropriate sponteneity.
When Moses was so long in returning, the Israelites lost the connection - Moses - as their tangible.
A midrash states that both God and the Israelites had something to learn from the golden calf worship - the Israelites had to learn not to try to reach God through magic - that this is a useless shortcut to the intangible, and God had to learn not to expect the average person to comprehend a total, abstract deity who is not in the business of always giving off tangible experiences of God's presence as with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
According to some commentators the golden calf was a pivotal point in God's relationship to the Israelites - the golden days of pure individual spontaneous offerings were replaced by a mob spontaneity, and now the path to holiness had to be commanded and ritualized and God's presence more integrated with everyday living.
This mutually learned lesson led to prescribed animal sacrifices, performed in the presence of community, prepared and often regulated by the high priest, and highly ritualized.
It was if the acts of K'doshah, of holiness, were embedded as a symbol in the very way that these prescribed rituals were conducted.
Sacrifice was giving up something precious - one can only comprehend holiness by surrounding ourselves by reminders that losses or sacrifices are as basic to a holy life as are gains.
What one gains by a sacrifice of the finest of animals - the ones without blemish - is an understanding that sincere atonement or even a spontaneous gesture of goodwill, characterized by sacrificial offerings, can only be achieved by putting on the line what is best in you - in the days of ritual sacrifices, the best of the produce - in our days, the honour of our words, that what we say or think is a reflection of what we do.
And this is why reading of these archaic customs speaks to us today.
Today's parashah begins with the olah, an offering that is entirely consumed by fire, that was not brought to expetiate sin or theft, but rather for thoughts of the heart.
One may ask, why the need to hold your thoughts to account?
Rashi said that thoughts of sin are kasheh - more difficult or worse - than actual deeds of sin.
In general, people do not consider thoughts to be a religious or moral issue, so why were sacrifices ordered on their behalf?
The Rambam had this explanation: a person is made up of two parts - the physcal and the intellectual. the body, being physical, has all sorts of physical urges and animal instincts, on the other hand, the mind manifests our image of god. To sin with one's mind is thus a greater desecration than sinning with one's body, with the one caveat, than punishment is for action, not thoughts, in other words that our being in the image of god is more harmed by undignified thoughts than by physical actions, which are in themselves often the result of undignified thoughts.
This is remarkably sophisticated, the notion that non-punishable bad thoughts are still the stuff of atonement - , all the more remarkable that they were developed in the midst of a very different surrounding social context where moral actions were not enjoined, let alone moral thoughts.
The al chayt part of the Yom Kippur liturgy talks about the sins we have committed by evil thoughts.
This is perhaps the reference of that early time and its rituals to us - that everything we do and think is capable of holiness, and thoughts can be a measure of dignity no less than our actions, even though only we can know our actual thoughts.
Reading about all of the arcane rituals around the sacrifices may seem irrelevant to a modern mind - but if we can step back we can see that we still need ritual as our tangible connection to the intangible - as the practice of discipline which reminds us through symbolism, what it most means to be a Jew today - to be holy, through our lives and our thoughts.
Animal sacrifices were the devices of an earlier day - now we must find our own - through everything available to us - prayers in community, private prayers, relationships. the unspontaneous care and detail performed around a ritual concentrates the mind and in its own way allows us to have a similar glimpse of the eternal that Abraham had without such device.
Heschel encapsulates the progression of holiness for us as a people: "When history began", he wrote, "there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time. When at Sinai the word of God was about to be voiced, a call for holiness in man was proclaimed: 'you shall be for Me a holy people.' It was only after the people had succumbed to worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a tabernacle, of holiness in space, was commanded. The sanctity of time came first, the sanctity of man came second, and the sanctity of space last. Time was hallowed by God; space, the tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses."
The challenge to hallow space is the legacy passed on to us today.
Shabbat Shalom.