Parashat Vayikra
We begin the Book of Leviticus this Shabbat, and many of us feel it. The prescriptions for animal offerings, the blood dashed on the altar, the careful choreography of priestly service — it is easy to feel like a stranger in this material, as if we have wandered into an ancient instruction manual that no longer speaks to our lives.
But it does. And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offered us several keys for unlocking why.
The Hebrew word for sacrifice — קרבן korban, forms the verb להקריב lehakriv — meaning “bring close.” We are brought close to God by what we bring close. A sacrifice is, at its root, a gesture of relationship: of apology, of gratitude, of love and hope.
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Rebbe of Lubavitch, noticed a grammatical twist in the opening verse. Rather than reading “when one of you offers a sacrifice,” the Hebrew actually reads מכם mikem — when you bring a sacrifice “from you.” The essence of sacrifice is that we offer ourselves.
We bring our energies, our thoughts, our emotions and intentions. We bring our commitments that after the sacrifice we will continue to pursue the moral and the good. The physical form of sacrifice — an animal or grain offering — expresses an inner act. What we offer, in this reading, is the nefesh habeheimit נפש הבהמית, the animal soul within us — our instincts, our boundary-breaking impulses, our herd instinct, our less thoughtful reactions — so that the Godly soul may rise.
The attention to the details of the sacrificial pageant is to remind us to ritualize our approaches to action and to others. More thoughtful rehearsals of how we expiate guilt or celebrate to share joy will lead to more salient and meaningful moments of our lives.
And since we started reading Leviticus this week we know that we will get to the parsha in which deeper layers unlock meaning. Leviticus chapter seventeen:
כִּי נֶפֶשׁ הַבָּשָׂר בַּדָּם הִוא וַאֲנִי נְתַתִּיו לָכֶם עַל-הַמִּזְבֵּחַ לְכַפֵּר עַל-נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם כִּי-הַדָּם הוּא בַּנֶּפֶשׁ יְכַפֵּר:
“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have assigned it to you upon the altar to ransom your lives; it is the blood, as life, that effects atonement.” — Leviticus 17:11
The blood on the altar is not food for an angry god. It is a substitution: the animal’s life given so that ours may continue, so that we may go on chastened, cleared and re-connected. We express our commitments to take hold of our lives and journey on toward becoming the moral and spiritual beings God calls us to be.
Vayikra is about sacrifices, and though these laws have been inoperative for almost two thousand years, the moral principles they embody are inviting and challenging. The sacrifice says: my life is not simply mine to spend as I please. It is held in trust. It is offered back.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Bolton