Vayikra (Leviticus 1:1-5:26) March 20, 2021/7 Nisan 5781

Welcome to the Book of Leviticus! Parashat Vayikra is mostly concerned with the specific procedures surrounding the most common sacrifices offered by Jews up until the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70. While most of us know that offering animal and vegetable sacrifices was pretty common in the ancient world, the idea of worshipping God by slaughtering and burning animals is still a little odd for us in the 21st century. Why would God command such a bloody and sometimes wasteful (the standard daily sacrifices were burnt in their entirety, meaning that each day, at least two lambs were going to waste, not to mention any special offerings for holidays) form of worship? And if sacrifices are so important to God, why would they be discontinued in the absence of the Temple? It's quite perplexing. Thankfully, the Jewish bookshelf has a guide for us.

In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides discusses the origin of sacrifices in Judaism. He explains that God never really wanted animal sacrifices, "but the custom which was in those days general among men, and the general mode of worship in which the Israelites were brought up consisted in sacrificing animals... It was in accordance with the wisdom and plan of God...that God did not command us to give up and to discontinue all these manners of service. For to obey such a commandment would have been contrary to the nature of man, who generally cleaves to that to which he is used; it would in those days have made the same impression as a prophet would make at present [the 12th Century] if he called us to the service of God and told us in His name, that we should not pray to God nor fast, nor seek His help in time of trouble; that we should serve Him in thought, and not by any action." What the Rambam is trying to say is that God wanted the Israelites to accept the Torah, but that, given the time period, a deity who didn't demand sacrifices would not have been taken seriously. So God put a whole bunch of rules in place about how the sacrificial rites would work. Human sacrifice was out, and the day-to-day offering schedule is pretty light - one sheep in the morning, another in the evening, each one accompanied by a grain offering and a wine libation. There are situations where individuals might bring a sacrifice on their own behalf, and holidays have extra offerings, but God didn't demand a huge investment of livestock from the Israelites as a nation. Additionally, God restricted sacrifices to a single place: the Temple Mount (until the construction of the Temple, sacrifices were permitted elsewhere on, but once it went up, that was it). In the absence of the Temple, we don't sacrifice.

While Maimonides the philosopher spoke of the mitzvot concerning sacrifices as a way of weaning the Israelites off the practice of worship via barbecue, Maimonides the halakhist writes in his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, that belief in the resumption of the sacrificial offices in the Messianic age is a core tenet of the Jewish religion. In Conservative Judaism, based on an interpretation presented in a midrash, the belief is that sacrifices will not be reinstituted (at least as regular worship) in the Third Temple. For that reason, Conservative siddurim have removed the traditional sections of text study detailing the various tasks involved in offering the daily sacrifices which are part of the preparatory section of the morning service (replacing it with other, non-sacrifice texts), and print an option for a variant text of the Musaf Amidah for Shabbat and holidays which omits the mention of the special offerings for those days. In addition to these two replacement sections, two references to the future reinstitution of sacrifices have been changed. A prayer for the speedy resumption of God accepting "the fire offerings of Israel and their prayers" has been changed to mention only the latter form of worship, and the (traditional options for the) Musaf sections mentioned earlier have been altered from the future tense to the past - "and we shall offer the Musaf sacrifice of this [insert occasion] day" becomes "and they offered the Musaf sacrifice of this [insert occasion] day." I never really gave this change much thought (in fairness, I never really paid much attention to the words of the prayers when I was younger, and even if I had, I was not familiar with the original verbiage, so I wouldn't have realized it was a change) until I heard a d'var Torah given by Rabbi Barry Schlesinger, the rabbi of Torat Hayim, the Conservative synagogue I attended in Herzliya. He pointed out that the change to the blessing was not just putting it in a new tense, but the person had changed, "we" was replaced with "they." While it makes sense in terms of theology and modern sensibilities surrounding animal sacrifices to describe them in the past, the shift to the third person serves to disconnect us from our communal past. So it might be appropriate to say, "and we offered the Musaf sacrifice of this [insert occasion] day," tying us into the chain of worship which, while it does not currently include sacrificing animals. It may never do so again, did in the past.

If prayer has replaced burnt offerings as our primary form of worship, then it is important to approach prayer with the understanding of what it is replacing. Every year at our Pesach seder, we read Rabban Gamliel's admonition that one who does not explain the meaning of the Pesach lamb has not fulfilled the obligation of the Seder. In the absence of a real sacrificial lamb to serve as our main course, we symbolically represent it with a bone - traditionally one from a lamb shank, but often a chicken wing or neck. How often do we really give thought to the fact that a bone on the Seder table is a symbol of the central role the sacrificed lamb plays in the holiday - both in terms of worship and in terms of providing the main course for the Seder dinner? Similarly, most experienced Seder-goers are familiar with the "Hillel sandwich" that we make with matzah, haroset, and maror. But if we actually pay attention to the Haggadah's description of Hillel's custom which we are emulating, haroset doesn't actually appear. What Hillel did was make a sandwich (or more likely a wrap - in his day, soft matzah was the norm) out of the Pesach lamb and maror in a literal performance of the command "with matzah and maror you shall eat it." Teaching what to do is important, but if we divorce the what from the why, we are doing the tradition a disservice. There's an old joke about a couple, newly married, preparing for a big holiday dinner. The wife takes the roast and cuts the ends off before putting it in the pan. Confused, her husband asks why she did that, and she explains that her mother always did it that way. At dinner, the wife asks her mother about cutting the ends off the roast, and she says that she learned it by watching her own mother. So they call grandma and ask why she always cut the ends off the roast. The answer? "I only had a small pan, so I had to trim the meat to make it fit." Doing something because it's tradition is totally fine, but if we don't understand the origin of the tradition, we are liable to miss the point, leaving us as a nation cutting the ends off of our metaphorical roasts.