Va-yikra 5774

By Rabbi Rami Pavolotzky
B´nei Israel Congregation
Costa Rica

Accepting the Past with Love

This week we start reading the third book of the Torah: Sefer Va-yikra.  As is well known, the first sections of this book are devoted to a detailed description of how to do the offerings, both animal and vegetable.  The Korbanot, Hebrew for sacrifices, were the basis of  Hebrew ritual from the building of the Tabernacle in the wilderness until the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem.  When Jews were forced to face the ugly truth of having to live without their most sacred place, they had to develop a new way of communicating with God.  The Talmud sages called it avodah shebalev, that is, worship, or ritual, performed from the heart.  I’m referring, of course, to prayer.

From the moment Jews abandoned the offerings and “officially” started to pray, the debate regarding the validity of sacrifices arose, a debate that still continues to this day.  Some believe that we should again have a Temple and sacrifice offerings to God, whereas others think that the worship of the Temple in Jerusalem will be restored in the messianic ages.  Most of the Jewish people do not wish to return to the times of offerings, but prefer to continue with traditional prayer.

Now then, how do we react when we have to read, year after year, the laws of the offerings that aren’t performed anymore?  Once more, the Jewish world is divided in regard to this issue.  The two positions shared by the majority are supreme praise and total rejection.  For some, especially within the ultraorthodox field, the korbanot constitute the cornerstone of the Torah, and their minute description is an essential text, perhaps one of the holiest in the entire Torah.  For this group, Va-yikra is perhaps the most studied and praised book of all the Pentateuch.

Other people categorically reject the idea of the sacrifices, seeing them as an ancient ritual which was fortunately ruled out.  For them, just the thought of having to read again about sacrifices constitutes a headache, and in fact, they prefer to avoid the subject altogether.

I believe there is a middle-ground view, which attempts to be modern but doesn’t shut the past out.  Those who find themselves in this position, and I include myself among them, think that it is certainly better to stick to prayer instead of returning to offerings.  Although animal and vegetable sacrifices to God were effective in the past, we do not need them anymore.  Today, prayer allows us to better express what we feel and want to communicate to God.  However, to think that our ancestors were savages who couldn’t pray, and hence sacrificed animals, is to distort our past.  Rather, we should think that in ancient times, that was a valid means of communication between people and God, and as such, we should accept it and value it.  And not just that; there is a lot of wisdom behind the details of how offerings should be done, from which we can still learn something.

So, this third position stands in the middle between those who accept what is ancient and traditional and those who reject it, precisely because it is ancient and traditional.  Sacrifices are no longer part of our daily life, which they certainly were in the life of our forefathers, and in that sense, they are still part of our life.  Our ancestors’ love and devotion are hidden behind them, feelings that we would like to embed into our own prayers.

Furthermore, it is possible that our future Jewish descendents develop manners of approaching God different from our own, that make them judge our prayers as something out of style and ineffective.  Nevertheless, we expect to pass on to them much more than an old-fashioned and meaningless ritual.  In a similar way, our ancestors of biblical times struggled to bequeath to us much more than the cold descriptions of offerings.

In short, when we once again read the descriptions of the korbanot, we can choose between those who praise them and consider them as the cornerstone of Judaism, and those who think that they are something of which we should be ashamed of having developed.  None the less, a third alternative exists, which propounds that we do not get stuck in time nor abandon our past.

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Rami Pavolotzky

B´nei Israel Congregation

Costa Rica