Vayikra: Sacrifice, Sanctity & Silence (Torah Lights Book 3)

Torah Lights: Vayikra Sacrifice, Sanctity and Silence [Shlomo Riskin] on This book compiles these commentaries, with each Parsha receiving three or four of.
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Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is true. A modern botanist would not say that plants pursue sunlight. This has not always been the case, nor, perhaps, was it inevitable. At every turn, it seems, living things are trying to In this highly acclaimed, five-volume parashat hashavua series, Rabbi Riskin helps each reader extract deeply personal, contemporary lessons from the traditional biblical accounts.

As Rabbi Riskin writes in the introduction to Torah Lights, the struggle with Torah reflects the struggle Maimonides taught that God instituted the practice of sacrifices as a transitional step to wean the Israelites off of the worship of the times and move them toward prayer as the primary means of worship. Maimonides noted that in nature, God created animals that develop gradually. For example, when a mammal is born, it is extremely tender, and cannot eat dry food, so God provided breasts that yield milk to feed the young animal, until it can eat dry food.

Similarly, Maimonides taught, God instituted many laws as temporary measures, as it would have been impossible for the Israelites to suddenly discontinue everything to which they had become accustomed. So God sent Moses to make the Israelites in the words of Exodus So God did not command the Israelites to give up those manners of service, but allowed them to continue. God transferred to God's service what had formerly served as a worship of idols, and commanded the Israelites to serve God in the same manner — namely, to build to a Sanctuary Exodus God forbad doing any of these things to any other being and selected priests for the service in the Temple in Exodus By this Divine plan, God blotted out the traces of idolatry, and established the great principle of the Existence and Unity of God.

But the sacrificial service, Maimonides taught, was not the primary object of God's commandments about sacrifice; rather, supplications, prayers, and similar kinds of worship are nearer to the primary object. Thus God limited sacrifice to only one Temple see Deuteronomy These restrictions, Maimonides taught, served to limit sacrificial worship, and kept it within such bounds that God did not feel it necessary to abolish sacrificial service altogether.

But in the Divine plan, prayer and supplication can be offered everywhere and by every person, as can be the wearing of tzitzit Numbers Nachmanides, on the other hand, noted that Leviticus 3: Nachmanides further noted that when Noah came out of the ark, there were as yet no Chaldeans or Egyptians in the world, yet Noah brought an offering that pleased God so much that Genesis 8: Nachmanides argued that the reason for the offerings was more likely that since people's deeds are accomplished through thought, speech, and action, therefore God commanded that when people sin and bring an offering, they should lay their hands on it in contrast to the evil deed that they committed.

Offerers would confess their sin verbally to contrast with their evil speech. They would burn parts of the animal in fire that were seen as the instruments of thought and desire in human beings. The offerers would burn the legs of the animal because they corresponded to the limbs with which the offerer acted. The offerer sprinkled blood on the altar, which is analogous to the blood in the offerer's body.

Nachmanides argued that offerers performed these acts so that the offerers should realize that the offerers had sinned against God with their bodies. And the offerer's soul and blood should have been spilled and the offerer's body burned, were it not for God's loving-kindness in taking a substitute and a ransom — the offering — so that the offering's blood should be in place of the offerer's blood, its life in place of the offerer's life, and that the limbs of the offering in place of the parts of the offerer's body.

Rabbi Isaac explained that the reason for the differing language was that it was exceptional for the High Priest to sin, since he felt his responsibility to God, Israel, and each individual. Similarly, it was very exceptional for the whole congregation to commit one and the same sin, for if some committed it, others would not. Professor James Kugel of Bar Ilan University reported that ancient texts offered several explanations for why peoples of the ancient Near East sacrificed animals: Kugel reported that more recent explanations saw the sacrifice as establishing a tangible connection between the sacrificer and the deity, while others stress the connection of the sacred with violence or see the function of religion as defusing violence that would otherwise be directed at people.

Kugel argued that the Israelites conceived of animal sacrifices as the principal channel of communication between the people and God. Professor Jacob Milgrom , formerly of the University of California, Berkeley , read the sacrificial system in the parashah to describe the forces of life and death pitted against each other in a cosmic struggle, set loose by people through their obedience to or defiance of God's commandments. But the priests could periodically purge the sanctuary of its impurities and influence the people to atone.

Similarly, Gordon Wenham of Trinity College, Bristol , noted that the sacrificial system regularly associates sacrifices with cleansing and sanctification. Sacrifice could undo the effects of sin and human infirmity. Sin and disease profaned the holy and polluted the clean, whereas sacrifice could reverse this process.

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Wenham illustrated with the chart at right. Wenham concluded that contact between the holy and the unclean resulted in death. Sacrifice, by cleansing the unclean, made such contact possible. Sacrifice thus allowed the holy God to meet with sinful man.

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The 20th century British anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote that to find the underlying logic of the first chapters of Leviticus about how to make a sacrifice and how to lay out the animal sections on the altar, one needs to look carefully at what Leviticus says about bodies and parts of bodies, what is inner and outer, and what is on top and underneath. Douglas argued that the tabernacle ran horizontally toward the most sacred area, Mount Sinai went up vertically to the summit, and the sacrificial pile started with the head underneath and went up to the entrails, and one can interpret each by reference to the others.

The pattern is always there throughout creation, with God in the depths or on the heights of everything. The Tabernacle was associated with creation, and creation with fertility, implying that the innermost part of the Tabernacle was a Divine nuptial chamber, depicting the union between God and Israel. Professor James Watts of Syracuse University argued that the rhetorical purpose of Leviticus 1—7 was to assert the Torah's authority over both religious professionals and laity.

No Israelite could claim to be exempt from its provisions. Like royal and oracular texts that their framework evokes, Leviticus 1—7 intended to persuade the Israelites and the priests to perform the offerings correctly, as specified in the text. But Leviticus 1—7 also aimed to reinforce the authority of the Torah over religious performance in the Temple. By publicly stipulating the forms of the Israelite's offerings, Leviticus 1—7 positioned priests and laity to monitor each other's performance, with the text as the arbiter of correct practice. Thus Leviticus 1—7 shifted cultic authority from the priesthood to the book.

When the Roman Empire destroyed the Jerusalem Temple, the Rabbis did not choose to follow those precedents for sacrifice elsewhere, but instead set up a substitute, declaring the study of the sacrificial laws as acceptable to God as sacrifices. Bamberger suggested that some scholars may have felt that the day of sacrifice had passed.

Milgrom noted that Leviticus 1—5, like most of Leviticus, is addressed to all the Israelite people, while only a few laws, in Leviticus 6: Milgrom taught that the burnt offering in Leviticus 1 was intended for the person who wanted to present to God a sacrificial animal in its entirety either as an expression of loyalty or as a request for expiation.

Milgrom believed that the cereal offering, whose description follows in Leviticus 2, was probably intended for the same purposes as the burnt offering, on behalf of the poor who could not afford entire animal offerings. Everyone, regardless of means, was able to bring an acceptable offering to God. Milgrom taught that in the original Priestly source "P" , an offerer brought the well-being offering in Leviticus 3 solely out of joyous motivations like thanksgiving, vow fulfillment, or spontaneous free will.

H's ban on nonsacrificial slaughter meant that all meat eaten as food had initially to be sanctified on the altar as a well-being offering. Milgrom taught that the rationale for the sin or purification offering in Leviticus 4: Milgrom called this pollution the Priestly Picture of Dorian Gray: While sin might not scar the face of the sinner, it did scar the face of the sanctuary.

This image illustrated a Priestly version of the doctrine of collective responsibility: When evildoers sinned, they brought the more righteous down with them. Those who perished with the wicked were not entirely blameless, but inadvertent sinners who, by having allowed the wicked to flourish, also contributed to pollution of the sanctuary.

The High Priest and the leaders of the people, in particular, brought special sacrifices in Leviticus 4: Thus, in the Priestly scheme, brazen sins the leaders' rapacity and inadvertent sins the silent majority's acquiescence polluted the sanctuary and corrupted society , driving God out of the sanctuary and leading to national destruction.

In the theology of the purification offering, the sanctuary needed constant purification lest God abandon it because of the people's rebellious and inadvertent sins. Milgrom taught that the guilt or reparation offering in Leviticus 5: Milgrom inferred from this relationship that expiation by sacrifice depended on both the worshiper's remorse and the reparation that the worshiper brought to both God and people to rectify the wrong.

Milgrom noted that if a person falsely denied under oath having defrauded another, subsequently felt guilt, and restored the embezzled property and paid a 20 percent fine, the person was then eligible to request of God that a reparation offering expiate the false oath, as reflected in Leviticus 5: Milgrom saw here Priestly lawmakers in action, bending the sacrificial rules to foster the growth of individual conscience, permitting sacrificial expiation for a deliberate crime against God knowingly taking a false oath provided that the person repented before being apprehended.

Milgrom concluded that the sin or purification offering taught the "ecology of morality," that the sins of the individual adversely affect society even when committed inadvertently, and the guilt or reparation offering fostered a doctrine of repentance.