Apr 8/06 - Shabbat Tzav / Shabbat HaGadol

Commentary by Rabbi Lawrence Pinsker

I know, I know. After only one week of readings about korbanot, or animal sacrifices, you are having a difficult time coping. The very idea that there are people prepared to reinstitute the sacrificial system when the Messiah finally, really, arrives and a Third Temple is built in Jerusalem contradicts everything you’ve been taught about progress.

Please permit me to make a suggestion. With a little imagination and an anthropologist’s tools, we can look deeply into these weeks of Torah readings from Leviticus and find profound spiritual and ethical values. These texts about sacrifice describe how a society coped with powerful feelings of alienation, guilt, and lost intimacy with God. The particular institutional healing strategy documented in the Torah should not prevent us from seeing sacrifice as an expression of a deep desire to relieve (human) suffering and to repair a broken world.

Our ancestors longed to be near to God. They noted that when people made mistakes, misunderstood or neglected their responsibilities, or damaged relationships to others, they began seeing the world in a broken way and acting differently to compensate. These disturbances of the mind and heart are not medical in nature, but rather the result of fear, guilt, and hopelessness: What if our actions are discovered? How will anyone ever trust me again? How can I ever trust myself again? How could I have betrayed God and dishonoured God’s image implanted in me and every other person?

Offering a sacrifice was the last step in undoing whatever damage a person had inflicted upon his or her connections to God and other people. It signified that he or she had corrected the wrongdoing and was now able to reintegrate into society and into closeness with God.

The feeling of thanks-giving is given a prominent place in the Torah. The korban todah—the thanks-giving offering described in this week’s Torah portion—had a special, elevated status. In ancient rabbinic texts, it is the sacrifice singled out from all the rest and given a prominent place in the Sages’ vision of messianic days. The rabbis said that the coming of the Messiah would see the end of all the sacrificial rites except for the thanks-giving sacrifice and also the abolition of all prayers except for the prayer of thanks-giving. (See Midrash Leviticus Rabbah 9:7.) The Rabbis believed that a time would come when both sacrifice and prayer would no longer be necessary. Human life would change to such an extent that it would be defined by universal mutual respect and mutual accountability. There would be no more need to atone for sins. Nevertheless, even when such a time had arrived, basic, positive human feelings would endure, such as love, devotion—and gratitude and wonder in the face of God’s gifts of the created world and of life.

The ancient Rabbis considered thanks-giving to be central to Jewish existence and the true basis of Jewish religious feeling—not guilt or fear, which harm our relationships with others, whether God or other people. Religion born out of crisis has no enduring power; when the crisis passes, so does the prayer that accompanied the moment of desperation and uncertainty.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that our belief begins with the awe and wonder:

Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers -- wiser than all alphabets -- clouds that die constantly for the sake of God’s glory, we are hating, hunting, hurting. Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit glory in nature. It is so embarrassing to live! How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings! Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.

(Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God)

Our daily prayer services give us an opportunity to offer prayers of thanks for times when we have escaped danger, imprisonment, illness, or other personal crises. Anyone who has had that kind of experience understands that such moments generate not only appeals for help but also deep feelings of appreciation for what one has. The prayers, however, speak about the blessings of the everyday and the ordinary—those wonders that are with us daily, morning, noon, and night—as reasons for gratitude to God. This is the meaning of the korban todah, the thanks-giving offering. We live in a world of wonder, and life itself is the greatest of all wonders. So many of us don’t appreciate the goodness around us until it’s gone. In the end of time, all sacrifices may disappear, but we will never do away with the need to give thanks.

Those who experience the events of life as a miracle know that it can be overwhelming. It has the power to change your life and your perception from that time forward. The same is true of our survival as a people. Certainly the Exodus changed us for all time. On the last Sabbath before Pesach, we read the beautiful text of the Haftarah for Shabbat haGadol—the overpowering prophecy of the “Sabbath of the Great One,” promising a time of peace and reconciliation for all. Pesach is like the thanks-giving offering: we have seen our hopes fulfilled and survived despite those who sought our destruction. We remain grateful to this day for the lessons of the Pesach, from which is born an undiminished faith that the God of Israel, Who brought us out of slavery to be a free people in our own land, will sustain us in life in the future.

The Jewish poet and novelist Joanne Greenberg wrote:

When the weight falls that could break me, And by the merest edge, the brittlest moment Does not break me, I look up in anguish and ask God again Why it is that You measure me so narrowly, And know so well which part of me is stranger to myself. “I am training Messiahs,” God says. “I start them out, each one, with smallest territory: A nation of one. So far the record of achievement hasn’t been too good. I think of giving up sometimes, But, being God, I am, by every indication, Not bad at hope.”

Passover is upon us; let it remind us that hope carries us forward and also gives birth to gratitude for every drop of goodness in our lives.

Shabbat Shalom.