Tzav: Which altar?
37 This is the law for the burnt offering, for the meal offering, and for the sin offering, and for the guilt offering, and for the investitures, and for the peace offering,
38 which the Ineffable commanded Moses on Mount Sinai, on the day it commanded the children of Israel to offer up their sacrifices to the Holy One in the Sinai Desert.
- Leviticus, 7:37-38זלתאטּחלוהחנמּלהלעלהרוֹתּהתאז :םימלשּׁהחבזלוּםיאוּלּמּלוםשׁאלו
חלםוֹיבּיניסרהבּהשׁמתאהוהיהוּצרשׁא םהינבּרקתאבירקהללארשׂיינבּתאוֹתוּצ :יניסרבּדמבּהוהיל
What does it mean to us now to observe the commandment of “offering up our sacrifices to what is holy”? What are the altars we worship today, and do they align with what God is asking of us in the desert?
I’ve been thinking about sacrifices a lot recently. I have two young children and although they bring endless joy, delight, and blessings into my life, a great percentage of every single day with them is sacrifice. Sacrifice of sleep when they wake me up at 5:30am. Sacrifice of alone time – even in the bathroom. My hair has turned significantly grayer since they came on the scene. And yet, my husband and I make all these sacrifices, large and small, for the risk that is love.
I think it is the same risk God is asking the people to make in this week’s parsha (Torah portion). The word “sacrifice” in Hebrew is korban. It has the same root as “coming close,” or “intimacy.” There is something about the ritual of sacrifice – of letting go of things that matter to you – that brings you closer or more intimate to something else. When the sacrifice is in the right spirit and that “something else” is intentional, we can find ourselves in a heart-opening relationship to life. We didn’t really need the thing we gave up, and there, waiting on the other side, is something much more true and powerful and Divine than anything we could have imagined, pre-sacrifice.
What about the choices and sacrifices we make every day that are less intentional? What about the sacrifices of money, of time, of attention that we all make, for ends that we either are not aware of, not proud of, or prefer not to examine?
In his commencement speech to Kenyon College in 2005, David Foster Wallace argued that the default altars our culture sets up for us are for the worship of money, things, beauty, the body, power and/or intellect. He writes:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
Leviticus is the book of Torah that tries to reset our default setting of worship and sacrifice away from what is empty and vapid and towards what is true and sustaining. And if Foster Wallace is correct, there is no opting out. There is no true atheism. We can choose our altars, but we cannot choose altar-less-ness. We are always sacrificing something for something else.
I find this idea paradoxically liberating. We cannot be “free” from sacrifice and worship, but we can be free through them. By bringing intentionality and awareness, we can make our everyday lives a sacrifice for what matters. Foster Wallace says, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly care about other people, to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
With the loss of the Temple, the formal place for sacrifices to God, the Rabbis argued that our prayers, combined with study of Torah and the performance of acts of loving-kindness (G’melut Chasadim), are the altars of our new offerings. We still must sacrifice, only now we sacrifice our time and energy, rather than animals. We sacrifice our distractions and our false gods and come close to who and what we really are, which is Divine. Which is love. The modality has changed, the object of the sacrifice has changed, but the act remains the same.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
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