Nehar Deah

Tzav

Offering up of Sacrifices – In Israel and Among the Nations

Offering up of sacrifices to God is seen, by the Bible as a natural human action, and almost obvious in nature. Already in the second generation after the creation of the world we are told of Kayin and Hevel (Cain and Abel) who bring an offering to Hashem, each one of the fruits of his labor (Bereishit 4:3-4). We are also told of Noach, who, when he left the ark, built an altar and raised up burnt offerings on it “from every pure beast and from every pure fowl” (ibid 8:20). The forefathers of the nation were accustomed to building altars in many places in the land of Canaan (Avraham [Bereishit 12:7-8; 13:18], Yitzchak [26:25]; Yaakov [33:20; 35:5]) – all this before the Torah was given to Israel.

It is apparent from the Bible that the offering up of sacrifices is not unique to the nation of Israel. In fact, anthropological research teaches that the sacrifices, as a gesture to the gods and as a means of communications with them, were widely accepted among the nations of the world. Many explanations have been offered for these deeds, including:

(a) The sacrifices serve as the food of the gods and man is required to offer sacrifices to them in order to sustain them;
(b) The sacrifice is a present to the god, an expression of thanksgiving by a person for the assistance he has gotten;
(c) The sacrifice accompanies a request or prayer, as a form of persuading of the god to favor the person;
(d) The sacrifice is eaten in a communal meal with the gods during which an intimate relationship and a connection to the foundations of the world is created.

The book of Vayikra opens with a description of the sacrificial order that was performed in Israel, in the times of the Second Temple. This order included five basic sacrifices: the olah (cattle or fowl) was completely burnt on the altar. The mincha (fine flour mingled with oil and frankincense) was divided into two; a small part of it was offered on the altar and most of it was meant for the priests. A small part of the shlamim offering was actually placed on the altar and the rest was eaten by the person who brought the offering and by the priests. The various forms of the chatat (sin offering) and asham (guilt offering) were burnt outside the camp or upon the altar and what remained was for the priests to eat. The details connected to these issues appear in our parasha (weekly Torah portion), Tzav, in teachings called “torot” (plural of torah): “the torah of the olah”, “the torah of the asham” etc. We have here a special usage of the term “torah” different from the one which is commonly accepted. The meaning of “torah” in this context of priestly issues is a teaching or instruction (from the root word meaning to teach or guide) and in most cases these “torot” (there are ten “torot” in the book of Vayikra and another four in the book of Bamidbar) give details of ceremonies and rituals for those specifically involved in them.

If we look at the sacrificial practices of the neighbors of the people of Israel, the Egyptians and the Babylonians, which are known to us through their literature and works of instruction to the priests of their religions, we discover that according to their system of beliefs, the sacrifices sustained the gods. The people in their temples customarily laid a table in the house of the god (i.e. the temple) before its idol; on the table they placed food and drink as a meal for the god, in the morning and afternoon. Here are a few lines from a set of instructions from the daily ceremony of the city of Erech (Uruk) in southern Babylon: “Bring water [for the washing of] hands to the gods Anu and Antu of the heavens. Lay the table and arrange [upon it] the meat of an ox, meat of a sheep and fowl. Serve excellent beer, together with squeezed (?) wine. Be plentiful with all [kinds of] vegetables.”

A rough picture which demonstrates the dependence of the gods upon the sacrifices appears in the Babylonian flood story. When Ut-napishtim (the “Babylonian Noah”, the hero who survives the flood) comes out of the boat and prepared the sacrifice for the gods, a sign of thanksgiving for his salvation, “the gods smelt the pleasant fragrance; the gods smelt the good and pleasant fragrance, the gods crowded together like flies around the sacrifice”. After many weeks of forced fast, due to the floods, the gods fell upon the sacrifice in order to satisfy their hunger. In this aspect, the sacrifice of Israel is fundamentally different. Despite the fact that we may be able to find expressions in sources which remind us of idol worship concepts, for example the demand of Israel that: “My sacrifice, my bread, which is presented to Me for offerings made by fire, of a sweet savor to Me, shall you observe to offer to Me in its due season” and the names of some of the vessels in the mishkan and the Temple – the table and upon it the showbread, the menorah (7 branched candelabra) and the incense altar – hint at the fact that they seem to be made for the enjoyment of God who dwells within his house. However, all these are only a remnant of a world that has passed. Those who surmise that Israel’s entire body of ritual is inherited from a pre-Biblical world are probably correct, but this body of tradition is obsolete, as it is clear that the God of Israel does not need sacrifices in order to sustain himself, he does not need the menorah to light his way, nor does he need the pleasant fragrance of the incense in order to make his life more pleasant.

If this is so, the question still remains as to why the Biblical faith of Israel did not do away with the sacrificial cult entirely? If it does not offer anything to God – “Will Hashem be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil?” (Micah 6:7) – what value does it have for man? We note a few attempts made in the times of the First Temple, in the direction of reform and refinement of the concepts of the rituals. The prophets, beginning from Amos, in the middle of the 8th century BCE, took away from the sacrificial cult its senior status as the criterion by which the faith of Israel was judged, so that fulfilling its precepts was no longer essential for gaining Hashem’s blessings. In opposition to the exclusiveness of the sacrificial cult, the prophet Amos declares (in contrast to the tradition of the Torah!): “Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?” (5:26) Another direction was taken by the author of prayers, King Shlomo (Solomon), at the dedication of the Temple. At the end of a declaration that the Temple is not his home, but rather God’s, and he does not dwell within it – “Could it be that God dwells on the earth? Behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain you” – he completely ignores the topic of the sacrificial cult which takes place in the Temple. For the composer, the Temple is a channel through which all the prayers of Israel pass to get to God in the heavens. Man does not have to present himself personally in the Temple in order for his prayers to be accepted; even from a distance they will be heard and answered (ibid verses 46-49). Possibly the strongest breaking away from the sacrificial cult of the priests was by the prophet Yesha’ayahu (Isaiah), who, in his vision of the end of days sees the Temple as having the mission of a national court, which many nations will come up to in order to learn from the Torah how to bring peace between nations (Yesha’ayahu 2:1-4). However, while the First and Second Temples still stood, the system of sacrifices remained as was set down by the Torah, despite the ideological tensions it created. Only after the destruction of the Second Temple and in the long years of diaspora – right up till our times – did the question of the necessity of the sacrifices arise and their revival at the end of days was even a topic of debate. Rambam (Maimonides) deals with the question of why the Torah did not completely do away with the sacrificial cult (Guide to the Perplexed 3:32):

“It was the widespread custom [to offer up sacrifices] in the whole world of then, and the general worship which they grew up with, was the sacrificing of all sorts of animals in those shrines where they placed their idols, bowed to them and placed incense before them … therefore, in his [ie God’s] great wisdom, did not obligate … command us to leave and do away with all these forms of worship, as it was something that was unlikely that we would have accepted, as the nature of man is that he is comfortable with what he is accustomed to … therefore [God] left them with certain forms of worship but moved them away from being to creatures and products of the imagination … and this Godly arrangement, that every remnant of idol worship was wiped out and the great and true foundation became established in our minds, that is the realization of Hashem and his unity.”

Professor Mordechai Kogen
Jewish History Department

Custom and Law – The Passover Sacrifice and the Passover (Seder) Plate

The weekly parasha of “Tzav” is generally read on the Sabbath before Passover and it is worthwhile looking at the connection between the contents of the portion, the sacrifices, and the Seder night.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, the nation was forced into a life without a Temple and they could no longer continue to offer up the Paschal (Passover) sacrifice in Jerusalem. Therefore, an alternative was found for it in the form of the roasted shank bone, which was placed, together with other symbols, on the Passover Seder plate.

What is the source of the Passover Seder plate custom? One of the central motifs of the Seder night is the emphasis on the transformation that the nation of Israel underwent when they went from slavery to freedom, when they went from being a nation of slaves, to “free men” (=masters or sons of kings). In order to emphasize this motif, for example, it is customary during the Seder, especially when drinking the four cups of wine, to lean – that is, to spread oneself out freely – on pillows, according to the Roman custom. In this vein, there are those who conclude that in Talmudic times it was also customary to emphasize the motif of freedom by placing before each diner a separate small table, as was common in those days at festive meals in the Greco-Roman world. On this table they would place the various symbols of the Seder night. This small table “shrank” through the years, until it became the plate which is known to us today.

Placing the shank bone among the other symbols on the plate aroused a question which is not necessarily simple. The roasted shank bone was supposed to symbolize the Paschal Sacrifice that was offered up in the Temple, and there was reason to fear that the shank bone would be seen as an actual substitute for the sacrifice, and from here the conclusion could be drawn that it is possible to offer up sacrifices outside of the Temple! In order to avoid any suspicion of this, many people do not eat the roasted shank bone, especially not on the Seder night. In addition: in order not to create a too strong connection between the roasted shank bone and the sacrifice that was offered up in the Temple, the shank bone was given an additional significance with time: it became a symbol of the “outstretched arm” through which the nation of Israel was saved in Egypt. (The Hebrew word for what is commonly known as the shank bone in English is “zeroah”, which also means “arm”).

Other symbols are placed next to the shank bone, such as the maror, bitter herbs, which symbolize the bitterness of the children of Israel’s lives in Egypt, and the charoset, which symbolizes the mortar Israel used in their backbreaking labors. We also place an additional vegetable on the Seder Plate, the karpas (celery), as we need to dip vegetables at the beginning of the meal, and also a boiled egg. Even this had multiple significances. On one hand it symbolized a special sacrifice, the chagiga, which was customarily offered up on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and on the other hand there are those that see the eating of the egg as a sign of mourning, a commemoration of the Temple which was destroyed.

It is also customary to eat an eat at the meal after a funeral (know as Seudat Hahavra’a [Meal of Recovery]) and also at the meal before the fast of Tisha Be’av, another sign of mourning, and the most common explanation for the connection between the egg and mourning comes from the shape of the egg: it is round and has no “mouth”, which symbolizes acceptance of the judgement and the silence of the mourner from here on, and also – in the case of death – the fate of man which continually recurs like a circle.

Calendar – Counting of the Omer

Together with the animals which were sacrificed in the Temple, sacrifices were also brought from the plant kingdom. One of these sacrifices was brought on the day after the first day of the festival of Passover, meaning the 16 Nissan. For this sacrifice a certain amount (“omer”, which is a volume measure of about 4 liters) from the first harvest of the grain crops of that year was brought. The priest would raise up the omer before Hashem, and therefore it is called the “omer of the waving”. In Vayikra 23:15-16 it is written: “And you shall count for yourselves from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the omer of the waving; there shall be seven complete Sabbaths; until the morrow after the seventh week, you shall count fifty days; and you shall offer a new meal-offering to the Hashem.” The word combination “the morrow after the Sabbath”, the sages explained as meaning the same day of the “omer of the waving”, that is the day after the festival of Passover. From this explanation we see conclude that the Torah commands to count “seven complete Sabbaths”, meaning seven full weeks from that day, and on the fiftieth day to sacrifice the “new meal-offering”, a sacrifice from the new wheat crop, from which has not yet been sacrificed from that year. The festival we celebrate on the fiftieth day is known as the “Festival of Shavuot (weeks)”, which the sages identified as the day which Israel got the Torah on Mount Sinai.

After the destruction of the Temple, in remembrance of this sacrifice, the sages decreed (Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 66a) that people should continue to count the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot, starting from the time of the bringing of the omer offering. “The counting of the omer” is done at night (which is the beginning of the day according to the Hebrew calendar), from the evening after the first day of the festival of Passover up till the night before the festival of Shavuot.

From the literature of the Geonim we find a blessing over the counting and also the manner in which it should be done, and in time other parts were added to it, some of which were influenced by the Kabala. The wording of the blessing, which is accepted by all ethnic groupings, is “… who has sanctified us with His commandments and has commanded us in the counting of the omer”. After this, the formula of the counting is recited, which includes a count in terms of the days and weeks. There are a number of traditions with respect to the exact wording of the counting: In Ashkenazic tradition (for example) it is “today is twenty days, which are two weeks and six days of the omer” while Oriental Jews say “today is twenty days of the omer, which are two weeks and six days”. (As an aside, there are sources which also have the wording “in the omer”, which is most commonly known in the form of “Lag Ba’Omer”, i.e. the 33rd day in the omer.)

In the Babylonian Talmud (Yevamot 62b) it is written that “Rabbi Akiva had twelve thousand pairs of students … and all of them died during one period … from Passover to Atzeret (=Shavuot)”. Many varied explanations have been given for the deaths of the students of Rabbi Akiva, and generally they connect them to the revolt of Bar Kochba (132-135 CE), and traditionally the common practice is to keep certain of the customs of mourning during the time of “the counting of the omer”. For example, no weddings are performed during all or part of the period, an in this there are various customs among n the various ethnic groupings.

The days of the “counting of the omer” connect between two festivals and raise awareness in preparation for the festival of Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the Torah.