How to Truly Live, or What the Heck Can Ritual Sacrifice Teach Us Today
Sermon on Terumah 5782
What is the true purpose of a temple?
Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham, “Make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them,” God commands in this week’s Torah portion of Terumah, and the sanctuary ordained here is for the purpose of ritual animal sacrifice. Defunct in Jewish tradition for over 1900 years, since the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, just what the heck can ritual sacrifice teach us in the year 2022 CE?
First, we must note that one of the central teachings of Judaism, one of our great and most influential revelations, is that God does not require human sacrifice of us. From the time of the binding of Isaac, the Akeidah we read on Rosh Hashanah, through the creation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness of Sinai that is the heart of our Torah portion of Terumah this week, Judaism repeatedly affirmed that children are not bred to be sacrificed to an angry or vengeful God. Instead, sacrifice is ritualized to animals, and used to supplant the dangerous pagan tendency to sacrifice human beings.
Described in loving detail in this week’s sedrah, at the heart of Biblical Judaism is the altar for the sacrifice of small animals, cakes of grain, and incense, rather than humans. It is never to be used as other religions might have, for the real or surrogate sacrifice of even a single human being.
This may seem obvious, but I think for most of us today it is not. You see, the mizbei’ach in the mishkan, the altar of sacrifice of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness was a means to an end. It served as a way for our Israelite ancestors to sublimate the apparent human need for sacrificial ritual and rite, and gave them an understanding of the value of human life. Our High Priests, indeed all kohanim, were taught to be ohev shalom v’rodef shalom, lovers and pursuers of peace. They did not engage in punishing human beings, or even participate in warfare or policing. They were trained solely in ritual, including ritual sacrifice.
To our post-modern eyes the sacrifice of an animal may seem barbaric—and to the vegetarians among us perhaps it should. But Biblically it was used to demonstrate that God loved and valued human life in this world, and did not desire its destruction. The mitzvot, the commandments, are ordained for the purpose of life—v’chai bahem, we are commanded, live by them, not die for them.
Human sacrifice was ubiquitous in the ancient world. One can make the case that Christianity was a way of reaffirming that ancient practice, ritualizing in a highly graphic and disturbing way a literal human sacrifice, the killing of God’s own son. It soon became a way of asserting the primacy of the world-to-come over life in this world, future possible super-human life in place of real world, current, actual human life.
While giving full respect to the profound ethical basis of Christianity and its sincerity of belief, Judaism has continued down a different path that insists that the giving of human life is no great metziah, no desirable end, that this life is all we are guaranteed and it is our responsibility to make the most of it. While we mourn and remember our many martyrs, we celebrate their lives and their courage, not the brutal way they ended. For Jews, the true passion is for life, not death. The purpose of religious expression, of Avodah, worship, is to reach towards that passion, to affirm God’s connection to us in a direct and holy way, during life, during our own lives.
In our tradition, after the destruction of the 2nd Temple nearly 2000 years ago, prayer and tzedakah replaced ritual sacrifice. It is not blood that God seeks now, but our own passionate devotion: to holiness, to personal and professional morality, to social justice, to creating and affirming the good that we can bring in this world.
Poet Ruth Brin writes about the process of sacrifice as conducted by the High Priest then, and by us today:
The garments of the high priest were of such beauty,
The jewels so radiant, they dazzled the people.
Daily in the sanctuary he made sacrifices to the Lord,
Of the lamb and bull
The dove and the little cakes
To the shepherds and farmers
Who brought the sacrifices
These were the means of life.
Thus they proclaimed their willingness
To give life itself to their God.
In all ages, at all times,
People have traded value for value…
But for those who love God the only sufficient gift
Is the symbol of life.
Teach us, God, the spirit of sacrifice;
Will You accept as sufficient
Our prayers and our attempts to pray
As You once accepted the lambs and grain
Of our ancestors?
Will You accept our struggling efforts
To return love for hostility
And justice for partiality?
Will You find our study acceptable?
Teach us God the spirit of sacrifice:
How to devote out lives to our highest ideals.
That is, may our tradition teach us how to truly live in this world, and work to shape this complex and troubled world, so that we can serve God with our words and our actions.
In this week of Parshat Terumah, may our own religious direction, our prayers and actions and spirits, be nurtured by our connection with Jewish holiness and blessing. May we continually affirm life, and live lives of meaning and purpose, of vitality and commitment, of love and giving, as Judaism and our God require.