( Text of the parsha )
Look, sacrifice is hard to swallow. It’s bloody and gruesome and earthy and when you burn up all that animal flesh everything gets covered in sticky, smelly grease.
When I was pregnant with my daughter there was a whole neighborhood that smelled so strongly of rancid fat to me that even driving through it caused me to retch.
Sacrifice is hard to swallow, like God. God is really hard to swallow. The Christians have figured out a really terrific way to swallow God. They just, you know, swallow. That’s awesome for them.
For Jews it’s harder. You can try to slice God up and shrink God down and extract God’s essence or stone-grind or expeller-press or molecularly distill God, but God is still too damn big to swallow.
Well, God could be smaller if God wanted, too. God could dance on the head of a pin.
One way or another, God has to be smaller for humans to have any chance of even dealing with God without going blind and burning up and generally being annihilated by God’s full-on glory. God has to have little thumbnail-sized avatars of God that we can grab onto, see, swallow, taste, feel, love.
Actually, God has a bunch of thumbnail-sized avatars. They’re called people. And sure, there’s been a lot of data loss in the thumbnailing process. Everyone’s just a tiny piece of a big picture, and lossy to boot. Corrupted data and all of that. Anyway, so here we are, thumbnails of God. We have a path back to the original. It’s up to us to follow it.
Maimonides said that God specified animal and other sacrifices to the Israelites because God knew that everyone at that time sacrificed to their gods in those ways. God wanted to give the people something they’d be familiar with. A beaten path. So we cannot blame either God or the ancient Israelites for all that grease. God gave the Israelites what they needed to find their way back to God. God did not expect them to leap into darkness, into a whole new way of understanding the unseen.
Nachmanides, on the other hand, was of the mind that the destruction of the second temple was indeed a disaster, that literal sacrifice in a literal temple was the original, and still preferred, method of relating to God, and that our inability to do that anymore was a great sadness and a great disability for us.
Even today, most Orthodox siddurim still ask for the restoration of the beit ha mikdash and look forward to resuming the sacrifices as outlined in the torah. And most other siddurim do not. I personally have never looked forward to the resumption of animal sacrifice or to the rebuilding of the Temple. I think most of us today could not imagine such a thing. Animal sacrifice seems so obviously deficient as a way to connect with God, so obviously barbaric and obviously primitive and obviously lesser than prayer and service and acts of lovingkindness.
But really, on what do I base my opinion of sacrifice? Have i ever done it myself? Have I even ever killed a mammal myself, or seen one killed in person? I held a man I loved when he died, and one thing I can say about that is that death is primitive and intense and gruesome and strange and it is absolutely barbaric that we all must die, and that my uncle, a man I loved who had not lived out his allotted days, as far as I was concerned, died. And also that I have never felt more in the presence of the holy and the sacred as when I sat there with my uncle as he died, except perhaps when giving birth, which is also gruesome and bloody and brutal and intense and absolutely strange.
Why then do I dismiss ritual slaughter as something less likely to connect me with the divine than some nice clean praying in a nice clean synagogue with absolutely no rancid fat smell? Is it because I like to imagine that I am more civilized than that, or because I know that I am not more civilized than that and I would prefer not to understand that about myself, because if I did -- chaos? Is my knee-jerk dismissal of literal sacrifice just another way to hide from the terrifying realities of life as we know it, just as our funeral homes and our nursing homes and our intensive care units and all the beeping machines are a way to pretend that we no longer die? In rejecting sacrifice, am I rejecting the reality of death?
Then there’s the other reality of eating meat. It is messy and greasy and smelly and smoky and bloody and all meat came from something that was killed, on my behalf, by someone somewhere on a real farm, factory or otherwise. Sacrifice sanctifies the eating of meat, and probably that kind of sanctification is something we need more of in our lives. Attending a sacrifice would, at the very least, make it harder to pretend that we are not doing the things we are doing.
Too, when we give the first fruits or the firstborn of a flock to God, we acknowledge in a very concrete way that everything we have is borrowed or given to us. I mean, there's "thanks god for all the awesome you've given us" and there's "thanks god for the awesome and here's our very best sheep." Those are pretty different acts. In my family, we even have trouble at Havdalah pouring out wine to extinguish the candle in. We think "but that's good, drinkable wine! Why waste it?" It's not like we're saying "why waste it, we could give it to starving children in India who don't have anything but Manischevitz to drink." We would just rather drink the wine ourselves. If we have such a reaction to spilling a little bit of wine, I imagine it'd be pretty powerful to give up a whole actual living animal. To see all that good meat go up in smoke, for the sake of something or someone invisible, unknowable, unthinkable...
I don't want to sacrifice animals. I don't think I can hope and pray that the Mosque on the temple mount is torn down and a new Temple is built there and that I will someday go there on Sukkot and buy or bring a sheep or goat and stand there singing psalms while some guy named Cohen kills and butchers and burns up the animal I've brought.
But I can see the appeal. I can see that it might actually be the most intense experience of God I could have in this world. Just ordinary me, not great at meditating, not super at prayer, only able to feel God in fits and starts and only inklings. I can very well imagine that it would be like attending a birth or a death, only there for the taking (or giving) whenever I felt distant from God, whenever I needed to connect.
I don't pray for the restoration of the temple and the sacrifical system. But I'm not sure that I shouldn't.
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