D'var Torah

What do you do when you are living in a world you don’t recognize, with challenges you never imagined facing? What do you do when within your own community (or communities), there is immense hurt and pain? What if this hurt and pain sometimes seems to divide rather than unite, as many people navigate distinct but interconnected experiences of loss (including ambiguous loss)? How should a person try to navigate a time such as this?

For many of us, some version of these questions has been all too present of late. Franklin Foer captured one version in his recent, haunting piece for The Atlantic, The Golden Age of American Jewry Is Ending, and the staff of Hey Alma captured another version of the challenges of the present moment in their February article How to Have Hard Conversations About Israel and Palestine with Fellow Jews. Many of us are so bewildered by the present – and feel so helpless about much of what we are observing in the wider world – that it can be hard to figure out how to productively work for positive change. Others of us may have a very clear sense of what we believe we and others need to do next, but find ourselves at odds with people we care about when we articulate this vision. 

In our Torah portion this week, Tzav, we meet a community from thousands of years ago whose people were grappling with some of these same challenges – though a reader would be forgiven for not noticing this aspect of the portion at first glance. “Tzav” means “command” (the imperative verb, not the noun), and it is full of instructions for how the priests should perform a variety of sacrifices. Some of these sacrifices were routine, and others of which were meant to help them navigate specific life experiences – like a time of unusual gratitude, or a time of contrition after having wronged someone else. 

The rituals described in Tzav are so esoteric (Jewish communities haven’t practiced animal sacrifice in thousands of years) that it can be easy to lose track of the all-too-relatable circumstances they were meant to address. In the story told within the Torah itself, the sacrificial system is meant to help the Ancient Israelites find a reliable way to communicate with God through a tumultuous time – their journey through the wilderness to a new home, and their experiences creating a new society after centuries of enslavement. Sacrifices were meant to be one of the steadying forces in their collective lives. (The other big steadying force was the new commandments they were receiving for how to treat each other ethically – and sacrifices were in many ways the embodied, ritualized reminder of these commandments.)

One of the most interesting parts of the way Tzav (and last week’s portion, Vayikra) describes sacrifices is that it describes a centralized system. The Ancient Israelites couldn’t just perform sacrifices in their backyard – they had to travel to a specific worship space, first a specialized tent and later a Temple made of stones, that was shared by the entire community. This is actually not the way Judaism views prayer (and connection with God more broadly) today – you can pray anywhere. But by requiring the Ancient Israelites to perform their sacrifices at a specific time, and in a specific place, the sacrificial system described in Leviticus required the Ancient Israelites to be in community in a very radical way. People going through hard times, or joyful times, weren’t ever doing it entirely alone, and the story of what they were experiencing in the present moment was one they told their fellow community members not just with words, but also through the physical evidence of the type of sacrifice they were bringing (grain or meat, and which type, etc) on any given day. We also see the Ancient Israelites’ belief that they were all interconnected reflected in the specific rituals that accompanied their sacrifices, which emphasized re-establishing connections with each other and with God, especially after hard times.

We don’t participate in these particular rituals today, but Tzav can remind us to ask: what are we doing to honor the many ways we are connected to each other, and to support each other through challenging times? What are some of our strategies for seeing each other as the complicated and full human beings we all are, and for hearing each others’ stories? 

Tzav, and Leviticus’ entire description of the sacrificial system (as well as the Talmud’s stories about how people made entirely new systems, once again, once sacrifices were no longer possible), is also a reminder that we come from a long tradition of people who found creative ways to navigate challenges and experiences they never could have imagined. We walk in their footsteps and we can draw strength from their example – which was one of curiosity, community building, and belief in the possibility of personal and collective change for the better, even in the midst of the wilderness.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alexandra Stein