Tzav צו
Parashat Tzav continues the laws of sacrifices begun in the previous parasha, this time from the perspective of the priests performing the ritual. Rules are set out for burnt and grain offerings, sin and guilt offerings, and peace offerings, each with its own specific procedures. Details are then set out for the induction of Aaron and his sons into office, prior to the inauguration of the service of the Sanctuary.
In the essays that follow, the first looks at the place of sacrifices in human civilisation and the connection between religion and violence. The second is about the thanksgiving offering and the role of gratitude in the emotional life. The third asks why the Torah is so emphatic in its prohibition against eating blood. The fourth concerns the transformation of Jewish life after the destruction of the Temple. How was it that Judaism survived the loss of its most central institutions: the Temple, the priesthood, and the sacrificial service? The fifth is about a difficult passage in the haftara where Jeremiah says that God did not originally command the Israelites to offer sacrifices. What might this mean?
Violence and the Sacred
Judaism is less a philosophical system than a field of tensions – between universalism and particularism, exile and redemption, priests and prophets, cyclical and linear time, and so on through a long list of polarities. Rarely is this more in evidence than in the conflicting statements within Judaism about sacrifices.
On the one hand, reading the book of Psalms, it is impossible to miss the sense of excitement and joy with which people came to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple and offer sacrifices to God:
I will sacrifice a thanksgiving offering to You and call on the name of the Lord.
I will fulfil my vows to the Lord in the presence of all His people.
In the courts of the house of the Lord – in your midst, Jerusalem. Hallelujah. (Ps. 116:17–19)
To give back to God, to thank Him for the gift of life, to atone for your sins, to join your people as they come together to pay homage to their heavenly king, to be in the place that more than any other was the home of the Divine Presence: this is what the sacrificial system was about. It was vivid, emotional, sometimes penitential, often joyous: the tryst, the lovers’ meeting, between God and His covenanted people. The dry prose of Vayikra and its sacrificial laws should not blind us to the fact that there was a profoundly affective dimension to the service. It spoke to the heart, its hopes and fears. It was high religious drama.
Despite this, time and again reading the prophets we are struck by how impassioned their critique of the sacrificial system was. We hear it in Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Micah gave it one of its most famous expressions:
With what shall I come before the Lord
And bow down before the exalted God?…
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
With ten thousand rivers of oil?…
He has shown you, O man, what is good.
What does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God. (Mic. 6:6–8)
The conflict runs deep, but it is a tension, not a contradiction. What the prophets were saying is that Judaism is a monotheism, not a dualism. There is one world, not two. If we love God then we must love our fellow human beings, the neighbour and the stranger. If we seek God’s justice, we must practise justice. If we call for God’s forgiveness, we too must be forgiving. To compartmentalise our relationships with God and with our fellow humans, caring about one while neglecting the other, is just such a dualism. The priest reminded people of their duties to God. The prophet reminded them of their duties to humankind. One without the other is unsustainable and indefensible.
Yet anyone who thinks deeply about the religious life must ask: why sacrifices? Why this way of serving God? Maimonides says that this is how other nations served the gods in those days. To command the Israelites to behave otherwise would have been asking too much, too soon, of a human nature that is slow to change.1Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, III:32.
Yet God did not hesitate to forbid them from making idols and icons despite the fact that this too was ubiquitous in ancient times. So even on Maimonides’ theory, there is still a question. Why did God permit a form of service shared by other nations in the ancient world and that was in some ways less than ideal? Many answers have been offered in the history of Jewish thought. One of the most intriguing is given by the early fifteenth-century Jewish thinker, Rabbi Joseph Albo (Spain, 1380–1444), in his Sefer HaIkkarim (The Book of Principles, 1425).2Rabbi Joseph Albo, Sefer HaIkkarim III:15.
Albo’s theory took as its starting point not sacrifices but two other questions. The first: Why after the Flood did God permit human beings to eat meat? (Gen. 9:3–5). Initially, neither human beings nor animals had been meat eaters (Gen. 1:29–30). What caused God, as it were, to change His mind? The second: What was wrong with the first act of sacrifice, Cain’s offering of “some of the fruits of the soil” (Gen. 4:3–5)? God’s rejection of that offering led directly to the first murder, when Cain killed Abel. What was at stake in the difference between the offerings Cain and Abel brought to God?
Albo’s theory is that killing animals for food is inherently wrong. It involves taking the life of a sentient being to satisfy our needs. Cain knew this. He believed there was a strong kinship between man and the animals. That is why he offered not an animal sacrifice, but a vegetable one (his error, according to Albo, is that he should have brought fruit, not vegetables – the highest, not the lowest, of non-meat produce). Abel, by contrast, believed that there was a qualitative difference between man and the animals. Had God not told the first humans: “Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves in the ground”? That is why he brought an animal sacrifice.
Once Cain saw that Abel’s sacrifice had been accepted while his own was not, he reasoned thus: if God, who forbids us to kill animals for food, permits and even favours killing an animal as a sacrifice, and if, as Cain believed, there is no ultimate difference between human beings and animals, then I shall offer the highest living being as a sacrifice to God, namely my brother Abel. Cain killed Abel as a human sacrifice.
That is why God permitted meat-eating after the Flood. Before the Flood, the world had been “filled with violence.” Perhaps violence is an inherent part of human nature. If humanity were to be allowed to exist at all, God would have to lower His demands. Let humans kill animals, He said, rather than kill human beings – the one form of life that is not only God’s creation but also God’s image. Hence the otherwise almost unintelligible sequence of verses after Noah and his family emerge on dry land:
Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in His heart, “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood…”
Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them…
“Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything…
Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God, has God made man.” (Gen. 8:29–9:6)
According to Albo the logic of the passage is clear. Noah offers an animal sacrifice in thanksgiving for having survived the Flood. God sees that human beings need this way of expressing themselves. They are genetically predisposed to violence (“every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood”). If society were to survive, humans would need to be able to direct their violence towards non-human animals, whether as food or sacrificial offerings. The crucial line to be drawn is between human and non-human. The permission to kill animals is accompanied by an absolute prohibition against killing human beings, “for in the image of God, has God made man.”
It is not that God approves of killing animals, whether for sacrifice or food, but that to forbid this to human beings, given their genetic predisposition to bloodshed, is utopian. It is not for now but for the end of days. Until then, the least bad solution is to let people kill animals rather than murder their fellow humans. Animal sacrifices are a concession to human nature.3On why God never chooses to change human nature, see Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, III:32.
Sacrifices are a substitute for violence directed against mankind.
The contemporary thinker who has done most to revive this understanding is French-American literary critic and philosophical anthropologist René Girard, in such books as Violence and the Sacred, The Scapegoat, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. The common denominator in sacrifices, he argues, is
…internal violence – all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that.4René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 8.
The worst form of violence within and between societies is vengeance, “an interminable, infinitely repetitive process.” This is in line with Hillel’s saying, on seeing a human skull floating on water, “Because you drowned others, they drowned you, and those who drowned you will in the end themselves be drowned” (Mishna Avot 2:7).
There is no natural end to the cycle of retaliation and revenge. The Montagues keep killing and being killed by the Capulets. So do the Tattaglias and the Corleones and the other feuding groups in fiction and history. It is a destructive cycle that has devastated whole communities. According to Girard this was the problem that religious ritual was developed to resolve. The primary religious act, he says, is the sacrifice, and the primary sacrifice is the scapegoat. If tribes A and B who have been fighting can sacrifice a member of tribe C, then both will have sated their desire for bloodshed without inviting revenge, especially if tribe C is in no position to retaliate. Sacrifices divert the destructive energy of violent reciprocity.
Why then, if violence is embedded in human nature, are sacrifices a feature of ancient rather than modern societies? Because, argues Girard, there is another and more effective way of ending vengeance:
Vengeance is a vicious circle whose effect on primitive societies can only be surmised. For us the circle has been broken. We owe our good fortune to one of our social institutions above all: our judicial system, which serves to deflect the menace of vengeance. The system does not suppress vengeance; rather, it effectively limits itself to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign authority specialising in this particular function. The decisions of the judiciary are invariably presented as the final word on vengeance.5Ibid., 15.
Girard’s terminology here is not one to which we can subscribe. Justice is not vengeance. Retribution is not revenge. Revenge is inherently I-Thou, or We-Them. It is personal. Retribution is impersonal. It is no longer the Montagues versus the Capulets, but both under the impartial judgement of the law. But Girard’s substantive point is correct and essential. The only effective antidote to violence is the rule of law.
Girard’s theory confirms the view of Albo. Sacrifice (as with meat-eating) entered Judaism as a substitute for violence. It also helps us understand the profound insight of the prophets that sacrifices are not ends in themselves, but part of the Torah’s programme to create a world redeemed from the otherwise interminable cycle of revenge. The other part of that programme, and God’s greatest desire, is a world governed by justice. That, we recall, was His first charge to Abraham, to “instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just” (Gen. 18:19).
Have we therefore moved beyond that stage in human history in which animal sacrifices have a point? Has justice become a powerful enough reality that we no longer need religious rituals to divert the violence between human beings? Sadly, the answer is no. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War led some thinkers to argue that we had reached “the end of history.” There would be no more ideologically driven wars. Instead the world would turn to the market economy and liberal democracy.6Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
The reality was radically different. There were waves of ethnic conflict and violence in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and Rwanda, followed by even bloodier conflicts throughout the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia. In his book The Warrior’s Honour, Michael Ignatieff offered the following explanation of why this happened:
The chief moral obstacle in the path of reconciliation is the desire for revenge. Now, revenge is commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion, and because it is regarded as such, its deep moral hold on people is rarely understood. But revenge – morally considered – is a desire to keep faith with the dead, to honour their memory by taking up their cause where they left off. Revenge keeps faith between generations…
This cycle of intergenerational recrimination has no logical end…. But it is the very impossibility of intergenerational vengeance that locks communities into the compulsion to repeat…
Reconciliation has no chance against vengeance unless it respects the emotions that sustain vengeance, unless it can replace the respect entailed in vengeance with rituals in which communities once at war learn to mourn their dead together.7Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (Toronto: Penguin, 2006), 188–190.
Far from speaking to an age long gone and forgotten, the laws of sacrifice tell us three things as important now as then:
First, violence is still part of human nature, never more dangerous than when combined with an ethic of revenge.
Second, rather than denying its existence, we must find ways of redirecting it so that it does not claim yet more human sacrifices.
Third, the only ultimate alternative to sacrifices, animal or human, is the one first propounded millennia ago by the prophets of ancient Israel, few more powerfully than Amos:
Even though you bring Me burnt offerings and offerings of grain,
I will not accept them…
But let justice roll down like a river,
And righteousness like a never-failing stream. (Amos 5:23–24)