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EXPLORING
THEOLOGICAL
MYTHS
Different ways of looking at traditional beliefs.
RABBI JEREMY ROSEN

WHO WANTS TO SEE SACRIFICES ?

Sacrifices play a central part in the Torah. They are the main vehicle for worshipping God, for marking daily service and for dealing with human activities and events. Jewish history is dominated by the two Temples where sacrifice was the essential core of activity. Our prayers constantly repeat a desire to have the sacrifices reinstated. Yet for many of us the idea of animal sacrifice is difficult to enthuse about. Do we really want to see sacrifices return? How do we deal with this?

It is Cain who initiates the first sacrifice to God, a peace offering which is not an animal sacrifice. Is this why it was not accepted? No commentator suggests that this is the reason but Abel 's animal offering is accepted. Noah offers a sacrifice to God after coming out of the ark but there has already been a distinction made between animals even before the flood because Noah took in two of each of animals described as ' Unfit'. Unfit for what? One must assume that unfit means unfit both for human consumption and for sacrificing. So the fact that Noah took seven each of the ' fit' animals implies that by his time there was an established tradition about eating and sacrificing animals. According to the Talmud man was originally not permitted to eat meat. It was not until Noah that animal meat was allowed. Was his sacrifice one which enabled him to eat meat as well as to thank God? Later on in the Torah the structure of sacrifices differentiated between those sacrifices that a layman could participate in and those which were only for 'higher' purposes. The ' Mincha', the peace sacrifice, was one that was shared between man and God whereas the burnt sacrifice, the 'Olah' was usually offered completely to God and the priesthood. Noah, after the flood offers an ' Olah'. Nevertheless the link between eating meat and sacrificing begins here. If one wants to eat meat one must kill within a controlled and spiritual framework and one 'shares' the sacrifice with God and the priests. One can begin to sense some of the lessons that the sacrificial system was designed to inculcate.

The idea that God 'smells the offering' of course is not meant literally any more than is 'the finger of God' or 'the anger of God'. It is not that God 'needs' sacrifices or any other ritual for that matter. But God is in a reciprocal relationship with humanity. Attempts of humans to connect with God have the effect of 'pleasing' God and invoking a response if only because a human expressing deep inner feelings often understands better how to proceed.

God seals His covenant with Abraham at the sacrifice that is divided into parts, one for Abraham and one for God . Of course the most important lesson about sacrifices is that learnt by Abraham when he nearly offers up his son Isaac. Given the prevalence of human sacrifice throughout the world at that time there are two important lessons. One is that human sacrifice is unacceptable and the second is that one can easily misunderstand Divine messages. Ultimately this is why instructions are recorded in the Torah in detail rather than being left up to an understanding of what God requires .

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Once the system of sacrifices is clarified in the Torah certain issues emerge. On a personal level the sacrificial system emphasizes that it is not a system of automatic penance. One must put things right before one can come to the Temple. Whether it is correcting something one has done wrong to another person or to God, the first stage in the process is to confess. Not to a priest but to oneself. One must then express and verbalize it to God. This is an amazing psychological innovation, this need to recognize and accept what one has done. It is only since Freud that we have come to understand fully the human tendency to sublimate, to refuse to come to terms with reality or to deal with what has happened. The confession, the viduy, is designed precisely for this purpose. Then if restitution needs to be made, it must be done as a precondition of bringing sacrifices. Finally there had to be a determination not to repeat what had been done. Only then, after restitution and after repentance can the act seal the process. This why the prophets so often criticized the misuse of the sacrificial system because people were taking short cuts and assuming that an offering was enough. It is unlikely the prophets opposed sacrifices altogether at the time any more than they opposed the kingship because of the legacy of bad kings. But they hated hypocrisy. Perhaps the people thought one could bribe the priesthood with a fat calf and the priest would intervene with God. This idea still influences some people who are far from ethical yet make major donations to religious leaders in this 'modern' era.

In addition to the process of sacrificing as a personal or communal atonement, the Torah describes communal sacrifices, personal sacrifices, obligatory and voluntary. Perhaps the most far reaching is the biblical command that if one wants to eat meat one must bring it to the priests as a sacrifice and not just kill and eat wherever one is. But this would have created difficulties in a situation were an enlarged border would have made it impractical to go up to Jerusalem each time one wanted to eat meat. So accommodation was made and in the end, laymen were allowed to kill meat, a distinction was made between 'Kodshim', the Holy, sacred, and 'Chullin', the workaday norm for the man in the street. Hunting was allowed. And yet it is clear that the ideal is still to eat meat within the Temple framework. Why?

Anyone who has seen animals being slaughtered for meat will fully understand the horror of animal slaughter. It makes no difference what method is used or how hygienic and sanitized the abattoir may be. It is a horrible experience I can attest to in the light of my experience, studying to qualify as a rabbi and having to learn the system of animal slaughter. I made it my business to observe different systems on different continents both Jewish and non Jewish. I have no doubt that if the ordinary person could see any method of animal killing he or she would have great difficulty in eating meat. The animals sense what is ahead of them. They are terrified and are prodded with electrically charged sticks or worse to go forward to their death. The air is rank with the smell of blood and innards as they are poured out of the carcasses and run down the gutters. We, in the twenty first century simply hide these unpleasant scenes away and the average consumer has no inkling of what goes into bringing his steak to the table. It is far worse if one lives in the countryside and witnesses as I used to in Oxfordshire the way farmers hack animals to death either on their farms or at the back yard of the local butcher. Respect for animals or indeed for life seems totally absent.

The system of sacrifice was a vast improvement on these methods. Animals were led through courtyards by priests in clean ceremonial clothes. The atmosphere was one of reverence and the air was filled with incense. The whole approach to killing was as an act of devotion restricted to a very few practitioners and all within a religiously charged atmosphere of worship. The Temple was the focal point of Jewish communal life. It was accessible to everyone. The king or whoever was the ruler exercised political power. But the Temple was the place to which every person was entitled to go, man, woman, child, the stranger and the alien. Certainly the priesthood performed the functions but they performed them on behalf of and for the people of Israel in general and anyone from the world outside who wanted to participate. The Temple symbolized spirituality. It was the House of God and yet God's name was mentioned in full only once a year on the Day of Atonement.

The Temple was not a house of prayer. It had singing, performed by the Levites, but this was a background to performance. In some ways every individual at home had more immediate access to God through prayer. The Temple was the place of the nation as opposed to the individual. After the Babylonian exile the synagogues which coexisted with the rebuilt Temple in Israel and continued to be the focal point of Diaspora life. The significance of the Temple for the nation was difficult to replace because its ceremonials were on behalf of everyone regardless of language, level of commitment, place of residence or affiliation. It was also the home of the legislative council the Sanhedrin. So that when the Second Temple was destroyed the only way the rabbis could find some sort of replacement was through formal community prayer. This is the main reason why the prayers that they initiated refer so much back to the sacrificial system. To them it represented the ideal cohesive system for the nation as a whole. And like the Kingship, it was a symbol of self determination. Of cultural and religious independence, of a golden era that the darker the Diaspora became, the brighter shone the image of a freer and nobler past even if the reality at the time was not quite so perfect. So one can understand the significance of the sacrifices in the Rabbinic psyche of the generation that lost the Temple.

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The question is whether it is necessarily the case that sacrifices will be re-instituted at a time in the future when the Temple may be rebuilt. There were many biblical laws that were either temporary or fell into disuse. The order to destroy the Canaanite tribes fell into abeyance both because with time they disappeared and because the Assyrians mixed up all the tribes to the point where identification became impossible . The laws of slavery applied to a slave society but when Jews were no longer in a position to have Canaanite slaves or when the societies they lived in did not allow Hebrew slaves the laws simply fell into disuse. The Biblical law about prophets fell into disuse with the disappearance of prophecy. The laws of leprosy for people clothes and buildings were abandoned. The cities of Refuge became inoperative and later unrealizable. Laws that allowed certain actions such as the Sotah for the suspicious husband were simply stopped as was the capital punishment for certain crimes . The list goes on. Of course these laws were still studied. They represented ideas and ideals that merited poring over to try to understand the underlying spiritual messages. But as effective aspects of Jewish life, they had no function at all. Would the same thing apply to sacrifices with the destruction of the Temple?

The overwhelming body of Rabbinic opinion was that sacrifices would indeed be restored. And to this day that is the opinion that the majority of the rabbis of the Orthodox world adhere to. Nevertheless many people still have difficulty reconciling themselves to animal sacrifices. This must have been the case a thousand years ago because Maimonides tackles this in his philosophical masterpiece 'The Guide To The Perplexed'. I want to quote Maimonides at length because his testimony on this subject is crucial.

' It is impossible to go suddenly from one extreme to another; it is therefore according to the nature of man impossible for him suddenly to discontinue everything to which he has been accustomed…the custom which was in those days general amongst me and the general mode of worship in which the Israelites were brought up consisted in sacrificing animals in those temples which contained certain images, to bow down to those images and to burn incense before them. Religious and ascetic persons were in those days the persons who were devoted to the service in the temples erected to the stars as has been explained by us. It was in accordance with the wisdom and plan of God as displayed in the whole creation that He did not command us to give up and discontinue all these manners of service; for to obey such a commandment would have been contrary to the nature of man who generally cleaves to that which he is used. It would in those days have made the same impression as a prophet would make at present if he called us to the service of God and told us in his name that we should not pray to him, not fast, not seek His help in time of trouble that we should serve Him in thought and not by any action. For this reason God allowed these kinds of service to continue….I know you will at first reject this idea and find it strange you will put the following question to me I your heart… What prevented Him from making His primary object a direct commandment to us and give us the capacity of obeying it?…It is contrary to man's nature that he should suddenly abandon all the different kinds of Divine service and the different customs in which he has been brought up…

…The sacrificial service is not the primary object ( of the commandments about sacrifice ) whilst supplications prayers and similar kinds of worship are nearer the primary object and indispensable for obtaining it, a great difference was made in the Law between these two kinds of service. The one kind which consists in offering sacrifices although the sacrifices are offered to the name of God has not been made obligatory for us to the same extent as it had been before. We are not commanded to sacrifice in every place and in every time or to build a Temple in every place or to permit anyone who desires to become a priest and to sacrifice. On the contrary all of this is prohibited to us…except that prayers and supplication can be offered everywhere and by every person .

According to this highly controversial position the sacrifices were a temporary stage in the process of weaning Israel away from pagan sacrifice and towards the ideal of communication with God through prayer. If this is the case then there is no reason to suppose that the sacrifices would be reinstated. It is often argued that Maimonides wrote his ' Guide' for philosophers , assimilated Jews or the non-Jewish world. A truer guide to his Jewish beliefs is his book of Jewish Law , the 'Yad HaChazaka'. There, he includes laws that form the essence of Judaism and includes those that while currently in abeyance, like the Sanhedrin or the King, might be reinstated and he details the sacrificial system. The argument that Maimonides included only those laws that would still apply is disingenuous because he also includes laws about Canaanite slaves. Maimonides included the corpus of Jewish law not necessarily because everything would be reinstated but because it merited study and should not be forgotten because of its important role in the development of the people and its legal system. Nevertheless we can only hazard a guess, given that he is not here to reconcile these two apparently contradictory texts.

Of course it is possible that human attitudes may change. It will anyway take a superhuman intervention to turn anything to do with rebuilding the Temple into reality. The politics of the international community govern the Temple Mount. There is no realistic chance of demolishing the Mosque of Omar and even if one did the majority of the Orthodox world believes that one may not go onto the Temple Mount because we are in a state of Ritual impurity. Within the Orthodox world itself the fissures are so profound that it is impossible to envision agreement on an architect let alone on who would serve as a priest and how matters of ritual purity would be determined. It is not without reason that the rabbis believed that only a resurrected Elijah could possibly sort these things out. So it is possible that if the future is in the hands of God so too the solution is in the hands of God and we may change in our way of thinking too.

The rabbis sometimes came up with quite radical views about the nature of future worship. 'In the future to come God will allow everything He has forbidden' or 'In the future all sacrifices will be annulled except for thanking God' ( a similar statement is made about prayers as well) . Rabbi Yitschak said 'What is meant by the words 'This is the law ( Torah ) of the Guilt Offering', 'This is the law of the Sin Offering'? Whoever studies Torah does not need a burnt offering nor a peace offering nor a guilt offering' . Rabbi Yitschak enumerates the different categories of sacrifices, personal and communal. For him Torah is the crucial issue because it is Torah rather than sacrifices that keeps the Jewish people alive. I am not suggesting that any of these rabbis did not wish to see the return of the sacrificial system. One simply does not know. One can see in their opinions some of the variety and openness that indicates that there are different ways of looking at this subject.

The fact is that no one knows how any messianic era would play itself out and how Divine intervention would work. For the present the sacrificial system tells us a great deal about the past. But it also tells us a great deal about the nature of the different sacrifices and what their aim was to achieve in the individual consciousness and what their goals were to achieve for national cohesion. There is a great deal to be learnt from these ideas, structures and the procedures that, when applied to our daily concerns, can help us live our lives in the present.