This week's Torah portion, Tzav, describes in great detail the sacrificial offerings that God commanded the priests to make upon the altar. The rabbis wondered about these rituals and considered whether God actually needed human beings to perform them. Could God have asked the angels to do them instead if God really needed them? Why depend on imperfect and unreliable human beings?

In a classical midrash, the rabbis ask just this question: "The Holy Blessed One said: If I wanted a sacrifice, would I not ask the angel Michael, who is always with Me, to make the offering? Yet, whom did I ask? The people of Israel." (Tanchuma Tzav)

So, why does God make this choice? Why risk it?

The great Chasidic master, Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Kotzk (1787-1859), imagines God answering the question: "If I had wanted just the deed itself, indeed, I would have commanded Michael to do it, since his acts are more pure than any human could ever perform. However, I asked human beings to do it because I do not want the deed. Rather, it is the intention and the preparations that I want. In this respect, the deeds of humanity are more pleasant to Me than the act of any angel." (Ohel Torah, Tzav)

In Jewish tradition, angels are pure beings of light who exceed human beings in every respect except for one. They have no free will. It is their very perfection that makes them incapable of doing anything that God does not wish them to do. On the other hand, we imperfect humans are capable of disappointing God by falling short (sometimes falling very far short) of what God wants from us.

Yet, it is our imperfection that God craves. God delights in the fact that, when we do what is right, we do it because we choose it. And that is why God chooses us.

God does not care about the ancient sacrificial offerings themselves. God does not care about the lighting of the candles, the food we eat or don't eat, the work we abstain from, or the performance of any ritual deed at all. The performance is not the point. The point is only that we set our intentions on something beyond ourselves and strive toward the pure holiness that is beyond our grasp.

So, the next time you think about performing any ritual and you catch yourself thinking – "Will God hate me if I don't do this the right way?" – try to reframe the question. God does not care how you do it, only that you engage in an intention toward holiness. If you can engage deeply and meaningfully in the contemplation of the exact right moment to light the candles, or the precisely correct way of reading a sacred text, good for you. Do it with delight and joy beaming from your soul.

On the other hand, if you worry that you have fallen short of what is "exact" and "precise," then comfort yourself with the knowledge that it is your inexactitude and your imprecision that God finds most delightful and wondrous about you. If it weren't for that, God just would have asked Michael to do it instead. But God did not do that. God chose you.


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Bo: Pharaoh's Free Will
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I ended Shabbat last night with a group of teenagers on a small spoil Island in the Indian River Lagoon on the east coast of southern Florida. We kayaked here for a Confirmation retreat that included paddling on the shining water, preparing meals, camping overnight, planting fruit trees, and studying texts about Judaism and the environment.

After dinner last night, we made the havdalah blessings over wine and spices. We lit and extinguished the braided candle as we heard the water ripple, the crickets chirp, and the manatees and dolphins breathe. Then we assembled sticks, pine needles and palm fronds to make a small, intimate fire to keep us warm through the evening.

We sat around the campfire for two hours, sometimes chatting, sometimes putting more wood on the fire, and often just sitting in silence. To me, it seemed like a precious moment — a group of teenagers with no cellphones or laptops to stare at, no lessons or sport practices to run off to, nothing better to do than just stare into the red, orange, yellow and blue flames of our modest fire.

There is something captivating and intoxicating about a fire. Staring at it, feeling its warmth, feeding it and tending it, lulls us into quiet appreciation. We are fascinated by the way fire transforms things. It turns scraps of wood into energy. It dances and breathes and shines out where there was darkness. Fire also has that hint of danger to it. Fire reminds us of our physical vulnerabilities and the way that, if we are not careful, we can be consumed by forces beyond our control.

We watch a fire and feel that we are, somehow, a bit closer to the eternal source of creation and change in the universe — a power that can seem, sometimes, to overwhelm us. Watching a fire, we are transfixed by a world that is always, right before our eyes, becoming something new.

In this week's Torah portion, Tzav, we read about how the ancent Israelites kept a fire burning before the Temple: "A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, not to go out" (Leviticus 6:6). The Israelites burned offerings on that fire to express their gratitude for their blessings, to find forgiveness of their faults, and to come close to their God. 

Nowadays, when we talk about the sacrifices described in the book of Leviticus, we often say things like, "These ancient practices seem very strange to us," or we talk about how we are lucky that we now worship God with words, not with burning animal carcasses on an altar. But I think the old, abandoned practices of the Temple and its sacred fire are not as strange to as we like to say they are. They are not so irrelevant. 

We, too, stare into the fire of the Shabbat candles, the havdalah flame, or just a friendly campfire on a cool Florida night, and we discover a bit of eternity in the sparks and the shifting, living light. We are fascinated by it and we are reminded of our fragility in a universe filled with wonder and change. 

Today, as we get back into our kayaks, we will feel the swells and currents of the lagoon's waters under us — another reminder of transforming power that is not fully under our control. We will paddle our way back to the mainland and back to the usual rhythms of our lives. We will carry with us, though, some memories of a Shabbat spent looking into the light, feeling ourselves warmed by sacred flames, peering out of the darkness into the transforming fire of eternity. 


Other Posts on This Topic:
And After the Fire — a Still, Small Voice
Tzav: Find the Sacred in Every Little Thing

The burnt offering is what we usually think of when we think of the highest sacrificial offering to God. In it, the entire animal was burned and "turned into smoke" on the altar. Unlike other offerings, none of the animal was kept for human food. The burnt offering was used for the most important offerings, including the twice-a-day, every-day perpetual offerings that were the clockwork of the Temple.

It seems odd that this passage places the sin offering on the same level as the burnt offering. The sin offering was used primarily as a way of seeking forgiveness for unintentional sins. As such, it could be brought to the priest by anyone upon the realization that he or she had violated some sacred requirement or prohibition. We might have thought that this was the most ordinary of all sacrificial offerings, a way merely of saying "sorry" for a mistake. 

Yet, this verse states the opposite. It goes so far as to call the sin offering "holy of holies." The sin offering is made in the same place—perhaps both physically and spiritually—as the holiest of all offerings. There is a hint here of what the rabbis meant when they praised the repentance from sin, even over not sinning at all. 

The Talmud declares (B. Berachot 34b): "Rabbi Abahu said, 'Where those who have repented from sin stand, those who have never sinned cannot stand." Through the act of recognizing error and seeking forgiveness, a sinner becomes superior to the sinless! The greatest perfection, to the rabbis, is not in the perfect. It is the repair of the imperfect. 

We even could conclude from this message that sin is, in fact, the vehicle through which we ascend to the highest realms of holiness in our lives. That may seem preposterous, or even perverse. How can a wrong be better than a right? Yet, it does make psychological sense and spiritual sense. 

We can learn more from our mistakes than from doing only what is right. When we act in thoughtless ways and see the harm we have caused, we can be shocked by our own failings. The awareness of what we have done can teach us a deeper commitment to doing better in the future. We learn to do what is right for all of the right reasons—not just to follow a rule out of simple obedience, but as a choice informed by personal heartache and hard-won experience.

Each of us carries the baggage of our own past. We all have had moments that we remember and deeply regret—enough to make us wish we could change the past. Even after we have apologized and made restitution to the people we hurt, those moments stay with us. The spiritual power of this teaching, however, is that we can transform the guilt we might feel about those moments into something positive. When we come before God—and come before our own deepest selves—with heartfelt remorse, we turn such moments into a source of personal elevation. 

We may not be able to change what we did in the past, but we do have an opportunity to change what our past means to us. It is within our power to heal the wounds we feel from our mistakes and realize that they have made us better, not worse, than we were before.

This is Torah. It is the Torah of the sin offering. Your sins, once you confront them, put you in the place of the highest holiness. They are no longer a source of pangs of guilt, but become a source of strength. Through them, you enter the Holy of Holies.


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You are What You Choose to Be
Repairing Everything in an Instant