Every year when we reach the book of Vayikra I find myself struggling.
I’ve spent months chewing on the juicy carcasses of Berashit (where nascent humans discover their relational limitations, and family conflict and sibling rivalry reign aloft), and Shemot (where the Israelites march across the parted, healing waters in the liberationary narrative centrepiece of the Torah).
The tonal shift between Berashit and Shemot carries us from intimate, individualised family stories into the collective experiences of a people shaped by oppression, resistance, and redemption.
But in Vayikra, we deflect away from narrative itself into complex ritual.
We don’t really read about what happens to our people; we read lists of rules and practices about how meaning, holiness, and relationship with God are sustained.
Pasuk after pasuk of instruction about animal sacrifice, what to bring, how to prepare it, where the blood goes:
The priests shall dash the blood against all sides of the altar (Lev 1:5)
The priests shall bring the bird to the altar and pinch off its head (Lev 1:15).
The priest shall tear it open by its wings (Lev 1:17)
As Rabbi Devorah Weisberg points out, these practices seem “pointless at best and offensive at worst.”
But our Sages also teach us in Pirkei Avot (5:22):
בֶּן בַּג בַּג אוֹמֵר) הֲפֹךְ בָּהּ וַהֲפֹךְ בָּהּ, דְּכֹלָּא בָהּ)
Turn it over and turn it over yet again, for everything is contained therein
Torah contains everything. Everything is in it.
Not only the beautiful and the uplifting, but also the strange, uncomfortable, violent Theatre of the Sacred; bizarre and morally dubious texts who aggressively demand that we remain in relationship with them.
Vayikra alludes to the intentionality behind various types of offerings that the Israelites would bring in service, ones for right and wrong doings (Chatat – not upholding a promise, not helping when you can; Asham – atoning for sacred trespassing and willful deceit), offerings of thanksgiving (zevach sh’lamim), and simple gifts to God given just because (minchah).
But beneath them all burns the olah, the elevation offering that would burn morning to evening and evening to morning in an enduring expression of commitment to holy service.
אֵשׁ תָּמִיד תּוּקַד עַל־הַמִּזְבֵּחַ לֹא תִכְבֶּה
A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, not to go out (Lev 6:6)
Cantor Isaac Sonnet-Assor teaches: “This Eish Tamid is the engine at the heart of the ancient Israelites’ spiritual life, a constant reminder of their connection to all that is Holy, and the means to express all of their spiritual needs: to mend relationships, to celebrate and give thanks, to pray for healing, to make all moments of sacred life.”
As Rabbi Weisberg reminds us, the sacrificial system was ultimately about ‘drawing near’: korban from the root k-r-b.
The Israelites were reaching beyond the known to encounter the unknown, seeking divine connection through something tangible and embodied, much like they did during the famed golden calf debacle.
As Sonnet-Assor points out, from this fire, from these strange and unsettling rituals emerges one of the Torah’s most powerful moral visions. Later in Vayikra. the Holiness Code cries out:
you shall love your neighbour as yourself!
you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt!
Our commitment to justice and holiness evolves and rises from this outlandish ritual world.
The same fire that consumed offerings is the fuel for an ethical life.
So this is what challenges me about Vayikra. Because it confronts me with the recognition that Torah is simultaneously inspiring and repellent, a dramatic synthesis of the holy and the grotesque.
And this is what challenges me about being a Jew this week, these past two and a half years, across this lifetime and those lifetimes yet to come. To be Jewish is to be bound up in confronting images and distorted realities of devastation, war and brutality, despotic and murderous governments, antisemitism, and its insidious weaponisation and divisive politicisation.
So as we live through an unmoored historical moment of deep moral fracture, and beg our texts for guidance, perhaps Vayikra is asking us what the Eish Tamid should be sustaining while wars are fought and bodies are disfigured in the name of ‘sacrifice.’ That same fire that once burned beneath the korbanot (rooted in both the word for and the impulse to ‘draw near’) can still be tended to through the work of our tradition at its most vital. Through study, through scholarship, through artistry and gathering, through music and the poetic richness of our literature.
There is something sacred still that is worth keeping alight.
- Cantor Rachel Weston serves Kehillah North London and Southgate Progressive Synagogue.