Efrat, Israel – Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them: When any person of you brings an offering unto God, you shall bring from the cattle, the herd or the flock. (Leviticus 1:2)
The book of Leviticus continues where the book of Exodus left off: after the exquisite description of the complexity of the Sanctuary’s components, the Torah is ready to introduce the priestly duties of sacrifices described in the verse above.
Undoubtedly, the entire sacrificial system, replete with whole burnt offerings, sin offerings, guilt offerings and peace offerings, has a rather raucous ring to the modern sophisticated ear.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch attempts to provide a symbolic significance for each of the sacrifices, and etymologically suggests that the essence of korban (Hebrew for sacrifice) is to bring the individual close (karov) to God.
For our purposes, I’d like to approach the entire holy Temple ceremony by analyzing a rather striking midrash which emphasizes an otherwise innocuous pronoun in our opening verse: “When any person of you (mikem) brings an offering unto God….” The fact is that if the purpose of our verse is to issue a command to bring offerings, it could just as easily have been transmitted without the word mikem. Indeed, this particular pronoun in this particular context never appears in the Bible again. Teaches the midrash:
Why does [the biblical text] state mikem [of you]? From here we derive that whoever fulfils the obligation to recite one hundred blessings each day is considered as if he/she offered a sacrifice. How do we know this? From the Hebrew word mikem [of you], which has the numerical equivalent of one hundred [mem-kafmem=40+20+40]. (Midrash Yalkut Ma’ayan Ganim, ad loc.)
Why does the midrash link these 100 daily blessings with an offering to God? Presumably, if we understand the connection, the world of blessings may very well illuminate the world of sacrifice.
Let us examine the essence of a blessing. Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi in his classic work The Kuzari, teaches that the laws of proper blessings enhance our pleasure, create heightened awareness and a more sensitized appreciation of every object in the world; indeed the necessity of our making a blessing precludes the possibility of our taking for granted God’s many bounties. After all, pleasure demands awareness, and a blessing sharpens our senses, leading them to appreciate what we have and are about to enjoy: a glorious sunrise, a burst of lightning, the children around the Sabbath or festival table, a bright, red strawberry.
But what then should we do with our awareness? How do we channel our new-found awakenings to the gifts of the world around us? A comment of Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik, of blessed memory, on a passage in Tractate Berakhot, can provide us with an interesting insight.
Rabbi Levi asked concerning two contrasting texts. It is written:
‘The heavens are the heavens of God but the earth has He given to the children of men,’ (Ps. 115:16), and it is also written, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 115:16). There is no contradiction: in the one case it is before a blessing has been said, in the other case after. (Berakhot 35a)
The usual interpretation explains that before I make a blessing, everything belongs to God; the blessing is my request for permission to partake of God’s world. Hence, partaking of something without a blessing is in effect committing thievery against God; it is as a result of our blessing that the Almighty grants us permission to partake of His physical world. In effect, before the blessing, the world is God’s, and after the blessing, He gives the world’s bounty to us humans.
In a unique twist, Rabbi Soloveitchik turns this interpretation on its head: “The heavens are the heavens of God, but the earth has He given to the children of men.” (Ps. 115:16) is the description of the world before blessings, and the verse, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” is after the blessing!
Why? A world devoid of blessing is a world without any divine connection, a neo-platonic world with an iron curtain separating the human and godly realms.
Suddenly, earth and heaven are no longer enemies, strangers in a strange universe, but all of God’s creations magnificently and miraculously come together. If the Torah has one urgent message, it is the sanctification of our physical world. For Jews, the divine and the physical meet in an eternal dialogue, and the first expression of that dialogue is the blessings we make.
An additional and related aspect of the significance of blessings is the Hassidic-Kabbalistic nation. Early in the book of Genesis, God becomes disappointed with His world and decides to destroy it (except for the righteous Noah, that is):
And God said, “I will blot out the human being whom I have created…. both humans, and beast, and creeping things, and fowl of the air….” (Genesis 6:7)
Rashi asks why God’s anger is directed toward animals? After all, these brute creatures are innocent of any wrongdoing. Rashi then presents us with two possible interpretations. First, that all of creation including animal life had become so depraved that nothing could be called innocent — a perversity that pervaded all of reality. But his second answer is the one that concerns us here:
Everything was created for the human being. When he ceases to be, what need have I for them (beasts, creeping things, fowl)! (Rashi, ad loc.)
This is a profound idea that looks at God’s creation as a hierarchy, starting with inanimate rocks, ascending toward living plant life, and from there to animal creatures of mobility and then reaching upward to the communicating human being. All the mobility of an animal cannot alter the fact that animals are ruled by the earth and the waters and the skies, into the mold of each individual species. Only the human being’s gift of communication enables him to relate to God — if indeed he utilizes his freedom of choice properly.
Now when the human being takes the objects of the world around him, and he makes blessings over the world he lives in, he brings all of existence — including plant life, animal life, and every worldly object into a relationship with God. In effect he is giving a higher purpose to all of these realms, thereby bringing everything back to its ultimate divine source. By uplifting the world, by restoring it to its divine dimension, the human being repairs a world broken by iniquity and despair, alienation and materialism And without this potential for uplifting the world, without a lofty and up-reaching human being, all of creation becomes short-circuited, the universe has no purpose for being, a reverse “bang” takes place.
Now we are ready to return to our midrash, the rabbinic concept which identified the daily blessings with the sacrifices that brought humanity close to the divine. What God wants from us is not only to build a Sanctuary, but to transform the entire world into God’s Sanctuary, God’s Temple. “You shall make for Me a Sanctuary so that I may dwell in your midst,” commands God. And so the sacrifices bring cattle, grain and fruits back to the Almighty who created them, enlisting the world — inanimate, vegetative and the human facilitators — in the service of the divine.
Just as Temple sacrifices brought God and all of His creations into the world, so do the daily 100 blessings bring God into the world — suffuse the material world with divine spirituality — in our world today. By means of daily blessings we have the potential of making the entire universe a divine sanctuary.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
Founder & Rosh Yeshiva,
Ohr Torah Stone
Founding Rabbi of Efrat