Sermon by Rabbinic Intern Jacob Lipkin’s for Parshat Vayikra, April 5, 2025

When I was in day school, every year a few days before Simchat Torah, during Chol HaMoed Sukkot, we had an assembly where we unwrapped the whole Sefer Torah. The school staff unfurled its whole length, put on gloves, and held a part of the Torah standing a few feet apart from each other while the entire student population sat on the ground surrounded by the Torah all around us. The school Rabbi would join us on the inside and dutifully proceed through the Torah, narrating it in terms that we would be familiar with. He spent a while on Bereishit, guiding us through the patriarchal narratives that we had studied in depth. Shemot was full of its own excitement as well, as we could recognize the text of Song of the sea and the 10 commandments. Our Rabbi would say a brief word about the Mishkan toward the end of Exodus – which we’ve been reading the last few weeks – and then, right as he was set to begin Vayikra, he paused and took a deep breath. He would then say rhythmically, “sacrifices, sacrifices, sacrifices” as he ran across the entire Vayikra section of the unrolled Torah.

I remember this recurrent childhood experience so vividly because I think that, although my day school’s Rabbi was mostly making a joke, it is a powerful symbolic manifestation of most of feel about Vayikra! The mainstream view appreciates the narrative of our first two books and then feels compelled to tune out when we get to all the details about sacrifices and priestly protocol that Leviticus is concerned with. For us 21st century liberal Jews, we seem to have arrived at a consensus that Vayikra is by far the most peripheral piece of the Torah to our daily lives. We do not have a Tabernacle nor a Temple, we only symbolically remember who is and isn’t a priest, and – speaking gratefully as a vegetarian here – we certainly are not systematically slaughtering animals on altars. In Hebrew, Vayikra is also known as Torat Kohanim, the Torah of the Priests – is it not then Torah for all of us as well? My contention, however, is that this entrenched attitude is deeply misguided and that my day school’s Rabbi was fundamentally mistaken. Vayikra is far more than “all” sacrifices, and, perhaps more importantly, what we have termed “sacrifices” is a profound misnomer in the first place.

In order to undo the first misconception and to attempt to uncover a deeper layer of religious significance in Vayikra, we have to begin with the latter issue of terminology. I want to introduce one Hebrew word in particular today: korbanot. Vayikra opens with and maintains a discussion of korbanot, which are all those things that we offer in the Mishkan, but I think it’s a mistake to call those “sacrifices” in English, as we’ve grown accustomed to. For centuries, millennia even, Protestant scholars read Vayikra and criticized its primitive worldview, deeming the korbanot model transactional – we give God something nice, and then God will be nice to us. This is one basic theory of sacrifice, that it is essentially a gift to a deity to prompt a like gift in return. This view, however, is far simpler than the intricate system that Vayikra describes, and, in the language of Notre Dame Bible Scholar Gary Anderson, it is too “crudely mechanistic”.[1] Sacrifice implies giving something up – often materially – for a greater purpose, but that model is not quite what Vayikra institutes, as only a couple of the korbanot are actually centered around giving up something, that is, sacrificing it. I’m going to repeat that: not all of the korbanot actually involve sacrificing! It is worth breaking down the different varieties of korbanot. Shifting away from our perception of korbanot as strictly sacrifice will enable us to consider the the full depth of religious ideals and experiences embedded in the system when taken as a whole.

In brief, Chapters 1-5 offer five varieties of korbanot, each different in kind and purpose. We’ll focus on the first three of those. First is the twice-daily olah – an animal that is burnt up fully on the altar and whose pleasing scent wafts up to God. Next is the cheaper minchah korban of flour and oil, a small portion of which goes to the priest, but whose majority is burnt on the altar as a pleasing odor to God. These first two are indeed more or less sacrificial, in that those who offer it give up something material and are not immediately repaid. However, it is the precise opposite with the following korban: the shlamim, a wholeness offering. The wholeness offering is traditionally understood as a well-being offering and is brought in a less strictly regulated fashion. It’s not clear when a person would bring a wholeness offering, but we know that there were a few different categories:

1. When you had vowed that you would make an offering if/when something desirable happens (neder)
2. When you are grateful for something (todah)
3. When you just feel like it for no reason in particular (n’davah)

The main rule of the shlamim, though, is that its meat is cooked on the altar such that it can then immediately be eaten by those who offered it. In fact, it seems that ancient Israelites were expected to eat meat if and only if it corresponded to this offering! Let’s hold on a minute – this doesn’t actually involve giving anything up. We’re the ones getting the benefit! So calling it a sacrifice misrepresents this crucial and frequent type of korban.

Let’s return to these three categories, which I’ll summarize as requesting, thanking, and just because. I want to propose that these mirror rather well the different kinds of prayer we might wish to offer. Sometimes we pray to ask for something, to thank for something, or just because we need/want to. Prayer doesn’t even require belief in a recipient; Heschel argued that prayer is humanity’s “ontological need” – we are drawn to pray, to wish to be in conversation with a greater power by virtue of simply being humans.

Not for nothing, the Rabbis of the Talmud formulate a comparison between temple korbanot and prayer. In the first Tractate of the Talmud, they spend considerable length deriving where Jewish prayer comes from. They of course need to address what they will do religiously after the Temple’s destruction. They kill two birds with one stone: whereas we once used korbanot to draw close to God, now we use prayer.[2]

I should defend my insistence on using the untranslated “korban”. The Hebrew קרבן is derived from the root ק–ר–ב, meaning “close,” and it is the same root used today in Modern Hebrew’s word for relatives: קרובים. The verb that the Torah uses idiomatically for presenting an offering, להקריב, as in Vayikra’s second pasuk, ,’אדם כי–יקריב מכם קרבן לה׳’ literally means to bring or make an object close. In terms of function, I think “offering” is a passable translation of korban, but we should be aware that we are at best approximating a term that would literally be “that which brings us close”. Proximity to God as the underlying concern of korbanot is evident both in the language and in Vayikra’s narrative context. Exodus ended with God’s presence entering the newly constructed Mishkan; the status quo at the start of Vayikra, then, is that God at last has a a dwelling place on Earth. The deity of the first two books of the Torah was certainly mighty but was rather inaccessible to the average Israelite. Accordingly, the Israelites construct the Mishkan in order to make their God accessible; theologically speaking, we wish to make the infinite accessible and approachable.

However, the nature of the God whom we approach is not identical in each of the korbanot. I think this is how it should be, because we are likely to feel called to different aspects and qualities, and perhaps even different versions, of God throughout are lives. Sometimes we need the olah and the minchah, and we can find meaning in giving something up, whether it’s phones on Shabbat or fasting on Yom Kippur. But God of shlamim, the wholeness offering, is much more intimate. My teacher, Ben Sommer, has argued that the ritual symbolically enables us to eat the same meat beside one another. Breaking bread together is the foundational act of closeness and comfort; the shlamim seems to have been an attempt to share a meal with God. Could we approach prayer in the same way, wishing that God weren’t so far off but instead at our table?

I will be the first to celebrate our transition away from the korbanot system of animal slaughter. But I also want to suggest that we can continue to learn from it, to have some empathy for our ancestors who were trying to experience the Divine in their lives in their own way. I will conclude by returning to an earlier point: Vayikra is not just about sacrifices – it is about closeness. Even its name is about God calling Moses in, wanting to have a human partner close by. As we begin this section of the Torah for the next couple of months, I hope that we can be inspired to feel closer to our own selves, our community, and, if we’re lucky, to the Shechinah, the Divine Presence. Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Gary Anderson, “Sacrifice and Sacrificial Offerings (OT),” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992), 5:871.
[2] Berakhot 26b

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