Adapted and edited from Ari’s Grill & Torah on March 31, 2017.
Hey, it’s Friday afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Grill and Torah time. Actually, we’re not going to have a grill this week. It’s raining, as you can see.
But the whole parsha is Grill and Torah. The whole parsha is talking about sacrifices. So stay tuned.
All right. We’re opening up Sefer Vayikra, which is Torat Kohanim.
For those of you who don’t speak Hebrew, it’s the Torah of the Priests – the book of the priests.
And of course, this week we are starting the book that talks all about sacrifices in the Beit HaMikdash. You know, we talk about that area, but I always say that whenever I go to the Old City – those of you who follow me on Thursday nights in the live show – I always point to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and I say, “They built that on our Temple Mount and we’re the occupiers?!” It’s ludicrous. But I’m not going to talk politics today because I never talk politics (joke). What we’re going to do is go into the parsha.
It’s really interesting. I don’t know if you saw in the description above – I wrote VAYIKRa with a small Aleph, and it wasn’t a mistake.
Actually, in the Torah, the word Vayikra – Vav, Yud, Kuf, Reish, Aleph – the letter Aleph is written very, very small.
The small Aleph in Vayikra means that this is the book you should be starting when the kids are in Kita Aleph, in first grade.
And you’ve got to ask a question: Reading stories in Bereishit about Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, and Yosef and the brothers – those are stories that are much easier for kids to understand. So why do we start with such a dry halachic Jewish law book like Vayikra, which is just dry laws? And most of the dry laws are about sacrifices, and we don’t even have them today.
So what is the point of starting first-grade kids on such technical terms?
I think that maybe education has gone through a reform over the last however many years, and we’ve become actually lazy in our ways. In other words, we don’t want to push the kids too hard. “How are they feeling?” And of course, it’s important how kids are feeling, but kids are sponges. When you teach them, they can learn quickly, they can get the information quickly, and they have imagination. So not only can they learn the information, they can think about it in ways that we cannot as adults.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m not an adult yet. [joke]
But in any case, I want to go into this parsha.
It says here, “Vayikra el Moshe” – Hakadosh Baruch Hu calls to Moshe. And notice, it doesn’t say “tzivah” – “commanded” Moshe. It says He calls to Moshe. “Vayedaber Hashem elav me’Ohel Moed” – and God talks to him from inside the Ohel Moed, inside the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. There was a place where God spoke to Moshe from.
And then the parsha goes on with a fantastic sentence: “Daber el Bnei Yisrael ve’amarta lahem, adam ki yakriv mikem korban l’Hashem” – “Speak to Bnei Yisrael and say to them: When a man from among you brings an offering to Hashem…”
Adam. Adam is a word for man, right? There’s another word – ish. Ish is a man, and adam is a man.
So why use the word adam?
Adam was the first man created, and he was almost a base man. There was nothing on him. It was just base.
So why would they use the word adam and not ish, which is a more… I don’t want to say civilized… but a more knowledgeable person?
“Adam ki yakriv” – a man who will sacrifice “mikem” – from you. But where is he going to sacrifice it from? “Min habehemah, min habakar umin hatzon” – from the livestock, from the cattle and from the flock – “takrivu et korbanchem” – you shall bring your offering.
The passage seems to repeat itself. It says, “Adam ki yakriv” – a man who will give a sacrifice – “mikem” – from you – “korban l’Hashem” – a sacrifice to God – from the animals. He should give his sacrifice.
What is the passage saying here? What are we talking about?
Rav Nebenzahl’s Teaching
Rav Nebenzahl writes something really beautiful here. If you listen to Rav Nebenzahl – he was the head rabbi of the Old City, a really fantastic individual. I would say, without hesitating, one of the great rabbis of this generation, a man with modesty that is almost scary.
I’ll tell you a story about this man. When a groom who is getting married walks into the yeshiva where he learns all day long – a yeshiva in the Old City – Rav Nebenzahl gets up and dances. Now, he’s 80 years old plus, and he gets up and dances with the groom.
You see that? And he learns 24 hours a day – I don’t want to say 24, but 22, 20 hours a day. But when a groom walks in, he gets up and dances. It’s really unbelievable to see this every time.
You know, I had a student once when I was a rabbi there. I had a student who said to me that he thinks learning is a waste of time. So I said, “Well, go to Rav Nebenzahl and ask him – he wasted his whole life. He’s been learning his whole life.”
So the student walks over to Rav Nebenzahl and says to him, “Rabbi, I think learning Gemara – I can’t stand it. It’s a waste of time.”
And the rabbi looks at him and says, “Well, the truth of the matter is, for the first 22 times I finished the whole thing (Shas), I also thought it was a pain in the neck.” Well, he didn’t say it like that. But the point is that he’s very learned and he’s very modest.
Bilaam’s Mistake
So Rav Nebenzahl writes the following. We know that Bilaam, one of the prophets of the gentile nations, was trying to curse the nation of Israel.
And it says something really, really interesting.
Before he wants to curse Bnei Yisrael, he asks for an amount of sacrifices to give God.
This is what he says: “Give me seven cows and seven rams and different animals, a whole array of animals to sacrifice to God, who will then allow me to curse the nation of Israel.”
Where was his mistake?
Bilaam thought that we’re giving sacrifices to God, and that is a very childish – well, today it’s childish, back then they really believed it – but it’s a very childish view of religion.
God doesn’t need to eat. When I do Grill and Torah, I’m making the grill for me, right? We’re eating.
We actually have a commandment to eat meat on Shabbat. To enjoy the food. It’s actually commanded for Jews to eat that kind of food on Shabbat.
So the grill is for me, but it’s still a commandment for me to get ready for Shabbat. This is really interesting.
There’s shamor v’zachor – there’s “keep” and there’s “remember” the Sabbath.
So how do you remember the Shabbat? Remembering the Shabbat is brought down as follows: Even on Monday morning, if you go into a store and you see a huge piece of steak, you go, “Oh my God, that looks delicious.” So you buy it and you say, “This is for Shabbat” – on Monday or on Sunday or on Tuesday, it doesn’t matter. And when you do that, you are keeping the mitzvah of remembering Shabbat all week long. There’s a commandment to get good food and cook it and enjoy your Shabbat with food.
Now, we’re not doing that for God. We’re doing that for our own enjoyment. The commandment is to enjoy.
Sacrifices Are For Us, Not For God
So when it comes to sacrifices, it’s really silly. These sacrifices are not for God. God is not hungry. It’s ridiculous.
I think this is a mistake religions make today – thinking we make sacrifices for God. God has no needs, wants, or anything else. The sacrifices are for us.
Now, how do we see that?
Well, Bilaam made the mistake. He said, “If I give a lot of sacrifices to God, He will allow me to do what is not allowed to be done. He will allow me to curse the nation of Israel,” because what Bilaam thought was that he was in charge. He was going to give sacrifices to God as if he’s doing God a favor, and then God will give up morality and allow Bilaam to do what he wants – which was a ridiculous mistake.
But forget Bilaam. It happens with us too.
When we do things according to religion and Judaism, and you keep the Torah and the mitzvot, you think, “Well, why is God doing this to me? I did the mitzvot. I did all I had to do. I did Him a favor.”
So the truth of the matter is – let’s just stop full stop right now.
The sun came out this morning. It just burned through all our merits. We didn’t deserve that to happen. You woke up this morning. You took a breath. You didn’t deserve that. Your heart kept on pumping all night long.
How dare we think that we deserve something because we did something! We have a responsibility to act that way. You don’t get a prize for doing the right thing.
When you want to teach your children, you give them prizes. But as a moral human being, you don’t do things to get a prize. And Judaism says that we don’t obey God – we don’t worship or serve God to get a prize. That itself is the prize – obeying God. We’re living a moral life.
What Are The Sacrifices For?
So what are the commandments? What are the sacrifices?
The sacrifices are the following. And it’s not only for sins. It’s a big mistake. I’ve heard a lot of Christians say, “Oh, we need to get repentance and therefore you give a sacrifice.” Sacrifice has nothing to do with repentance. Most of the sacrifices are not for repentance.
The general sacrifice – like the Shelamim or the Todah – are given to give thanks to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. When a miracle happens, we bring a sacrifice to say thank you to God. It’s not that we’re owing Him something.
So what are we doing? We’re taking our animal, we’re taking our livestock, our ownership of whatever we have, and we’re saying, “You know what? It’s not ours. It’s Yours, God.” We’re saying nothing in this world is ours. That’s what we’re doing.
Now, when it comes to sins, the reason we slaughter animals is we have to look at the blood of the animal and say, “That should have been me,” and therefore we will come to do some kind of self-correction in our ways. That should have been me. I should have been on that altar, not the animal.
But Judaism never believes in human sacrifice. We know that from Avraham Avinu, right? It was a test, and the angel says, “No, you cannot sacrifice Yitzchak.”
The sages talk about Avraham and say he actually wanted to do it at the end. He says, “Okay, I understand I don’t have to, but I want to sacrifice Yitzchak to show You how much I feel.” And God says, “No, that’s not what I want.”
So it’s not a matter of what we feel or what we think. It’s a matter of what God says, what the Torah says.
Feelings vs. Truth
This is very important in today’s world, because in today’s world we see that feelings are running everything. “I feel it’s wrong” and “I feel it’s right.”
And no one can say that whatever the person feels is right or wrong. You don’t have to disrespect them or scream at them for whatever they do in life, whatever their beliefs are.
Certainly, if we’re talking about politics – right and left – I can disagree completely with the other person. He can be totally wrong. He can be fabricating history. He can be lying, even intentionally.
But I can still respect the person and expose their lies by showing them the truth. So that’s the way to behave. Calling people names or yelling or threatening them – that’s not the way to do it.
Why Start With Vayikra in First Grade?
So the korbanot, the sacrifices, are actually for us. It’s a demonstration of the fact that we understand that, yes, we’re in this world and we have to work and we have to take responsibility. But at the end of the day, nothing belongs to us.
And this is something that all of us have to learn.
Now, why does it start with Kita Aleph? Why do first graders have to learn this idea of blood and sacrifice?
Why? Well, number one – and this is something I thought about when I was reading the parsha – we have to teach the first graders already that Jews, the Jewish nation, belongs in the Land of Israel.
The idea is that our whole culture is centered around the Land of Israel. There is no Beit HaMikdash, there’s no Temple anywhere else in the world.
So the point is, Kita Aleph has to understand that it’s not about technicalities. It’s who we are at the base of our religious existence. The Temple Mount is the base of our religious existence.
We’re going to be celebrating Passover very soon, and by the way, the whole Passover holiday is centered around the Temple.
There is nothing that we can do today on Passover that we would do in the Temple. So we play a game. Our houses are our theaters of Passover.
We have a Seder, we sit down for a meal, and we act the whole thing out, and we’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t even miss the sacrifice anymore.
So yes, when we say, “This year, I hope that we’ll be able to go up on the Temple Mount and sacrifice the Korban Pesach and renew and revive the Israel that we’re all waiting for.”
And again, no one should get depressed. We are moving forward at fast speed. I mean, in 69 years, we have been doing what Jews have not done in 2,000 years.
We have Jews coming from all four corners of the earth. I mean, it’s prophecy – real prophecies. It’s biblically amazing. We have the land which is blossoming.
It’s one of the pure prophecies of a time of redemption: The land is blossoming. Jews are coming from all four corners of the earth.
That’s why the small Aleph in Vayikra – we have to start teaching first graders where they belong, where they should be, where at least they should aim for.
I tell people all the time, if they live outside of Israel, it’s not a matter of if you’re coming today or tomorrow. It’s a matter of whether you know that you should be here and have it somewhere in your brain to know that this is where you should end up.
Two Final Thoughts
I want to finish off with two thoughts, not just one.
One thought is that there’s one major prohibition when it comes to sacrifice: You are not allowed to sacrifice something that is stolen. It is an abomination and it is not accepted. It’s the worst of sins.
So you could say, “Well, how could someone possibly think that they can sacrifice something they stole? They’re doing something wrong and they think…” Well, we know we fool ourselves often when it comes to religion. We do things thinking we’re doing the greatest thing when we’re actually doing the worst thing.
So number one: Stealing is off. It’s finished. You cannot steal anything for sacrifice. It’s not even accepted.
But number two, and this is very, very important: The sacrifices are also very sensitive to socioeconomic situations.
Someone who’s poor is not expected to bring the big animal. They can bring even barley. Because the sacrifice itself is not the main thing. It’s our internal work that we’re doing – whether we’re thanking God for what He gave us, whether we’re just making a statement about the ownership of the world to God, or whether we’re saying we’re sorry, we’re repenting. But the sacrifice is not the main thing. It’s our internal feelings that we have to take care of.
A Call to Action
Talking about being sensitive to the socioeconomic situation of people, I want everybody to stop what you’re doing right now and focus on what I’m saying.
We hear from the IDF every year about soldiers whose families are in financial trouble. They have financial difficulties, and I know for a fact – I’ve spoken to these soldiers. Last year a guy said to me, “I am not going home for Passover. I am not going home for the Seder because I don’t want to be a financial burden on my family. When I’m here in the army, I get food, I get board, and my parents can save money.”
I mean, it’s insane, because when guys are in the army in uniform, there’s no difference. There’s no socioeconomic difference. They’re all fighting and they’re all going to give up their lives for each other, and there’s no status.
The green uniform cuts out the status. But at the end of the day, these guys take off their uniform and they go home.
So there are guys who have families who are fine. There are guys who have families here – unlike the lone soldiers – everything’s great. But the lone soldiers are going home to an empty house.
The guys who have financial problems at home with their families are going home to the problem. So they come out of the pressures of the army, of defending Israel and being in danger, and then they go and deal with that.
We are not willing to have that at all during Passover.
Join me as we say thank you in the most direct way to the men and women of the IDF for protecting Israel who need our help.
All right. That’s it. We’re wishing everyone a wonderful weekend.
Shabbat Shalom from beautiful Judea, Israel. Take care, everyone.