Tzav
Leviticus 6:1-8:36
Jeremiah 7:21-8:3, 9:22-23
Special reading for
Shabbat HaGadol
Malachi 3:4-24
The haftarah usually read with this week’s portion (when it does not fall on Shabbat HaGadol, as it does this year) is taken from the prophet Jeremiah, who was fated to witness the destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.C.E. by the Babylonians. It downplays the centrality of the Temple cult.
It preserves Jeremiah’s futile attempt to disabuse the inhabitants of Judah of the comforting belief that their sacrifices will save the beleaguered city and that God will never vacate “the Temple of the Lord” (Jeremiah 7:4).
The haftarah opens with Jeremiah’s astounding declaration that the cult played a minor role in God’s revelation to Israel in the wilderness. Derisively, Jeremiah says in God’s name: “Add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat” (Jeremiah 7:21).
But “burnt offerings” were never eaten. As the Hebrew term olah suggests, they went up in flames on the altar. As the Midrash states, all of it ascended directly to God. No human being, priest nor Israelite, tasted of this sacrifice, as they did of all the others.
What a bracing point-counterpoint! The Torah portion begins with a description of the olah sacrifice: “This is the ritual of the burnt offering: the burnt offering itself shall remain where it is burned upon the altar all night until morning, while the fire on the altar is kept going on it,” (Leviticus 6:2). Then in the haftarah, Jeremiah dismisses the rite.
The prophet goes on: “For when I freed your fathers from the land of Egypt, I did not speak with them or command them concerning burnt offerings or sacrifice” (Jeremiah 7:22). Again, we are jarred.
For more than a month, we have read some six portions, with more to come, dealing with the building of the Tabernacle, its sacrifices and the consecration of its priestly attendants. And Jeremiah tells us that God had little to say about sacrifices at Sinai and after?
Restore equilibrium
But Jeremiah distorts the record for a reason. He seeks to restore a measure of equilibrium between ethics and ritual. His contemporaries teeter on the brink of national debacle because their cult is bereft of moral content.
“But this is what I command them,” Jeremiah continues in God’s name, “Do My bidding, that I may be your God and you may be My people; walk only in the way that I enjoin upon you, that it may go well with you. Yet they did not listen or give ear; they followed their own counsels, the willfulness of their evil hearts” (Jeremiah 7:23-24).
In other words, the Torah is far more than a handbook for priests. It is, above all, a vision of society built on the principles of equality, justice and compassion. Severed from those goals, the cult becomes indistinguishable from those of Israel’s neighbors.
Ancient rabbis selected the haftarah of Jeremiah not to repudiate the sacrificial cult, but to keep it tethered to the Torah’s ethical grid.
The tension between ritual and ethics is a recurring phenomenon in the pages of the Bible, with many passages in the prophets and psalms echoing Jeremiah’s condemnation of imbalance and hypocrisy.
The best proof that the ancient rabbis did not side wholeheartedly with the prophets on this issue is that they did not eradicate the Temple from Jewish memory. The Mishnah, edited some 130 years after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, preserved massive amounts of Temple practice.
Even as the rabbis replaced the Temple with the synagogue and sacrifices with verbal prayer, creating a totally new religious institution in the process, they acknowledged Temple precedents.
The twice-daily communal sacrifice, morning and evening, became the basis for our Shaharit and Minhah services, while the Maariv service was associated with the embers left on the altar at night.
The eternal light of the synagogue replicates the menorah of the Temple that was never allowed to go out. And the synagogue was consciously designated to be “a diminished temple” for Jews in the Diaspora (Ezekiel 11:16).
The rabbis knew that the synagogue represented a great religious advance over the Temple, yet they strove to retain the enduring values of that transcended form of worship.
In so doing, they avoided the false dichotomy that asserts that the way to God is either through ritual or ethics. Rather, it is the genuine integration of both that enhances each one and forms “a perfect heart” and a complete relationship with God.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is the previous chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary.
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