This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Helen L. Conway, has been dedicated by Alan Gotthelf in honor of Moshe Sayer.
* * *
In our portion this week, God calls Moses from the Tabernacle and proceeds to give him a set of instructions for the sacrifices. Today we may find these irrelevant at best and, given the amount of blood and gore involved, revolting at worst. In our tradition, communal prayer, has replaced the sacrificial rituals. Yet, many modern Jews find lengthy set liturgy equally impenetrable or off-putting, especially if they are not fluent in Hebrew. However, before we even get to the difficult details in this portion, there is embedded in the text a clue as to why the story might be able to help us with our experience of prayer. Or to be more specific, there is something implied in the text.
The text of Leviticus 1:1 begins: “Adonai called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying…”(וַיִּקְרָ֖א אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיְדַבֵּ֤ר יְהֹוָה֙ אֵלָ֔יו מֵאֹ֥הֶל מוֹעֵ֖ד לֵאמֹֽר.) We can assume, since we have the record of the rest of the conversation, that Moses responded to this call and listened. We know that he was not in the tent with God as the previous chapter (at Exodus 4:35) tells us: “Moses could not enter the tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and Moses could not enter the Tabernacle.” So either Moses heard a call and physically moved closer to hear the instructions; or the voice was loud enough to be heard where he stood, and he metaphorically moved closer in the sense of stopping what he was thinking and doing to pay full attention to the detail of the lengthy instructions.
During my coaching training, I noticed that in the individualistic secular society in which we live today, a ‘calling’ is often re-interpreted by career coaches in a post-religious way as a pre-existing phenomenon which we must ‘find.’ It is treated as an object akin to a purpose or vocation which we must ‘locate’ and ‘niche down’ into if we are not to waste our life. It is ours to own. Here however the calling of God to Moses is described by a relational verb not a noun. It is a beckoning, an invitation to spend time in communication. Indeed, the Hebrew word for “sacrifice” (korban, קָרְבָּן) originates from the Hebrew root k-r-v (קרב), meaning “to draw near,” “to approach,” or “to come close.”
Paying close one-on-one attention to anything or anyone in modern society is hard these days. My hometown has just erected by the roadside large electric advertising screens that flash images and adverts at drivers just as they are navigating traffic junctions. On the smaller screen in our hands, incoming emails ping, and notifications flash their demands as we conduct two or three WhatsApp conversations at the same time. In news and sports broadcasts the coverage bifurcates, showing footage of two locations at once whilst a ticker runs a third line of information underneath. All these screens ultimately act as a barrier between us and the people actually in the room with us. How then can we cultivate a practice of paying attention to the spiritual and relational aspects of our life amidst all this unwanted noise?
The intriguing thing about this portion is the sheer detail of the sacrificial ritual. If it was the aroma that was pleasing to God, why was it not enough to just roast an animal? Why all the laying of hands, the dashing, the flaying, the cutting, the laying out, the slaughtering, and the washing? Perhaps it is because paying true attention to our relationships can’t be done in a quick transactional manner. It requires our hearing a call from another, then a process of moving closer, of stopping, setting aside, reordering priorities, the pulling up of a chair, the internal opening up of receptiveness to what we might be about to hear and required to do as a result. It requires a preparatory process.
It is tempting to see liturgical prayer as akin to the pleasing aroma of the burnt offering, to assume that all the endless words of praise of God in the siddur are the end result the Divine seeks to hear. But this portion suggests that in fact it may be the replacement for the sacrificial process that gets us to what is eventually wanted, a final version of a call and response process that has developed over time. The call is the scheduling of prayer; the liturgy is the process that allows us to stop and become ever more extracted from the busy external world and more immersed in the spiritual. Depending on our personal practice, we have similar bodily actions within the drawing closer process. We drape fabric over our shoulders, wrap leather straps on our arms, bow, bounce on our toes, open the siddur, bow, sway. All these require that we set aside the usual devices that dominate our lives. Together they comprise rituals that are strange, maybe for some, even as irrelevant or unpalatable in their inducement of boredom, as the animal sacrifices, compared to the way we live on a daily basis.
So what is the end result? It is again, relational. It is the creation of a temporal space though the structure or keva of liturgy in which we can speak to God with private words with intention or kavannah. As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik put it, prayer
is the expression of the soul that yearns for God via the medium of the word, through which the human being gives expression to the storminess of his soul and spirit. (Cf. Worship of the Heart, pp. 146–147.)
It is a place where we are not the end product of social media companies, valuable for our transactions but where we can be in close relationship with a God who values us for who we are.
More, it is a relational practice in which we can often discern a response. We might not hear it as a booming voice form the tent but if we consistently create the conditions, we may well more frequently hear the still small voice that spoke to Elijah on Mount Horeb (I Kings 19:12). Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his 1953 essay The Spirit of Jewish Prayer, said:
Prayer has the power to generate insights. It often endows us with an understanding not attainable by speculation. Some of our deepest insights, decision and attitudes are born in moments of prayer, often where reflection fails, prayer succeeds.
In other words, we may not get the transactional result of getting all our petitions answered but we may well get the relational experience of grappling with the issue of why not.
The final letter in this portion’s titular word Vayyikra (וַיִּקְרָ֖א) is inscribed nowadays with a small alef in a Torah scroll. One tradition is that this shows Moses’ humility. When writing the Torah, Moses wanted to have experienced God as vayyikar (וַיִּקָּ֥ר, meaning “having happened upon” or “chanced upon”), the same word used for the prophet Balaam in Numbers 23:4—not vayyikra (a more intimate, direct call). God had, however, instructed Moses to place the alef at the end. Moses wrote it small to reflect his modesty and feeling that he was not worthy of being the one called upon. (See, for example, Birkat Asher on Leviticus 1:1.)
Perhaps, however, we can also see that small alef as a reminder that if we diminish the external demands in our lives and come into quiet contemplation, we can hear the call and ultimately come to notice what truly matters. When we make ourselves a little smaller by engaging with a process of shedding all our preoccupying thoughts and tasks, when we divest of the demands and distractions, when we still and truly listen to others we can finally feel the closeness of truly fulfilling relationships.
One might ask, then, if this is so, why does the Torah only contain the sacrificial routines and not give any details of how to perform liturgy? Didn’t God know what would happen and what we would need in later eras? Perhaps the answer is, God did. It’s right here in the text; it’s just that, in a repeating moment of na’aseh v nishmah (נַעֲשֶׂ֥ה וְנִשְׁמָֽע, “we will do, and we will understand,” as per Exodus 24:7), we have to do this; we have to engage in the process to understand it.
* * *