Leviticus Cycle Four Vayikra 1:1 to 5:26

Vayikra

When we study Vayikra we suddenly are thrown into the most guttural mesmerizing horrifying vivid beautiful parts and pieces of ourselves. I’m saying this because it would seem like all of this, the splattering of blood, the cult of the sacrifice, the animals, their sounds and smells, the historic chanting of Psalms (concurrently) by the Levites at the Second Temple, the whole event would be something so outrageously foreign to us that the schism would be too big to cross. But it isn’t too big if we want to know ourselves. And it isn’t too big if we want to come to some understanding of the many vibrations and intricate details involved in prayer.

First though, on a basic level, what is happening here? Well, we are being instructed as to the priestly sacrifices. There are many kinds…peace offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings (for example). There are the beings themselves to be offered, the bulls, rams, sheep and birds, smaller animals, bigger animals, meal offerings as well. There are the many ways of making this happen, in pots, in pans, straight on the altar, cut in pieces. And if cut in pieces, there are different ways of doing that cutting and piling, all along paying attention to the four different directions, north south east and west.

Clearly, this is not a simple task. It’s even more difficult because in our society we like to protect ourselves from the basic heart-wrenching stuff. We like to soften the truth, make it easier to integrate. So, we dodge around the direct call of that Canaanite influence, try to find some civilized approach to what feels like brutal and selfish destruction of God-given life. We call the sacrifices offerings and actually the word korban (approach) is used quite often. We placate ourselves with the fact that we really understood and got into Exodus and we can’t relate to everything. We can say to ourselves this whole sacrifice thing doesn’t even feel Jewish.

But it is Jewish. First, it’s connected to Exodus with one simple letter, the vuv, the backbone, the hook. Vayikra and Exodus are cleanly and clearly interconnected so if we can get Exodus it is our responsibility to move right into Vayikra and try to get that too. Next, sacrifice, according to the Zohar, is about the ascent of the masculine merged with the feminine (Zohar, Matt, p.411). For when Noah does his sacrifices (Gen 8:20) fire is spelled eshah, in the feminine and as we read in Leviticus 1:17 there is to be an ascent offering (olah), a fire offering, an aroma pleasing to God. The ascent offering is masculine. The fire offering (given our hint in Genesis) can be seen as feminine. So the chesed of the masculine comes together with the gevurah of the feminine and we have propulsion at tiferet right at the center and the rising of the aroma, the sensation, our own essence, to the divine. This is the subject of Shir HaShirim as well as any love story in Torah (as well as our own and we certainly each have at least one). Sacrifices…yes, sacrifices… are therefore about love. And love is certainly Jewish.

How else is the study of animal sacrifice Jewish? Well it’s about more than approach. It’s about more than just trying, It’s about the clinching of all approach, about open raw connection, a primal call to and from God. These sacrifices are direct transmission and purification if it hurts or not. And, most important, they are our prayer. They are how God is ordaining us to pray. For when the Second Temple fell and the sacrifices ceased it is known that this outer expression became integrated into our very beings as prayer. So say the sages.

So then, how can we even relate to this? Prayer at temple feels (well) more peaceful. We open our siddurs to the page the rabbi requests and if we know Hebrew we sing the appropriate lines and if we don’t we hum along. We do it because it seems we should and even if we don’t feel it or do the work we figure that God will still hear. We let the prayer enter us. We don’t walk miles with a goat in our arms to bring to the priest. We get in our car and listen to the radio and sometimes say hello to the rabbi. Perhaps it is sort of passive (we think). What’s important is that we’re here. And if some of us are familiar with Isaiah’s calls against rote sacrifices back in the old days of the Babylonian conquest, we’re off the hook in the present U.S. of A. That’s because nothing is being killed. Not a bull. Not a ram. Nothing but our very souls.

And this is what I’m getting at. Prayer is sacred. If sacrifice is love then prayer is love as well. It begins with speech. It comes from the undefined, the tiny beginning, from a place beyond name or place. As we read…God called to Moses speaking to him from the communion tent. He said, speak to the children of Israel and tell them the following (1:1). But an interesting grammatical fact here is that the subject God is not mentioned in the very first verb. God is inferred. And as the Zohar says: He called (anonymously) always implies the final rung. So, to expand on this, the center of Hashem, the radiant pinnacle, is shooting energy waves of calling, speaking and saying… from one level to the next to transmit to Moses and then flinging the light even farther in terms of saying and speaking to transmit to the Israelites. There’s some big-time transmission going on here to set and organize the vibrations that are to rise right back up in the form of…yes, prayer. God (it sure seems) is praying to us first so we can pray to Him.

I’m not going to enter into every possible level of prayer received and transmitted. What we do know is that we can try to walk in God’s ways and pray like Him. We can start seeing our services as an involved action to achieve kavanah… intention…first solitary and then as a community as we achieve various altered mind-states that will finally bring us to Mt Sinai and daat…or intimacy with Hashem. We can see ourselves bringing the wood to the altar with discipline, separating out the pieces in ourselves, our very brightest sparks to pull through our bodies (to tiferet) and then to place on the altar. We can smell the essence as it rises and finally brings us to devekut. We can use the words of the Amida blessings and even memorize them, letting them merge with the concealed voice. We can place our hands on the heads of those we love and make an offering of them, bundle them in light and see their glow in the eternal radiance. We can do this until it hurts, until we cry, until we transform beyond our human limitations. We can do it as if it is solid, real and alive, because it is.

So may we pray. May we pray hard. May we pray in the love and in the blood of our ancestors, in the bat kol…the daughter of the voice…the echo…of the prophets and the priests. May we merge our masculine and our feminine, our bodies and our organs, our hearts and our vision in love. May we see our cells and sparks rising from the altar in the smoke amidst the chanting and music of the first and second temple gatherings. May we pray enough to bring the future temple to this earth. May we hear the silent call of the silent voice and manifest it into our solid golden core…the breath of Hashem.