MARCH 17 • 2022 | 45
dispossessed wanderers home. When you
see a person naked, clothe them: do not
avert your eyes from your own flesh. (Is.
58:5-7)
The message is unmistakable. The
commands between us and God and those
between us and our fellows are inseparable.
Fasting is of no use if at the same time
you do not act justly and compassionately
to your fellow human beings. You cannot
expect God to love you if you do not act
lovingly to others. That much is clear.
But to read this in public on Yom Kippur,
immediately after having read the Torah
portion describing the service of the
High Priest on that day, together with the
command to “afflict yourselves,
” is jarring
to the point of discord. Here is the Torah
telling us to fast, atone and purify ourselves,
and here is the Prophet telling us that none
of this will work unless we engage in some
kind of social action, or at the very least
behave honorably toward others. Torah and
haftarah are two voices that do not sound
as if they are singing in harmony.
The other extreme example is the
haftarah for this week’s parshah. Tzav is
about the various kinds of sacrifices. Then
comes the haftarah, with Jeremiah’s almost
incomprehensible remark:
“For when I brought your ancestors out
of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not give
them commands about burnt offerings and
sacrifices, but I gave them this command:
Obey Me, and I will be your God and you
will be My people. Walk in obedience to all
I command you, that it may go well with
you.
” (Jer. 7:22-23)
This seems to suggest that sacrifices were
not part of God’s original intention for
the Israelites. It seems to negate the very
substance of the parshah.
What does it mean? The simplest
interpretation is that it means “I did not
only give them commands about burnt
offerings and sacrifices.
” I commanded
them but they were not the whole of
the law, nor were they even its primary
purpose.
A second interpretation is the famously
controversial view of Maimonides that
the sacrifices were not what God would
have wanted in an ideal world. What
He wanted was avodah: He wanted the
Israelites to worship Him. But they,
accustomed to religious practices in the
ancient world, could not yet conceive of
avodah shebalev, the “service of the heart,
”
namely prayer. They were accustomed to
the way things were done in Egypt (and
virtually everywhere else at that time),
where worship meant sacrifice. On this
reading, Jeremiah meant that from a Divine
perspective, sacrifices were bedi’avad not
lechatchilah, an after-the-fact concession not
something desired at the outset.
A third interpretation is that the entire
sequence of events from Exodus 25 to
Leviticus 25 was a response to the episode
of the Golden Calf. This represented a
passionate need on the part of the people
to have God close not distant, in the camp
not at the top of the mountain, accessible
to everyone not just Moses, and on a daily
basis not just at rare moments of miracle.
That is what the Tabernacle, its service and
its sacrifices represented. It was the home
of the Shechinah, the Divine Presence, from
the same root as sh-ch-n, “neighbor.
” Every
sacrifice — in Hebrew korban, meaning
“that which is brought near” — was an act
of coming close. So, in the Tabernacle, God
came close to the people, and in bringing
sacrifices, the people came close to God.
This was not God’s original plan. As
is evident from Jeremiah here and the
covenant ceremony in Exodus 19-24, the
intention was that God would be the
people’s sovereign and lawmaker. He would
be their king, not their neighbor. He would
be distant, not close (see Ex. 33:3). The
people would obey His laws; they would
not bring Him sacrifices on a regular basis.
God does not need sacrifices. But God
responded to the people’s wish, much as He
did when they said they could not continue
to hear His overwhelming voice at Sinai:
“I have heard what this people said to you.
Everything they said was good” (Deut. 5:25).
What brings people close to God has to do
with people, not God. That is why sacrifices
were not God’s initial intent but rather the
Israelites’ spiritual-psychological need: a
need for closeness to the Divine at regular
and predictable times.
JUDAISM’S MORAL DIMENSION
What connects these two haftarot is
their insistence on the moral dimension
of Judaism. As Jeremiah puts it in the
closing verse of the haftarah, “I am the
Lord, who exercises kindness, justice
and righteousness on earth, for in these
I delight,
” (Jer. 9:23). That much is clear.
What is genuinely unexpected is that the
Sages joined sections of the Torah and
passages from the prophetic literature so
different from one another that they sound
as if coming from different universes with
different laws of gravity.
That is the greatness of Judaism. It is a
choral symphony scored for many voices. It
is an ongoing argument between different
points of view. Without detailed laws, no
sacrifices. Without sacrifices in the biblical
age, no coming close to God. But if there
are only sacrifices with no prophetic voice,
then people may serve God while abusing
their fellow humans. They may think
themselves righteous while they are, in fact,
merely self-righteous.
The priestly voice we hear in the Torah
readings for Yom Kippur and Tzav tells
us what and how. The prophetic voice tells
us why. They are like the left and right
hemispheres of the brain; or like hearing
in stereo or seeing in 3D. That is the
complexity and richness of Judaism, and it
was continued in the post-biblical era in the
different voices of halachah and Aggadah.
Put priestly and prophetic voices
together, and we see that ritual is a training
in ethics. Repeated performance of sacred
acts reconfigures the brain, reconstitutes the
personality, reshapes our sensibilities. The
commandments were given, said the Sages,
to refine people. The external act influences
inner feeling. “The heart follows the deed,
”
as the Sefer ha-Chinuch puts it.
I believe that this fugue between Torah
and haftarah, priestly and prophetic voices,
is one of Judaism’s great glories. We hear
both how to act and why. Without the
how, action is lame; without the why,
behavior is blind. Combine priestly detail
and prophetic vision and you have spiritual
greatness.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the
chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the
Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have been
made available to all at rabbisacks.org.