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.