52 | MARCH 23 • 2023
of him, the son of man that You care for
him?
Yet You made him a little lower than the
angels and crowned him with glory and
honor.
You made him ruler over the works of
Your hands;
You put everything under his feet.
Ps. 8:4–7
Physically, we are almost nothing;
spiritually, we are brushed by the wings
of eternity. We have a Godly soul. The
nature of sacrifice, understood psy-
chologically, is thus clear. What we
offer God is (not just an animal but)
the nefesh habeheimit, the animal soul
within us.
How does this work out in detail?
A hint is given by the three types of
animals mentioned in the verse in
the second line of parshat Vayikra:
beheimah (animal), bakar (cattle)
and tzon (flock). Each represents a
separate animal-like feature of the
human personality.
Beheimah represents the animal
instinct itself. The word refers to
domesticated animals. It does not imply
the savage instincts of the predator.
What it means is something tamer.
Animals spend their time searching for
food. Their lives are bounded by the
struggle to survive. To sacrifice the ani-
mal within us is to be moved by some-
thing more than mere survival.
Wittgenstein, when asked what the task
of philosophy was, answered, “To show
the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” The
fly, trapped in the bottle, bangs its head
against the glass, trying to find a way out.
The one thing it fails to do is to look up.
The Godly soul within us is the force that
makes us look up, beyond the physical
world, beyond mere survival, in search of
meaning, purpose, goal.
The Hebrew word bakar, cattle,
reminds us of the word boker, dawn, lit-
erally to “break through,” as the first rays
of sunlight break through the darkness of
night. Cattle, stampeding, break through
barriers. Unless constrained by fences,
cattle are no respecters of boundaries. To
sacrifice the bakar is to learn to recognize
and respect boundaries — between holy
and profane, pure and impure, permitted
and forbidden. Barriers of the mind can
sometimes be stronger than walls.
Finally, the word tzon, flocks, rep-
resents the herd instinct — the power-
ful drive to move in a given direction
because others are doing likewise. The
great figures of Judaism — Abraham,
Moses, the Prophets — were distin-
guished precisely by their ability to stand
apart from the herd; to be different, to
challenge the idols of the age, to refuse
to capitulate to the intellectual fashions
of the moment. That, ultimately, is the
meaning of holiness in Judaism. Kadosh,
the holy, is something set apart, different,
separate, distinctive. Jews were the only
minority in history consistently to refuse
to assimilate to the dominant culture or
convert to the dominant faith.
The noun korban, “sacrifice,” and the
verb lehakriv, “to offer something as a
sacrifice,” actually mean “that which is
brought close” and “the act of bringing
close.” The key element is not so much
giving something up (the usual mean-
ing of sacrifice), but rather bringing
something close to God. Lehakriv is to
bring the animal element within us to be
transformed through the Divine fire that
once burned on the altar, and still burns
at the heart of prayer if we truly seek
closeness to God.
By one of the ironies of history, this
ancient idea has become suddenly con-
temporary. Darwinism, the decoding of
the human genome and scientific mate-
rialism (the idea that the material is all
there is) have led to the widespread con-
clusion that we are all animals, nothing
more, nothing less. We share 98 per cent
of our genes with the primates. We are,
as Desmond Morris used to put it, “the
naked ape.” On this view, Homo sapiens
exists by mere accident. We are the result
of a random series of genetic mutations
and just happened to be more adapted to
survival than other species. The nefesh
habeheimit, the animal soul, is all there is.
The refutation of this idea — and it is
surely among the most reductive ever to
be held by intelligent minds — lies in the
very act of sacrifice itself as the mystics
understood it. We can redirect our animal
instincts. We can rise above mere surviv-
al. We are capable of honoring boundar-
ies. We can step outside our environment.
As Harvard neuroscientist Steven
Pinker put it: “Nature does not dictate
what we should accept or how we should
live,” adding, “and if my genes don’t like
it they can go jump in the lake.” Or, as
Katharine Hepburn majestically said to
Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen,
“Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put
on Earth to rise above.”
We can transcend the beheimah,
the bakar and the tzon. No animal is
capable of self-transformation, but we are.
Poetry, music, love, wonder — the things
that have no survival value, but which
speak to our deepest sense of being —
all tell us that we are not mere animals,
assemblages of selfish genes.
By bringing that which is animal within
us close to God, we allow the material
to be suffused with the spiritual and we
become something else: no longer slaves
of nature but servants of the living God.
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. This
essay was written in 2022.
POINTS FOR DISCUSSION
• How are humans similar to
animals? How are we different?
• How can making sacrifices for
a friend, a family member, your
community, or God, bring you
closer to them?
• How do you personally “rise
above” and “sacrifice yourself”
for Hashem?
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
continued from page 51