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

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