Bring a sacrifice to the Lord

"…when a man among you brings a sacrifice to the Lord…"—Leviticus 1:2

We are beginning the book of Leviticus this week. The word Leviticus means “of the Levites.” The name makes sense considering that the book is primarily focused on the service in the Temple or the Biblical laws of purity and impurity.

Today though, the Levites are for the most part unemployed!

The Second Temple was destroyed in the year 70 CE and hence the end of the sacrificial system which was a central feature of the Temple.

Jews today pray three times a day paralleling the morning offering, the afternoon offering and the burning of the remains of the offering in the evening.

Substituting prayer for sacrifice is explicitly written in the book of Hosea where it says “…we will render for bulls the offering of our lips” (Hosea 14:3)

The English word sacrifice means that you are giving up something that has some level of value to you often in exchange for something else or for a higher value. For example, you may sacrifice your time for a friend or you may sacrifice your money for a good cause.

When we think of sacrifice in the context of the Temple, we think of the offering of an animal or in some cases vegetarian offerings.

In order to understand what the sacrifices in the Temple meant, we need to look at the Hebrew word used. The Hebrew word commonly translated as a sacrifice is “korban.”

The root of the word korban means “to come close.” It does not mean to sacrifice. When a person would bring any kind of offering in the Temple, and there were many, the goal was always the same—to get closer to God.

Whether it was a voluntary offering, holiday offering, peace offering, Nazirite offering, sin offering—what they all had in common was that it was a means to help us get closer to God.

The bringing of the offering was not an end in and of itself. This is a common misunderstanding of what a korban is. It is not a magic trick that somehow offering an animal in the Temple will affect an outcome automatically. The korban was the culmination of all the inner work that a person would do and it was a reflection of that.

Think of it this way. A person invests time and energy into a project and then makes a party to celebrate the completion of the project. The korban is the completion of the project–of all the inner, spiritual work that is invested to get closer to God. The korban is the celebration of the end of the process.

Thanks: Rabbi Moshe, weekly devotional