Parshah Commentary

One Shabbat morning, a stranger walked into the synagogue where I worked at the time with a large knife in a sheath on his belt. In response to our immediate alarm, he eagerly explained that he had brought it to services to help with our animal sacrifices. Of course, normative Judaism has not practiced sacrifice for nearly 2,000 years, since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. But perhaps the man should be forgiven for assuming that Jews still ritually slaughter birds and livestock in synagogues, considering how central such practices are to Judaism’s sacred texts and traditional liturgies.

This week’s parshah, Tzav, contains detailed instructions for the sacrifices Aaron and his sons are to offer in the Tabernacle. Some of these directions are given for the first time, while others are reiterated from last week’s parshah—a repetition that seems to emphasize their abiding importance, beyond the circumstances of their first utterance. The medieval scholar Rashi underscores this in his interpretation of the parshah’s second verse, in which God says to Moses, “Command Aaron and his sons thus: This is the law of the ascent offering.” Rashi comments: “The expression ‘Command’ always implies urgency to carry out a command, and implies . . . that it is binding upon all future generations.” By Rashi’s time, however, the commandments described here had not been practiced for over a millennium. What could it have meant to him to emphasize that these laws are incumbent on “all future generations,” and how should we find meaning today in these sacrifices we do not perform, but whose instructions we continue reiterating?

Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, the 18th-century Ukrainian mystic and Torah commentator known as the Meor Eynayim (meaning “the light of the eyes”) after the title of his magnum opus, offers one answer. He suggests that such commandments are metaphors for the practice of studying Torah. He reinterprets a phrase from this parshah’s opening verses—“the law [literally “Torah”] of the ascent offering”—to mean “Torah study that lifts one upwards.” (For this reading he relies on the multiple meanings of the word “Torah,” which can suggest both an individual law or the entire body of Jewish texts and religious wisdom.) He thus argues that the Torah that appropriately replaces sacrifice must be a form of learning that struggles actively with the text, yielding ethical insights that implicate and transform the reader in the process.

For the Meor Eynayim, our study of Torah raises us up when it is not a meek encounter with a text we read rotely, but instead a process of wrestling both with the text and with ourselves.

This claim is based in part on the Zohar’s use of the word “struggle” to describe Torah study. This Aramaic word for “struggle” that denotes sacred learning, the Meor Eynayim notes, is the same word the Targum, the canonical Aramaic translation of the Bible, uses to describe Jacob wrestling with a divine figure. By way of analogy, then, the labor of wrestling with Torah, rather than passively inheriting it, is a means of drawing near to and struggling with God. For the Meor Eynayim, this yields ethical transformations that will “bring our evil urge to submission.” “Through Torah you can rise upward,” he states; “you can lift your own darkness up and turn it into the light of dawn”—the time of Jacob’s struggle with the angel, as well as the time when the ashes of the sacrifice are removed from the altar, as directed in the beginning of our parshah.

The Meor Eynayim provides us with both a description and an example of what he instructs us to do when we study Torah. Rather than jettisoning our parshah’s precise repetitions of the laws of animal sacrifice as obsolete, he reinterprets them with a radical new spiritual meaning: We must challenge the text of the Torah as it challenges us in turn. We must struggle to find meaning in it, and in that meaning to discover the ethical claims Torah makes on our lives. Like the sacrifices so painstakingly described in our parshah, which can only be fulfilled through the integrated activity of both body and mind, this vision of Jewish learning implicates us fully, demanding embodied engagement and expression in the totality of our lives.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.