Jeremiah on Sacrifices
The rabbis had an extraordinary gift for the unexpected. Take as an example the haftara they chose for Yom Kippur. It is a day marked by fasting and other afflictions. It atones only for sins against God, not those against our fellow humans. Yet the sages chose to read the passage in Isaiah where the prophet says:
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
a day when a man will oppress himself?
When he bows his head like a rush in the wind,
when he lays his bed with sackcloth and ashes?
Is this what you call a fast,
a day for the Lord’s favour?
No; this is the fast I choose:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke.
Share your food with the hungry
and provide the poor wanderer with shelter –
when you see the naked, clothe them,
and do not turn away from your own flesh and blood. (Is. 58:5–7)
This is a stunningly counterintuitive choice, and yet it is clearly the right one. The rabbis saw themselves as heirs to the prophets,1Mishna Avot 1:1. and this is exactly what a prophet would have said on Yom Kippur. Do not think that you can win God’s forgiveness by abasing yourself before Him while ignoring the suffering of human beings. God wants us to honour Him by honouring His image, humankind.
More remarkable still is the haftara of Parashat Tzav. The parasha is about sacrifices: sin, guilt, and peace offerings, sacrifices that were to be burnt and others parts of which were to be eaten. It is about the induction of the priests who were to officiate at the sacrificial rites. It is a text that assumes the centrality of the sacrificial system in the ongoing relationship between the Israelites and God. Yet tradition took as the haftara Jeremiah’s denunciation of the sacrifices in God’s name. It also contains one of the most surprising passages in the whole of Tanakh, in which the prophet seems to deny that sacrifices were part of the original divine plan for His relationship with Israel:
For when I brought your forefathers out of Egypt, I neither spoke to them nor commanded them 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 all the way I command you, that it may go well with you. (Jer. 7:22–23)
How could Jeremiah say that God “neither spoke to them nor commanded them about burnt offerings and sacrifices” when the Torah is full of commands about sacrifice? This is a very difficult text. Most of the commentators assumed that it was not to be taken literally. According to Rabbi David Kimḥi (Radak), the meaning is that the first commands given to the Israelites, at Mara prior to their arrival at Sinai, related to Shabbat and civil legislation, not sacrifice.2Commentary to Jeremiah 7:22.
Maimonides adds that Jeremiah was saying that God commanded the sacrifices only as a means to an end, the knowledge of and closeness to God. The people, however, erred in seeing them as an end in themselves.3Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, III:32.
That is not what God commanded.
However there were commentators, among them Abrabanel, who believed that Jeremiah meant what he said. The entire sacrificial system was not part of the original divine intention. It became so only after the sin of the Golden Calf. To understand this, it is necessary to go back and re-read that episode. The clue lies in Exodus 33, another difficult passage.
Recall that Exodus 32 sets out the entire narrative of the Golden Calf. The Israelites, not knowing what has happened to Moses on Mount Sinai, panic. They gather round Aaron, demanding a substitute through which they can access the word of God. Aaron makes a calf out of their gold ornaments. God tells Moses what has happened and orders him to go down. Moses prays for forgiveness, goes down, destroys the calf, punishes the people, and returns up the mountain to pray again for their forgiveness. God does not destroy the people as He had originally threatened to do but insists that the wrongdoers must be punished.
It is the next chapter that is almost incomprehensible. Events happen, but the sequence is hard to fathom. In some cases, they seem to happen backwards. God tells the Israelites to remove their ornaments. But according to the text they have already removed them. God says, “My ‘face’ will go with you,” then Moses says, “If Your face does not go with us, don’t make us leave this place.” But God has just said that His face would go with them. Then God says something that undercuts this completely: “You cannot see My face, for no one may see Me and live.” So God’s ‘face’ will and won’t go with them. No one, not even Moses, can see it. But just a few verses earlier, the Torah said, “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” The chapter seems to be saying all manner of contradictory things at once.
The entire dialogue between Moses and God is obscure. Moses asks God to teach him His “ways,” show him His “glory,” and other requests that have nothing to do with the aftermath of the Golden Calf but seem instead to be a search for theological understanding. What was Moses doing asking abstract questions about the nature of God when his people felt traumatised, abandoned, and confused?
The most puzzling incident in the chapter is the statement that, immediately prior to his dialogue with God, Moses removed his tent from the camp. Of all the things Moses might have done at that time, this was surely the most inexplicable. The people needed him close, not distant, especially when, immediately beforehand, God had said that He Himself would not be present in the camp.
The most compelling explanation is that this was one of the extremely bold acts that Moses performed at that time. In the previous chapter we saw him smash the first set of tablets. We heard him issue one of the most audacious prayers in the Bible: “Please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book You have written.” The act of removing his tent from the camp should be understood in the same light. It was what the sages call an act of audacity towards Heaven itself.4The sages call this ḥutzpah kelapei Shemaya, Sanhedrin 105a.
Moses was declaring in effect that he would not accept the role of being God’s representative within the camp. If God Himself would not be there, neither would he. The dialogue that followed is one of the most consequential in the history of faith. It was to change forever the structure of Judaism. It is the reason the book of Vayikra exists.
Schopenhauer called it the problem of porcupines in winter.5Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, vol. 2, chap. XXXI, section 396.
What do porcupines do in the bitter cold? If they huddle too close, they injure one another with their spines. If they keep too much of a distance from one another, they freeze. That problem, transposed to the relationship between God and humanity, is what dominates the whole Torah.
In the early chapters of Genesis, God is close to human beings. He speaks to Adam and Eve and to Cain like a close friend. He lets Adam name the animals. He acts, literally, as his matchmaker. He warns Cain of the danger of losing control of his anger. But it does not help. All three sin. In an obscure verse in Genesis 6, shortly before the Flood, we read that “the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.” It is not entirely clear what this means, but it tells us that heaven and earth were too close, and the denizens of both committed sins.
For the rest of Genesis, God intervenes occasionally: in the tower of Babel and in Sodom and Gomorrah. Otherwise He is a personal presence in the lives of the patriarchs. Something new emerges at the beginning of Exodus: divine intervention with elemental force, liberating the Israelites and bringing the great empire of Egypt to its knees. This is God the supernatural, performing miracles, bringing plagues, turning sea into dry land, sending manna from heaven and water from a rock.
God’s presence is terrifying. Even His voice is unbearably intense. At Mount Sinai, the Israelites begged for it to cease. “If we continue to hear His voice we will die.” Instead they asked Moses to be their intermediary. But their total reliance on Moses as the mouthpiece of God led to the people’s panic after he had been absent up the mountain for forty days.
Moses now begins a difficult dialogue with God. He asks for God’s “face” to go with the people. He asks God to help him understand His “ways.” He then asks to see God’s glory, kavod. God says He will cause “all His goodness” to pass before him. None of these terms is simple. One in particular, the concept of “face,” seems to be ambiguous. God “speaks to Moses face to face,” but a few verses later He says, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live.” There seems to be a difference between speaking and seeing face to face. Much of this is obscure, but what is clear is that all these terms have to do with the different modes through which God manifests Himself to human beings.
One thing shines through the entire passage: Moses’ passionate and persistent plea that God should stay close to the people. “If Your face does not go with us, do not send us up from here. For by what shall it be known that I and Your people have found favour in Your sight? Is it not in Your going with us so that we are distinguished, I and Your people, from all the other people upon the face of the earth?” What makes us different, says Moses, is that You are close, not distant. This is Your people, he insists, not just my people. You cannot abandon them. It is not enough that You send an angel or emissary before them. You have to be there in their midst.
Until then, Moses had been the people’s sole intermediary with God. But it was this very fact, Moses seems to imply, that led to the making of the Golden Calf. So dependent were the people on me that my absence frightened them into rash and regrettable behaviour. They need another way of relating to You, one that is constant, regular, predictable, that does not depend on chance or circumstance. They need some way of understanding You, for as of now they simply do not know when You will be angry with them and when You will be forgiving.
God had already made it clear at the beginning of the chapter that direct personal closeness could be too dangerous. If the people sin and there is no intermediary between them and Him, there will be no way of avoiding divine wrath capable of destroying them. Now He explains further. In language strikingly similar to the words in which He explained His identity to Moses at the burning bush – “I will be what I will be” – He now says: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”
God is free. It is only because God is free that human beings too are free. Therefore God cannot be predicted or constrained. Justice and compassion are matters of ultimate choice. Judges must practise justice. Parents may exercise compassion. But God is both a judge and a parent (“My child, my firstborn, Israel”). There is no way of knowing, therefore, which way God will choose. So there is no way of excluding uncertainty from the Divine-human encounter.
Besides which, adds God, even you, Moses, with whom I speak face to face, cannot see My face. You want My “face” to go with the people. But they cannot even hear My voice directly without fearing that they will die. This is a very poignant moment. God admits, as it were, that He is simply too overwhelming a presence for the people to encounter directly. Moses acknowledges the point but then changes his request. He says, “Please show me Your glory.” “Glory” is less blinding than “face.” The Israelites had seen God’s glory before, when they ate the manna (Ex. 16). There then follows the great theophany at which Moses, hidden in the cleft of a rock, sees God’s “back” and hears Him declare, “The Lord, the Lord…” Then God tells Moses to prepare a second set of tablets and the covenant is renewed.
There can be little doubt that despite – perhaps even because of – the obscurity of the passage, we are in the presence of one of the turning points in Jewish history. It bears a striking resemblance to the episode in which Jacob wrestles with the angel alone at night. They have a number of features in common. They share a keyword, “face.” It occurs multiple times in both passages. Jacob, after the encounter, calls the place where it occurred Peniel, saying, “I have seen God face to face and I survived.” Both men bear the physical mark of the encounter. Jacob limps. Moses’ face shines. And out of both encounters something radically new is born. In Jacob’s case, he has a new name. In Moses’ case there is a new covenant, concretised in the form of the second set of tablets. Both encounters represent supreme crises in the life of faith, and afterwards each emerges with new strength.
What emerges from the great encounter in Exodus 33 is not forgiveness. That is the theme of Exodus 32 and 34. Rather, there is now to be a new relationship between God and the Israelites, one that would satisfy Moses’ request that God be “in the midst” of the people, while at the same time not exposing them to the risk of an overpowering presence they would find unbearable. God will have to “screen” His presence the way Moses had to “veil” his face once it shone with the light of God. Technically, what would go with the people would be God’s “glory,” not His “face.” Something new would enter the religious life of Israel. The transcendent God would now become immanent. The God beyond the heavens would become the God who dwells in the midst of the camp.
A new word enters the relationship between God and the people: the verb shakhen, “to dwell among.” Hitherto, this had been a word used exclusively of humans. Now it is given a local habitation and name. “Let them make for Me a sanctuary [mikdash] and I will dwell [veshakhanti] among them.” An entire choreography is set out for the Divine-human encounter. Sacrifices, until now offered spontaneously by Cain and Abel, Noah and Abraham, would be offered at set times in specific ways. An entirely new form of religious leadership would be introduced into the life of the Israelites: a priesthood. We have encountered priests before, but until now they have been non-Israelites: Malkizedek of Shalem, Yitro the Midianite, and the priests of Egypt whose land Joseph did not nationalise.
A rigorous set of rules would be established for those who enter the Sanctuary’s sacred space. They would be differential: some for the High Priest, others for ordinary priests, yet others for the people as a whole. The result would be a form of Divine Presence, known in rabbinic Hebrew as the Shekhina, very different from the God of creation who makes universes and the God of redemption who overthrows empires. This is the God who is close, who can be met in fixed places at predictable times, who travels with the people in the desert and will later be with them even in exile. This is God as shakhen, as “neighbour,” and also as kavod, “glory.” This is God as He gives a specific kind of dignity to man.
We can define the nature of this dignity, for it is the single most striking difference between the chapters that follow the Golden Calf and those that preceded it. Until now God has given and humans have received. God has acted, while humans have been the objects of Divine action. Now for the first time the people become active. They build the Tabernacle. They contribute to its upkeep. They are able to bring sacrifices. They support a priesthood that in turn acts as guardians of the holy for the sake of the people.
There is order and routine in the religious life. In place of the unique intercession of Moses in dialogue with God, there is now to be an annual day of atonement, at which the High Priest will confess and atone for the sins of the people. The religious life has been rescued from the vagaries of chance to the predictability of order and structure.6The role of the sacrificial system in protecting the people against the anxiety of rejection is emphasised in Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
The fear the Israelites felt at the absence of Moses has been acknowledged and a decision taken that it should not happen again. The sin of the Golden Calf remains a sin, but care has been taken that this too should not happen again.
This entire sequence of events is what Jeremiah meant when he said in God’s name, “For when I brought your forefathers out of Egypt, I neither spoke to them nor commanded them 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.” God’s original intent on bringing the people out of Egypt was to be their king: their legislator, their ruler, their protector, their judge. Israel would be a nation under the sovereignty of God alone. That is what Gideon meant in the era of the judges when he told the people who wanted to appoint him as their king, “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. God will rule over you” (Judges 8:23). That is how Isaiah saw God in his great vision: as a king in heaven seated on a throne, surrounded by ministering angels.
But the Israelites needed more. Such was the essence of Moses’ request. Yes, they knew that God, Sovereign of the universe, was their king. But they needed to experience Him also as a shakhen, a neighbour. They needed to feel Him close, but in such a way that they were not blinded by His light, deafened by His voice, overwhelmed by His infinity. They also needed specific times and places where they could come close, not just on never-to-be-repeated occasions like the division of the Red Sea or the theophany at Mount Sinai.
Hence the Sanctuary and sacrifices, and later, the synagogue, study, and prayer. This was not God’s original intention – if we have read Exodus 33 and Jeremiah 7 rightly as two texts that explain one another. But it was a request to which God acceded. This was a dazzling reversal. It meant that Moses, having agreed that the Golden Calf was a sin, understood that beneath it was a genuine yearning on the part of the people for an encounter with God that they could relate to without anxiety and terror.7This is also the reading given by Judah Halevi in The Kuzari, 1:97. According to Halevi, the people wanted some visible sign of God’s presence as they had had in the pillar of cloud and fire while they were travelling. Their sin lay in not waiting for divine instruction as to what exactly the sign should be.
And so, in a sense, it has remained. Nowhere do we see this more vividly than by comparing the great cathedrals of Europe with synagogues like the Altneuschul in Prague and those of the Ari and Rabbi Joseph Karo in Safed. The cathedrals were built to express the vastness of God and the smallness of mankind. The synagogues, small and simple, convey the closeness of God and the potential greatness of mankind.
After God’s anger at the Golden Calf came His love, and out of the call in love – the meaning of Vayikra – came the choreography of devotion: once in the service of sacrifices, and now in the offering of words and minds.