Tzav

The JC- Portion of the week

20 March 2008

“Thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: add your burnt-offerings to your sacrifices, and eat flesh” (Jeremiah 7: 21).

Reading the sidrah, with its detailed laws of daily burnt-offerings, it is hard to overestimate the centrality and holiness of sacrifices for the Children of Israel. All the more puzzling to read the haftarah in which the prophet Jeremiah appears to speak passionately against sacrifices. The people in his generation might as well eat their burnt-offerings — “eat flesh”, he says; they have no holy value whatsoever. And God rejects them.

The haftarah continues with Jeremiah’s sorrowful and solemn address to the people, made in the year 608 BCE around the area of the Temple. His list of their wrongdoings is serious. Morality has been abandoned, idols have been set up in the Temple and child sacrifice practised.

The contrast between the burnt-offerings brought in the spirit of true service to God as described in the sidrah, and the perversity of those offered in Jeremiah’s time could not be more marked. Unlike other sacrifices, the burnt-offerings were entirely consumed on the altar. So Jeremiah’s exhortation to eat the remains is saying something radical: without moral underpinning, these rituals are empty and meaningless, these sacrifices are just so much “flesh” and nothing more.

It is worth noting that this address places Jeremiah in mortal danger. Following these pronouncements, the furious priests and people threaten him with death. The rabbis who paired Jeremiah’s words with the sidrah of Tzav as an appropriate haftarah were also brave; they are not attacking or diminishing the institution of sacrifices but clearly rendering those not offered in the proper spirit as worthless and worthy of God’s mockery. Sacrifices as empty ritual without moral behaviour are as nothing before God.