Greetings and welcome to A Song of Zion, our weekly check-in and virtual minyan for Jews on Daily Kos. This is an open thread, and we treat it as a safe space for Jewish folks here. Non-Jews are welcome but we ask that they listen more than speak. No squabbling, please: if you want to fight, please step outside.
This Shabbat is the third of four special Shabbats preceding Passover in which two Torahs are read. The primary reading is Tsav, Leviticus 6: 1 to 8: 36. The second Torah reading is Numbers 19: 1-22. Chapters 6 and 7 of Leviticus continue last week’s discussions on the animal and grain sacrifices performed in the Temple, while chapter 8 details the sacrifices performed when Aaron and his sons dedicated the portable Temple carried in the Sinai desert.
The reading from Numbers details the killing and burning of a brown cow whose ashes are to be mixed with water to be sprinkled on anyone having contact with a dead body. This reading is added now so we can be reminded to purify ourselves for the coming holiday of Passover.
I think it is safe to say this portrait of our “old time religion” makes us uncomfortable. The founders of Reform and Conservative Judaism shared this discomfort. The late 19th and early 20th century founders of Conservative Judaism (to which I adhere) were otherwise observant Orthodox Jews who differed from Orthodox primarily because they could not abide with prayers for a restoration of the Temple with the restoration of worship by means of killing animals.
Early Conservative Synagogues were little different from Orthodox ones, with separate seating, a male led service, and for decades use of Orthodox siddurim (prayer books). The word Avodah appears throughout traditional siddurim. In rabbinic literature Avodah refers to the sacrificial service, but after the destruction of the Second Temple Avodah came to also mean prayer worship. Thus in the Tanhuma,, a collection of midrashim dating back to the early Middle Ages but attributed to the 4th century sage Rabbi Tanhuma bar Abba, we read “Prayer is dearer to God than all the sacrifices.”
The founders of Conservative Judaism, most notably Solomon Schechter but there were others, were particularly bothered by these lines in the Shabbat Musaf Amidah that had been recited every week for at least a millennium (translation from the Hertz siddur 1948):
May it be thy will, O Lord our God and God of our Fathers, to lead us in joy into our land, and to plant us within our borders, where we will prepare unto Thee the offerings that are obligatory for us, the daily offerings according to their order, and the additional offering of this Shabbat day we will prepare and offer up unto thee in love, according to the behest of thy will, as thou has prescribed for us in Thy Torah through Moses thy servant, from the mouth of thy glory.
This text was first altered in the Conservative Silverman siddur first published in 1946:
May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to lead us joyfully back to our land and to establish us within its borders where our forefathers prepared the daily offering and the additional Shabbat offerings, as is written in Thy Torah, through Moses, Thine inspired servant.
Subsequent editions (most recently Lev Shalem published in 2016) have made only minor changes to this text (the English primarily changes the sexist and imitation King James language). But if you attend an Orthodox synagogue today you will be proclaiming in the musaf Shabbat amidah your promise to rebuild the Temple and bring back the sacrificial cult.
The one thing I do like about the sacrificial service detailed in the first two parashas of Leviticus is that the sacrificial cult takes into account how much each person presenting a sacrifice can afford. It goes from bulls to sheep or goats to turtledoves or pigeons to flour – presumably rich farmers brought bulls, while poor farmers brought birds or flour, and I guess city dwellers had to go to the market and buy what they could afford.
However, while I’m living in the United States, a slaughterhouse off in Jerusalem halfway around the world will do nothing for me spiritually, and I doubt it would do much for most Israelis either. My wife and I lived in eastern Colorado with its slaughterhouses you can smell from miles away – one right in the town of Brush where we lived but after awhile we got so used to the smell we couldn’t smell it anymore – and feedlots where cows are packed in like a packed subway car in rush hour – when we drove to synagogue in Greeley via U.S. highway 34 the road went right past the largest feedlot in the United States and we could smell that from miles away. Rebuild the temple and start the killing of animals and Jerusalem will smell too, but at least here in the major cities and suburbs of the United States we would be far away from the stench coming forth from Yerushalayim.
Of course there’s a even bigger problem beyond the meaningless of killing animals as a means of worshipping God and the smell it would create, and that is the fact that the Al Aksa mosque and Dome of the Rock are located on the site of the Temple ruins. The mosques were inspired by the 17th Sura of the Koran, in which Muhammad in a dream one night was transported to Jerusalem to the ruins of the Temple, where he dreamed that he rose to Heaven and spoke to the prophets and to God. It’s considered the third holiest site in Islam. Tear down the mosques to build this slaughterhouse Temple, and Israel won’t have to worry about Hamas and Hezbollah anymore because Israel will be at war with the entire Muslim world – 1.8 billion people and over 20% of the world’s population, including countries such as Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, Morrocco, Tunesia, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and the other Stans of the former Soviet empire, none of which Israel has ever been at war with. I would submit that Israel has enough problems without expanding its present very tragic war to 20 percent of the world’s population – such a war could have only one of two possible results and neither will be pretty. Result 1: The destruction of Israel or Result 2: Nuclear holocaust. A war that would destroy Israel in a vain project to restore a 2,000 year old ritual that would be meaningless to almost all Jews today. Reading about that ritual, studying it in the Talmud, that’s fine, but no restoration please.
Shabbat Shalom