The Raw and The Cooked

The trees around our neighborhood have been budding this week, and it’s lovely to stop, pay attention and notice. Sometimes it’s the small things, you know? Parshat Tzav walks us through the rituals of the burnt offering, the grain offering, the purgation offering, reparation offering, the offering of ordination, and the sacrifice of well-being. It’s heavy with repetition, and a bit of a repeat of the instructions we already learned. But this time, something shifts. This is the first moment where it starts to move from theory into lived experience. By the end of the parsha, Moses performs the ordination ceremony on Aaron and his sons. It’s a true transition moment – the beginning of doing. The first real glimpse of na’aseh v’nishma—we will do, and then we will understand.

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Hello Leviticus! I’m a bit nervous to take this one on. It’s chock full of really complicated laws — offerings, sacrifices, purification. It’s dense, it’s repetitive, and it’s complex. In fact, Jacob Milgrom has a three volume Leviticus commentary spanning nearly three thousand pages (!!!). (My goal is to eventually get through his work, but it certainly won’t be this year.)

Vayikra, Hebrew for “and he called” is about God calling a people into holiness, teaching them how to live with Him, now that He’s taken them out of slavery. These newly freed people need to be taught what to do with such a freedom. This weeks parsha (chapters 1-5), focuses on sacrifices and offerings, reflecting different human needs: sin and guilt, surrender, gratitude, and connection.

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