The highest praise a rabbi hears is that her or his sermons and classes are always relevant, by which the generous congregant means that the topics always pertain to the lives of the people in the synagogue and are not arcane or archaic in content. But another way to translate that praise is to hear it as saying that the rabbi didn’t stretch the congregant’s sense of what pertains to modern living. If “relevant” means, “something the congregant already has an interest in,” then a rabbi who restricts teaching to those areas simply prevents the congregant from a broader interest in the world, in human history, and in the history of the human spirit.
I’ve often been tempted to add another perspective, to inquire “relevant from whose perspective?” Maybe some topic seems removed to the listener, but contains great insight and wisdom nonetheless. Maybe the lack of interest by the hearer is simply a defense against hearing something disturbing but necessary for spiritual growth. Or, maybe some detail isn’t relevant to the life of the congregant (yet) but is something God would have us consider and integrate.
Calling something irrelevant often reveals more about the listener than it does about the subject being labeled. Nothing Jewish is irrelevant. There is no “Jewish trivial pursuits” because no part of Judaism or Jewish history is trivial. But we do need to work to demonstrate its relevance and we do need creativity and energy to illumine its significance.
If a student of mine sees something I teach as irrelevant or trivial, it means I haven’t presented it well enough.
Today’s Torah portion, as with last week, is a number one recipient of the charge “irrelevant.” Listing the sacrifices to be brought to the Mishkan (Tabernacle) in the wilderness and the Temple in Jerusalem—the sin offering, the guilt offering, the burnt offering, the wave offering, the grain offering, the whole offering—the modern reader is confused by the staggering amount of detail, and is often horrified by this catalogue of animal killing (even though that same reader may eat dead animals for dinner).
But, the primary charge against reading all those sacrifices is “irrelevance”. After all, the last Temple was destroyed some 2000 years ago and there have been no authorized sacrifices in Judaism since that time. So why spend all this ink and time reading about something we can no longer do (and which many of us would no longer desire to do even if we could?)
Midrash Va-Yikra Rabbah, compiled two hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple, faced a similar dilemma, and the rabbis quoted there provide valuable insight into why we read about sacrifices no longer offered.
Rabbi Aha said in the name of Rabbi Hanina bar Papa, “In order that Israel might not say: ‘In the past we used to offer up sacrifices, and engage in the study of them; now that there are no sacrifices, is it necessary to engage in the study of them?’ The Holy Blessing One said to Israel, ‘If you engage in the study of them, I account it to you as if you had offered them up.”
What Rabbi Aha offers here, is the importance of imagination and sympathetic study as a religious value. While we no longer offer animal sacrifices, our ancestors derived great comfort and a sense of doing God’s will from that practice. We can learn of their sense of loyalty, obedience to divine fiat, and their intimacy with God by studying their piety and their practice. When we read the Torah portions about the sacrifices, when we learn the rabbinic expansions of those laws (both in the Talmud and the Midrash), we become like actors given a challenging script. Just as great actors make themselves feel what their characters would feel, Jews—through Talmud torah (Torah study)—train ourselves to share our ancestors’ piety and passion. We infuse our souls with the drive to make God’s will our own and to tingle to the thrill of responding to God’s needs, not merely to expressing our own.
By reading about the sacrifices—which we do not offer and many would not want to—we learn to shift the center of our spiritual gravity away from self-gratification toward meeting the needs of others and the Divine Other. By placing God’s agenda at the center, by allowing God and the Torah to define relevance in its own context, we dethrone our despotic egos and learn to place the needs of our family, neighbors, community, and faith at the center of our own agendas.
And in displacing our voracious selves, we discover not only our true selves, but God.
Shabbat Shalom!