Drawing Near

By Rabbi Elyse Winick
KOACH Assistant Director

In his introduction to the Seder Avodah of Yom Kippur in the Hillel mahzor, On Wings of Awe, Rabbi Richard Levy writes: "Sacrifice...the word almost makes us shudder. Ancient, faceless functionaries offering up something helpless to a God who does not need it and cannot want it; taking in vain the life of an innocent animal, ruining good grain that might feed human beings....At best it embarrasses us: pagan peoples offered sacrifices; the sacrificial period in Jewish life seems to be an historical anomaly, properly replaced by prayer when the Temple was destroyed....Do we mourn the Temple? Yes, surely – for the glory of an independent Jewish life that went up in its flames. In the Musaf service we mourn whatever wrongs our people may have done to contribute to the destruction: injustice and callousness to the poor, the prophets said, would destroy the First Temple; baseless hatred, the rabbis said, doomed the Second."

This image of the sacrificial order is deeply troubling, even for those among us who see the restoration of the sacrificial system as an ideal (note that our Conservative siddurim have transformed liturgical references to sacrifice as a future hope to an historical recollection). We’re compelled to wonder how this now antiquated system could ever have been relevant.

The Hebrew word for sacrifice, korban, comes from the root koof, resh, bet, meaning near. Not, then, about giving something up, or about burning an offering on an altar, but about drawing near. How we draw near to the Divine, or to one another, is culturally, situationally and contextually driven. In an era in which animal sacrifice – and even human sacrifice – were the norm, it makes eminent sense that our practices were informed by our environment. It makes yet more sense that we turned our backs on human sacrifice (witness God’s testing of Abraham in the binding of Isaac), based on the moral and ethical norms of our evolving tradition. And it is further affirming that when our primary altar was desecrated and destroyed, we moved on to identify prayer and acts of lovingkindness as the way we sought to express ourselves in our quest to be heard by God.

In one of the first years that I had the opportunity to lead services on the High Holidays, while still a student, my friend and colleague Rabbi Josh Gutoff offered me an interesting brakhah (blessing). Not "break a leg," or "good luck," or, (as any dancer knows), "merde," but "t’karev otam" (draw them near). It was a moment which stopped me in my tracks and which has informed my davvening ever since.

One of the key ways we draw closer to God is by drawing nearer to one another. The power of that shared closeness is manifest in our obligation to pray in a minyan (quorum). That’s not to say that we don’t have personal revelatory moments when we are all alone. But it does elevate the interweaving of individual-community-God to a higher spiritual plane. Through prayer, through generous and thoughtful interaction with our fellow human beings, through a deep sense of responsibility to the people and the world around us, we achieve two separate-yet-integrated goals of drawing near, both to God and to one another.

It’s a reality-shaking thought, t’karev otam. And I hope all our lives will tremble with the attempt.

[Posted 12/21/06]