In winter of 1996, a group of Jews, Orthodox and Conservative in roughly equal numbers, met at my house to discuss Jewish concerns. In particular, we were concerned at the absence of intellectual content in our synagogues, at the triumph of religiosity over religion, at the formalism of our traditionalism, and at the failure of our synagogues to excite either our minds or our souls. We are a group of liberal Jews, observant Jews, who see no contradiction in being liberal and observant. We are determined to find out what Judaism is, with minimal preconceptions. We think that the great search of Judaism through time has been a search for Judaism itself. In a symbol I have been developing, we want to compare the tablets of law Moses shattered with those he wrote himself.

We have gathered so far for a Ma'ariv service, and for the reading of the Megilla on Purim. We meet again on Shabbat Vayiqra for my daughter's bat mitzva. At that Shabbat morning service we will be joined by a few Reform Jews interested in what we are. If all goes well, we will start a prayer group which will meet more regularly, and which may evolve into a synagogue.

At the first meeting, we agreed that we would present to each other our researches into Judaism, or our musings and meditations on our religion. I presented the paper I append to this letter, and we discussed it for some hours. I do not know how it contributes to religious pluralism. None of us has any conceivable objection to such pluralism. But it is an attempt to come up with texts we can all relate to, without distinction as to sect. The topic is related to my earlier essay posted in Ariga, and it deals with one of the more problematical aspects of Judaism. In any case, here it is:

Prayers for the Restoration of the Sacrificial Service

I offer an outline of a paper I'm working on. There are no footnotes, and some sources are presented from memory. My paper is an example of a certain postmodern approach to Judaism. It assumes that all knowledge, all branches of learning, can be focused on the texts and the daily reality of Judaism. The end of Eurocentrist readings is also the end of an assumption that twentieth century texts are somehow more progressive, correct, insightful, than earlier texts. Postmodernism in this context means that such texts as Torah, Bible, Koran, etc., are no longer read as historically interesting, but as current and valid. It is the end of the Enlightenment idea of progress, at least as that idea applies to literary and sacred texts. For Judaism, which has always had a strong tendency to treat all of its texts as contemporaneous with each other, so that Talmudic and medieval and modern figures are often juxtaposed as if in argument, this use of the word postmodern is convenient.

In each silent devotion, whether weekday or holiday, we pray: Retzay Hashem elokainu..., and in that prayer we include: v'hashev et ha'avoda lidvir beytecha. Here is, rather explicitly, a prayer for the restoration of the sacrificial service in the Temple in Jerusalem. Why do we say this? Do we really want to see robed priests lead perfect sheep to ritual slaughter, as the defining act in Jewish worship? Do we say it without thought? Do we say it because we have read that, or have been told that, God wants us to say it? Does anyone believe this? Perhaps the more sophisticated among us say it because the Sanhedrin so enacted, and in the absence of a sanhedrin today, we cannot change this. But saying it isn't praying it. Does anyone truly yearn for the public slaughter of terrified bleating lambs as a sacred action? Is this prayed with the intensity and feeling of R'fa'enu, the prayer for healing? Do we enjoy the atavism, the harkening back to a simpler time when, we imagine, God was closer and this closeness obviated such questioning? Is the benediction a simplistic romanticism? Should we stop saying it? Haven't we stopped meaning it, praying it, whether we actually mouth the words or not?

Most Jews, of course, don't pray on any regular, organized basis. Of those who do, many belong to rites which have changed or eliminated this section of the siddur as well as other sections, particularly in the musaf amidas, which are still more explicit, numbering the sacrificial victims by species, and giving the accompanying grain and drink offerings. Certainly, if we don't mean it, we shouldn't say it. As Mark Twain points out in Huckleberry Finn (Huck is trying to pray for the Christian strength to obey the law and turn Jim, a runaway slave, over to the authorities), "You can't pray a lie." Incidentally, I assume

that the person at prayer either knows the Hebrew language or reads a translation. I have had students tell me that they pray quite religiously, in Hebrew, without having any idea at all of what they are saying. But that gets us into the question of prayer in general, and I want to concentrate now on the prayers for the restoration of the sacrificial service.

I am going to present an argument for the continuation of these prayers. For people whose conception of the binding, divine origin of halacha is absolute, this argument may seem an unnecessary apologetic for an eternal ordinance. For people determined that Judaism is entirely in our hands, this argument may seem like pointless casuistry, a justification of what, in any case, logical or illogical, right or wrong, I started out determined that I must accept. I can only hope I am being neither apologetic nor overly clever. I do not claim that I am offering the only or the definitive argument for the continuation of these prayers. In questions of Judaism, it seems to me that nothing is uniquely correct or definitive. This is not because we lack data, or texts, or logic, or insight, but because this is the very nature of our religion.

To start, I assume only that the rabbis had reasons for including such prayers in the liturgy, and that the obvious objections we may have to such prayers were obvious also to the rabbis. After all, it has been a very long time since there was any possibility of actual sacrifices; the prayers for their restoration were written and included in the liturgy quite a few years after the sacrifices had stopped, the land of Israel was firmly under Roman rule, and after any prospect of an early restoration of the temple was gone.

Let us look at the conditions for a sacrificial service. The Jews must have religious control of Jerusalem. A valid altar and its appurtenances must exist. There must be a functioning priesthood. The priests must have some means of maintaining ritual purity. A supply of valid animals must be on hand, and a steady increment in their number must be available. The political and social will to institute the service must be present. There must be a body of believers, ready to accept animal sacrifice as atonement, thanksgiving, obedience, and purification. In addition to all these, none of which exists today or is likely to exist in the foreseeable future, there are other requirements.

Over and over the Torah insists that, before the festival sacrifices are brought, the people bringing the sacrifices must make their families, the poor, the widows, the Levites, servants and orphans rejoice. All these people must actually be happy before the religious Jew can bring sacrifices. This, I submit, is the core of the reason we must continue to pray for the restoration of the sacrifices. We are, in fact, praying that there be something in life which focuses our minds on the needs of the people about us, and on the needs of the people who stand, facing us, face to face with us, on the road to the altar. In my reading, no festival sacrifices have ever been correctly offered, because the wretched have not been made to rejoice. Here, again, is a condition which it is impossible to fulfill.

Judaism seems full of such difficulties. We are told to obey the Lord, but He does not even want to tell us His name. When Moses asks, the response is, "I exist." Later, importuned, God reveals names, past and present, perhaps to show us the names don't matter. After all, anything with a name has limits, and a God with limits is generally considered an idol. But Moses mumbles, so maybe he had it wrong, or we didn't understand. Of course God has no name, any more than the infinite is a very big number.

The Torah is given in the wilderness, no man's land, under conditions that strain credulity past limits, and force us to think in metaphors. The first, purely divine version, is shattered, and a man carved version substituted. It is exactly the same as the first version, of course, but it isn't the first version. No amount of interpretation will ever make it the first version, although we have been reading and interpreting for thousands of years. No amount of care for the destitute will ever get us to Jerusalem, so that we may sacrifice our cattle and sheep, themselves grown old and far from perfect.

After we do receive the second version of Torah, exactly like the first but not the first, we all die - or at least the men over the age of twenty do. Two out of 600,000 men reach Canaan. The generation which enters the land has heard the Torah from people present at Sinai. That is, they have heard a reading, an interpretation of Torah, an account based on four decades old memory, or a saying of a text, the conditions of whose reception are fading from memory. For forty years we wander, trying to earn the right to enter the land promised to us. Once there, although the Torah makes clear that a central ritual site is to be prepared, over four hundred years pass before the sacrifices enjoined by the Torah are offered according to the laws of the Torah, in Jerusalem. It does not, of course, matter whether these laws were really given in the wilderness, added later, redacted, edited, changed. These are the central myths by which we read these texts, and the convention is unchangeable, for all sorts of reasons.

While in Eretz Yisrael, we seem largely to have misread the Torah. Many prophets, at any rate, assure us that we did, substituting sacrifice, the final point of communion with God, for the process of reaching that final point. Ritual seems always to tend towards this, that it replaces what it originally meant with its own intricacies and order and regulations. An ultraorthodox seder, with carefully measured matzah and bitter herbs, but little teaching of the departure from slavery, could serve among many examples as evidence of the tendency. Priest killed priest in eagerness to offer sacrifices, as if it were the killing of a beast that made us Jews in the face of God.

So we march towards Jerusalem, metaphorically across the Sinai desert, metaphorically from whatever exile we are in. We cannot arrive until we have made the destitute rejoice, and it may well be that we cannot accomplish that until we can read the text of Torah, and comprehend rejoicing - or that rejoicing which is not our own. (How does one make another person rejoice? There is something of the erotic in this, but a much sublimated erotic. I think making the other rejoice means making her, and her husband and children, fellow travelers on this path.) We symbolize this trek, which may be eternal, by facing Jerusalem while we pray, facing the Temple where we will offer sacrifices at last. The purpose of prayer, or a purpose of prayer, may simply be to get us all lined up and headed in the right direction. In Israel, too, the proper direction is essential, for there also no one has arrived. There is great pain in Israel today among some of the orthodox Jews, because they thought, erroneously, that they were getting close. The current sadness of some Lubavitch Hassidim is based on essentially the same misconception of the closeness of the end.

What of Jewish law, halacha, on the road to Jerusalem? Here, I should like to mention Nachmanides' strange reading of midrash (Sifre on Deuteronomy). The Ramban writes in his commentary to Leviticus that the purpose of the commandments outside of Eretz Yisrael may be practice. We perform mitzvoth outside the land in order that "when you return, they will not be novelties to you. ...for the main fulfillment of the commandments is to keep them when dwelling in the land of God."

Therefore, being overly careful of mitzvoth, to the point where their observance hinders the journey, or even disguises the road, must be avoided. We are commanded to eat kosher food here, in this reading of the shattered and whole stones, so that we will recognize kosher food in Jerusalem. If so, we might well save our over great concern over the finer distinctions of permitted and non-permitted foods until we are a lot closer. As should be clear, I am putting off an important aspect of the main question. Why sacrifice? why do animals have to die for us to get close to God? I think the symbols are not that difficult to decipher - even if, as always, there are many solutions, and I offer only one.

Death is the end of order. It is the boundary of reason and the limit of coherence. I suspect that the death of the sacrificial animal, which never happens, which remains a non-death because we cannot fulfill the requirements, is our non-death. We admit our readiness to sacrifice, to die, but do so in conditions which keep us alive. But the readiness to die puts us, already, in that instant, beyond the limits of order and coherence. We walk with God and without fear of death. God has preserved us for the journey by making it endless, infinite, a sign of transcendence. In comparison, those who deny death by staying home and amassing property, working out daily, gobbling vitamins - all the common death denying actions of the twentieth century - are living in graveyards of immanence. As long as we drive our cattle towards Jerusalem, trying to delight the poor and unhappy, driving sheep towards their deaths which are our deaths, we are safe. And we are not fooling ourselves. We are outside of time and are in a world beyond being. Also, of course beyond language, and I have great difficulty expressing myself here. Most of the time, to be sure, almost all of the time - all of the time to the extent that there is such a thing as time - we live in the same immanent world as the not religious.

The Torah shows us the spirit of God hovering about the primordial wastespace of tohu v'vohu - formlessness and void. This is the content of the holy of holies. It is a small emptiness containing the stuttered carvings of Moses and the shattered tablets of God. There is the recoil from nothingness, nothing said twice, in the same unidentical signs. Only the high priest could enter, once a year, utter the name not a name of beyond existence, and exit transformed. At the end, there is the vision of the void, as we always suspected, lying in bed, awakened by terror or simple insomnia in the darkness, overwhelmed by intimations of eternity. But (thank God) we will not get there.

Not all sacrifices were festival sacrifices, brought by us as depicted here. There were daily and communal sacrifices, sin and guilt offerings. I think they have, all of them, the same origins. I think the priests, a holy but indigent caste, represented those who must be made to rejoice, and the daily and Sabbath and other offerings were reminders of the point of transcendence, the edge of death which is not our death but close enouou so we feel death's lack of breath. But all of this requires much more work.

Meanwhile, let us pray for the restoration of the sacrifices. It is a prayer for the road to Jerusalem as Jerusalem should be, a city in which all people rejoice, because we travelers have made them rejoice.