Drash for Shabbat Shmini

Holy Slaughter

Our Torah reading this week recounts some of the details of the slaughter of animals and their consumption on the altar of the Beit Mikdash.  If you were listening to the English translation as it was read, and unless I miss my guess, your reaction may well have been:  Ugh!  We are, after all, conditioned to find such things distasteful.  And we probably wonder why our distant forebears found the sight of such carnage uplifting.  And possibly, we think that our reaction this morning reflects that civilisation has advanced since then.  After all, we find it difficult to imagine this raw butchery to be uplifting.  Doesn't that make us better, or at least more finely developed than the ancient Israelites?  In a word, no.

No, we don’t slaughter bulls and rams and offer them up as burnt offerings.  We don’t watch the smoke of a holy barbecue waft heavenward and hope that it will satisfy God’s need for…whatever.  But the truth is, we don’t offer very much to God at all.

And we allow much slaughter to occur on a daily basis without any intervention.  Or even feeling particularly bad about it. 

I’m not talking about the slaughter of bulls and rams.  We’re allowed to kill animals for food, and to use their skins and organs for clothing, pharmaceuticals and other things.  Oh, there are those among us who are vegans, who refuse to use animal products for any purpose.  And I’m not knocking vegan-ism   I’m just pointing out that it’s definitely a minority position.  Jewish law, and most other systems of ethics, do not forbid the use of animals.  In the case of Halachah, there are constraints on the slaughter of animals for food or other use.  Traditionally, the purpose for these constraints is seen as being twofold.  Firstly, to ensure that when animals’ lives are taken, they are taken with a degree of reverence so as to keep us aware of the value of life.  And secondly, to ensure a minimisation of animal suffering.

But I’m talking about the slaughter of human beings.

How many more millions must die in wholesale slaughter, such as in Darfur, before the world truly awakens?  How many Tibetans?  How many Christians, Baha’is and Zoroastrians in Iran?  How many Syrian rebels against the ruling Alawis?  Most of the human race sleeps well at night, even knowing about these things.  Look, I’m not suggesting that, if we don’t constantly wring our hands over this, then that’s evidence that we’re heartless individuals.  But if we’re informed about it, then we do have some responsibility to at least think, and talk about it.  And to try to find ways, even if they seem pathetic, to keep these atrocities in the public eye.

We Jews are uniquely positioned to help our neighbours, and our country in this area.  Every year we gather, as we will tomorrow night on the eve of Yom Hashoah.  Our purpose is to keep alive the memory and recognition that we were the primary targets of a xenophobia and ethnic cleansing that ran amok for over two decades.  This fear and loathing of The Other was Utopian and racist at its heart.  Before it was stopped, Nazism spread its net to catch many other groups in European life in its grip.  Recent revelations have shown that the Nazi Holocaust killed no fewer than 17.5 million souls, of whom six million were Jews.  And this is in addition to the casualties, military and civilian, of the world war that raged contemporaneously.  It’s staggering to think of.

So, we Jews see ourselves as being in the ‘business’ of keeping the history of the Nazi era alive, especially as we see the pool of actual victims and eyewitnesses shrink each year now that we’re approaching the seventieth anniversary of its end. But if we wish to remind our neighbours annually about how we suffered, we cannot remain silent about those who are suffering from present-day manifestations of tyranny of a similar nature.

So we don’t sacrifice animals on an altar today, and we do tend to think ourselves better because of it.  But we do seem content to allow the sacrifice of human beings to happen, continually, without much protest over it.

Some anthropologists have suggested that ancient rites requiring the sacrifice of animals to please a group’s god or gods, stem from man’s essential violent nature.  That having such rituals was a way of channeling the violence that is in each man, to better purpose than constantly creating violence between men.

I don’t know about that, but I’m sure that our fascination with barbecues also has something to do with this.  Being an omnivorous carrier of a Y chromosome myself, I love tending the barbecue as much as the next man.  In addition to providing a tasty meal at the end, there’s just something elemental about it.  This is why the guy tending the meat on the fire is seldom alone; the other blokes tend to gather around, libations in hand, to share the experience.  And it is something approaching a religious experience…make no mistake about it!

So violence, killing and bloodshed come naturally to us homo sapiens…certainly those of the male persuasion, and surely some of our sisters as well.  And if we’re honest, most of us indulge in activities that allude to this instinct, in various ways.  I’m therefore proposing that we drop our contempt, if that’s what it is, for the ancient cultic practices of the Israelites.  Maybe our ancient forebears were not so far off, after all.  When we read sections of the Torah such as this week’s reading, let’s drop the pretence that, because we don’t do it, we’re better.  Tell me you find these sections boring, since they reflect practices that we haven’t done for 2,000 years.  But don’t tell me you find the idea of animal sacrifices loathsome.

And iff we can have an honest conversation about the place of such sacrifices, and what they provided for our ancestors then we can better understand human nature.  And iff we can better understand human nature, then we can have an honest conversation about why episodes of violence reaching proportions of genocide continue to happen.  And we can begin to address these continued tyrannies that we see, and work to make them a thing of the past.  I'm not suggesting that we return to holy slaughter - only that we also work to address un-holy slaughter.  Ken yehi ratzon.