Good intentions: this week’s parashah, Vayikra

At the time these words are written, and most likely when they are read, smoke is billowing from locations around the Middle East. Unlike the smoke mentioned in this week’s Torah portion, there is little hope that its odour is pleasing to the Divine. Whether or not your side is winning at a time of war, and even when you think the war defensible or inevitable, it is awful.

The point of the ancient sacrifices was not the death of the beast, but the intention of the person bringing it to the altar. Jacob Milgrom notes that the Hebrew root r-tz-h refers to two kinds of meaning in the Hebrew Bible: acceptance and desire. Verses 3 and 4 of the first chapter see the root deployed twice in its first sense: a person wishing to offer an animal from the herd as an olah offering brings and lays his hand upon it, so that it may be acceptable.

Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica (1801-1854) offered a remarkable re-reading based on the second interpretation. He suggests that if a person has intention and a positive attitude, they are immediately “before Adonai”, but being human, they may forget their original intention. The point of the sacrificial system is to ensure that the original expression of their will is concretised, and that the practice of intending good things is regularised.

Baruch Levine suggests that the olah sacrifice served as “a signal to God that His worshippers desired to bring their needs to His attention.” It is a kind of smoke signal, an expression of hope that an offering presented with pure spirit will be accepted in earnest. God, it might be said, wants us to want the best.