Tzav: A Drash on Well-Being

 

© 2025 Trisha Arlin

 

If your offering is a sacrifice of well-being —If you offer of the herd, whether a male or a female, you shall bring before יהוה one without blemish. 

You shall lay a hand upon the head of your offering and slaughter it at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and Aaron’s sons, the priests, shall dash the blood against all sides of the altar. 

Then present from the sacrifice of well-being, as an offering by fire to יהוה, the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is about the entrails; the two kidneys and the fat that is on them, that is at the loins; and the protuberance on the liver, which you shall remove with the kidneys.

 

That’s enough of that, you get the drift.  Details like that is what most of the parsha, Tzav, is about, but I want to talk about the first sentence.  Not even the first sentence, the first phrase, “ If your offering is a sacrifice of well-being”

 

What is an offering of well-being?

 

Is it an offering in gratitude for well being or in pursuit thereof?  Well, the former, the HaShlamim, but also, in a way, it’s a hope for the latter.  One is grateful for well being but hopeful for more so let’s kill a small animal and throw around its blood and body parts.  

 

So how can we make an offering for well being if we’re not going to kill a small animal? After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the prayers and music and piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems) of Shacharit, Mincha and Maariv (Morning, afternoon and evening) were Rabbinic Judaism’s replacement for the temple sacrifices, so I guess this drash is my offering?

 

But what is meant by well-being?  The Hebrew is HaShlamim and well-being  is how the JPS  on Sefaria translates the Hebrew  but   Robert Alter translates it as “peace”.  So let’s explore both.

 

What is well-being?  Is it health?  Wealth?  Happiness? Maimonides, The Rambam, writes in his Guide for the Perplexed that the person seeking well-being has two objectives, the well-being of the soul and the well-being of the body, and he says, “The latter object is required first; it is also treated [in the Law] most carefully and most minutely, because the well-being of the soul can only be obtained after that of the body has been secured....”

 

Or as Bertolt Brecht says in the Threepenny Opera, “Food is the first thing, morals follow on.”

 

If you’re hungry or homeless or your country is being invaded and bombed to smithereens or you’re being sent to a torture prison in El Salvador, or you’re afraid of losing Social security in your old age when it’s your primary source of income (ahem) then emotional or spiritual well being is not the top of your list of priorities.  But let’s assume, for the sake of this drash, that you are a well fed,  educated, employed citizen living in gentrified Brooklyn, and you have the luxury of worrying about your soul.  What is true well-being for you?  Do you feel at peace, whole? what would be the proper offering to make in celebration or pursuit of that feeling?  Or is it merely a luxury of privilege to even aspire to that?

 

The Avot of Rabbi Natan, a commentary on the Pirke Avot, a book of moral guidance, says, “I desire kindness, not a well being offering.” Meaningful action rather than, dare I say it, virtue signalling.  And in my experience, acts of kindness can bring on feelings of well being, sometimes. 

Psalm 85 gives us more, “Faithfulness and truth meet; justice and well-being kiss.” Or in Robert Alter’s translation, “Kindness and truth have met, Justice and peace have kissed.”  Isn’t that lovely?  Kissed.  Kindness and truth meeting, That really speaks to me, I’m a bit of a truth teller and not always kind, though I aspire to it.  And justice and peace kissing? I’ve known a lot of wonderful important impactful activists over the years who wouldn’t know personal well being and public peace if it knocked them upside the head.  But oh my, if kindness, truth, justice and peace kiss?  That’s how I imagine this congregation at its very best, yes?    And wouldn’t a person who could embrace all those qualities  be complete, at peace, in a state of wholeness? 

Holy Wholeness, HaShleimut, is a name I like to use for God.  Not a being who intervenes, but the essence of well-being:  connection, completion, wholeness, peace.  That’s what I talk to when I pray the holy conversation of the Amidah. 

 

So is that my offering, a kiss for HaShleimut? (mwah)

 

Well, partly.  But I’ve got another sort of offering, for y’all.

Advice. 

 

I’m allowed to give advice, I’m old.  And that is my advice.  Be old.  I’ll explain.

 

I turned 71 a couple of months ago and I feel different.  Physically, yes of course, but really, actually, in my soul.   I’ve noticed that no matter how bad things get, and believe me, right now things are bad for me personally in terms of money and housing, nevertheless, I am weirdly happy.  I shouldn’t be, because life objectively sucks for me and certainly for the world, but nevertheless, I have been experiencing well-being. I’ve been trying to figure out why and I think I may have the answer.  

 

I’m going to die.  Sooner rather than later.  It’s not sad or depressing, it just is.  And I know it.  I know it in a way I never have before. When I was younger I knew I was going to die, something I learned when I was six and my grandmother taught me to say the bedtime shma in case I died in my sleep because if you say the shma just before you die then you will see God which, because this was the first time anyone every told me I was going to die, freaked me out. Thanks Gramma.  But even freaked out, I knew this was a scary story for grown ups, it wasn’t going to happen to me because I sincerely believed, in my heart of hearts, well into my fifties, that I was the one human who would live forever. 

It could happen.

 

Well, when you’re 71, that don’t work.   You get sick, your friends get sick, people you know die. The people in the Obituary section of the NY Times are your age!  This death thing, it is happening, and sooner rather than later.  Maybe I have another ten years, maybe more, maybe less, but that’s basically it.   I can worry about my immediate future, I still worry about food and rent, I’m still writing and trying to get published, but I don’t have any grandiose plans for the future.  What I have is now.  Which is all that any of us have really, but when you are 71, you can’t avoid it.  And what’s more, you don’t want to avoid it.  Assuming you have food and shelter and some kind of health and you’re not in pain or grief, now is, well, nice. 

 

It’s sweet, which is also my favorite word to describe Shabbat.  On Shabbat, if you’re doing it right, there’s no last week or next week, there’s no regrets or worries, there’s just today.  So when you’re old, and all you have for sure is this moment, everything you have or do or see is gravy. And I love gravy.  Now is great.  When I see or do or hear something I like, a flower, making someone laugh, Earth Wind and Fire, I enjoy it much more than I did before.  I am learning to concentrate on one thing at a time thus each moment can become Shabbat.  No before or after.  Now is all I have.  Now is good.

 

I hear you saying, what about Trump?  What about Gaza?  What about class warfare and racism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and imperialism and fascism? Yeah, I know.   Aren’t I scared?  Angry?  Don’t I want to help make the world better?  Yeah, of course, all that, still.  But that’s now, too.  There’s a sweetness to the awareness of that, too,  a new depth to those feelings of anger and grief that I didn’t know before. I don’t quite have the words yet to describe it. All things pass, which doesn’t just describe the good, it also is true of the bad. I don’t know if I will live to see it but even fascists pass.  And I know you all, you’re good.  I have hope in your future which will eventually be your now. 

 

So I know a little bit about well-being. But I like the Alter translation better: Peace.  Well not peace, wholeness.  I like the word shalom, it means hello and goodbye and peace because it really means completion, like a circle that starts at hello and goes around until it becomes good bye, and then hello and good bye kiss, and become peace.

So I offer a prayer:

 

Baruch atah HaShleimut 

Blessed wholeness 

Ruach HaOlam

Breath of the Universe

Breathing everything in

Breathing everything out

We give thanks for the possibility of kindness, truth, justice and peace.

We give thanks for the awareness of mortality that gives us 

The gift of Now

That we may know joy everyday no matter our circumstances. 

(Mwah)

Amen

Shabbat Shalom

 

Tzav, a drash

Tzav, this week's parsha, establishes some of the sacrificial duties of the professional high priest, the Kohanim,  along with some of their perks and ends with the ritual of their consecration.  There is an obvious parallel between these duties, perks and consecration and those of the modern Jewish religious leader. 

In Tzav, God tells Moses how to conduct a series  of religious rituals that only the Kohanim can carry out, specifically the rituals of Burnt Offering, meal offering, offerings for purgation, reparations, sacrifices for well being and the prohimbitions regarding fat and blood, and then the insturctions for ordination of the priests.  We are told what the priests should be wearing, how they kill, burn or otherwise consume the food or creatures being sacrificed.

The purpose or efficacy of sacrifice is taken for granted.   If done correctly, the ritual will evoke well-being,  sin will be purged, God will be placated.  The acts are not without meaning and effect, but to me the obligation seems  paramount and is perhaps an ends unto itself.  One wonders how the high priests managed to escape corruption and cynicism and one assumes many did not.   But noneless, they – and we - we brave alll the possible pitfalls, because they and we need the rituals.  Why?

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer wrote in The Torah, A Women's Commentary,

As we learn about ritual as a human phenomenon, we come to understand it as a language of it's own, uniquely meaningful.  

But what gives it that meaning? Is it the ritual itself, is there some magic in the specific act, or is it enough that it is separate and repeatable and and we have all agreed to assign meaning to it?  And in our own time, is group or private prayer an adequate substitute for an orchestrated and dramatic public offering of value to God?  Or is the system of halacha and all the attendent sacrifices one makes in comfort and ease if one is halachically observant, the only true substitute for a fire on a high altar?

Or are those special creatures, the hereditary high priests the only ones who can perform the rituals correctly so that we may be made whole and holy?  If so, can these Kohanim serve as models for a moden rabbinical student?  How should we approach the learning and carrying out of our rituals?  Is there is the inherent value to a ritual even if is divorced from its history, or meaning?  Where can we find our fire?

Arthur Green writes in his interpretation of the Se-fat Emet's commentary on Tzav,

We long for a perfect act of worship, one in which there is no distraction, no doubt, no holding back, no wandering of the mind, nothing but the pure gift of love.  But we miss the point.  Our worship is all about struggle, an ongoing inner process of transformaiton

I would like to tell you what was, for me, a perfect act of worship and a transformation.

My father was a kohen.  When I was young, I knew he was special, and he got to do stuff other people didn't do because of it and that made me special.    

One day my father came home with this wooden box, and inside were five beautiful silver coins, which were for the pidyon ha ben,   the ritual of redeeming the first born son from service in the temple.  My father would "sell" these coins to the parents of the child for the price of a donation to the temple, he would then perform the pidyon ha ben, whatever that was, and they would pay him with the coins.  My father was very proud of these coins and I really wish I still had them.  We bonded over the coins, until he told me that I could never do this ritual because I was a girl, and only boys counted as kohanim, and only boys needed to be redeemed.  Not fair.

Years pass, I am an adult feminist and completely alienated from Judaism and I move to Seattle and then discover Judaism ain't so bad after all and move back to Jewish New York, but  as drawn as I was to the Jewish community, I still couldn't help feel that religion was irrational and not for me.  But then, friends of mine had a baby, their first, and a boy, and they knew I'm a Kohen, I don't remember why, and they asked me to perfrom their son's pidyon ha ben.

Me?  But I'm a woman?  You mean, I can be a Kohen now? Or at least act as one? Yes, I can.  It was so exciting!  I hadn't read Hebrew out loud in a long time, but Rabbi Sami Barth stood next to me at the ceremony while I enabled Debby and Wrolf to redeem the infant, Jeremy.  And myself.  Because in that act, that perfect act of ritual, both Jeremy and I were redeemed.  My fear and doubts were nothing next to the connection I felt to Aaron, to my father, to every woman who ever wanted to lead and study and pray as a full human being and a Jew, and most of all, to my authentic self.   A perfect act of worship and transformation, indeed.

That baby, Jeremy,  is going to college next year.  And I am applying to rabbinical school, though not because I'm a kohen.  I belong to a congregation that considers such hereditary status to be beyond anachronistic, no, more like repulsive and un-American and we never, and I mean never, do aliyot by Kohen, Levite and Israelite, but I still, whenever I hear the priestly blessing recited by the rabbi and sung by the cantor, I still think, that's mine to say, not yours, mine, though I don't tell anyone, well I just told you, because I know I'm not supposed to feel that way, and I know it's not real but I do.

But I have come to know that any leader of ritual can be that k'li kodesh, sacred vessel.   Rabbi Shefa Gold, writing about this parsha in her book, Torah Journeys, says:

We are commanded to be a nation of priests, to take responsibility for the holiness of our world, to be healers, and when necessary to stand between Life and Death, bridging the finite and the infinite.

The ritual leader, kohen or rabbi or not, lights the holy fire, whether it's a burning pigeon or a powerful metaphor, and creates the bridge between the past and the future.