Eating In

Who cares about sacrifices!” people often complain, when they get to Leviticus. “Wake me when Leviticus ends.” But the sacrificial system is less about sacrifices than about who gets to eat them — and that is plenty interesting!

Of the three major types of sacrifice, only the first (the olah) was wholly a sacrifice, if by that you mean an animal slaughtered and offered up entirely to God.

The second (the minchah) was a grain offering, mostly fried on the altar as a sacred meal for the priests — payment-in-kind for their work on behalf of the people.

The last, and most interesting, was the zevach sh’lamim, usually translated “a sacrifice” (zevach) “of peace” (sh’lamim) — like shalom, but also irenicusand pacificusin the old Greek (Septuagint) and Latin (Vulgate) Bibles. Part of this sacrifice was sent off to God in smoke, but most of it was eaten by the priests and the people doing the offering.

Put all this together and you get ancient biblical wisdom on eating. We nowadays know enough to focus properly on “what” we eat; but the rules of sacrifice remind us to attend as well to “where” we eat, “how” we eat, and “with whom” we do the eating.

Start with the “where”. A straight line leads from the Temple cult to a synagogue Kiddushor oneg Shabbat:  all examples of eating as a sacred event in a sacred place. Synagogue meals expand the elemental sense of family beyond the accident of blood ties alone; they connect us with relative strangers in an effort to construct a story of shared identity, and destiny.

Our homes too are sacred: there too, we invite guests who attend as family around the intimate act of sharing food.

Restaurants are generally not sacred. By all means treat yourself to eating out, but not at the expense of meals eaten “in” — in synagogue and home with people you might never otherwise get to know.

As for the “how,” sacred meals are not swallowed on the run. They feature conversation, affability, nicely set tables, putting our best selves forward, and time allotted also to ritual, prayer and song. When we are done, an afterglow assures us that we have somehow experienced a deeper faith in friendship; a certain sense of how good it is to be alive; and a demonstration of what a life well led is all about.

Finally, the most important question: with whom do we choose to eat? Here, the third sacrifice, the zevach sh’lamim, becomes all-important. Targum Onkelos, a particularly ancient source for understanding Torah, generally translates the Hebrew into straightforward Aramaic: olah becomesalata; minchah becomes minchata.Yet sh’lamim becomes kudshaya, like the Hebrew kodesh, “holy.”

Jewish tradition usually considers the first two sacrifices (olahand minchah) holier than the third (zevach sh’lamim) because the third one could be enjoyed by ordinary Israelites, not just God and the priests. Onkelos defies that interpretation. For him, the zevach sh’lamim (the kudshaya) is the holiest one of all – for the very same reason. The midrash explains that with the sh’lamim, God, the priests, and ordinary Israelites are at one with one another.