So much of being a parent is trying to teach your children, time and time again, that there is nothing they might experience that they cannot bring to you.
We do it in small ways at the beginning: holding them as they cry over a fall and kissing their bruises, and watching with full attention as they point to their favorite picture in a book. Even our annoyance, even our anger, is part of this teaching: The anger will always pass, but my love for you, no matter what, will remain.
This is the lesson God struggles and fails to teach the Jewish people throughout their time in the desert. The failure makes sense: After hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt, God and the Jewish people have only recently rediscovered one another. The Jewish people have not yet learned to trust in God’s presence. They do not yet know that they can bring anything to God, that God can hold them in their sorrow and forgive their sins, that God will never leave them. And so God gives the Jewish people the mishkan, a portable sanctuary where they can always find God.
Commentators assert that God commands the building of the mishkan only after the Israelites constructed a golden calf to worship. They posit that the tabernacle and its sacrifices were meant to allay the Israelites’ fears of God’s abandonment — fears that led them to create an idol in the first place.
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In Rashi on Exodus 31:18, we read: “And he gave unto Moses etc. — There is no ‘earlier’ or ‘later’(no chronological order) in the events related in the Torah: in fact the incident of the golden calf (related in ch. 31) happened a considerable time before the command regarding the work of the tabernacle was given.”
In this reading, the mishkan is God’s offering to the Jewish people in the wake of the fracture. Unlike a child with a human parent, the Jewish people have never learned to trust that God’s love will not vanish. God cannot kiss bruises or laugh with us as we experience our first joys. But God, too, needs us to know that there is nothing we cannot bring to God, be it joy, sorrow or shame.
And so the Jewish people receive the mishkan, the place they can always find God, and with it, Vayikra (Leviticus), a sort of handwritten cookbook, presented by a parent who hopes its recipes will teach their children to trust that constancy.
These are what the korbanot, or sacrifices, become when we understand Vayikra as a family cookbook: The shlamim (peace offering), a meal to eat together when you overflow with joy. The chatat (sin offering), dinner for days when you are filled with shame. The asham (guilt offering), breakfast for times when it seems like too much has gone wrong. Celebratory feasts for childbirth in the offerings of the yoledet, the new mother. Solemn meals from the metzora, the leper, returning from exile.”
When we read Vayikra as a cookbook instead of a code, its valence changes: These are not simply sacrifices prepared for God or elaborate rituals to show our obedience. Instead, they are templates for meals to bring God and the Jewish people. They are ways for God to invite his children home. In the long list of korbanot, God beckons to the messiness of human life and invites it into His home. The range of experiences that trigger a sacrifice is not meant to overwhelm but to invite: Take your experience and bring it to me. Let us share it together.
And written at the top, for each and every recipe, are the words that parents, as they watch their babies sleep, hope their children will carry in their hearts all their lives: First, come home.
