Facing Death, Cherishing Life

March 20, 2026

For those of you who went to religious school or cheder as children, I’d like you to think back and try to remember what part of the Torah you first learned. Was it the Sh’ma? The Ten Commandments? Love your neighbor as yourself? Chances are, your religious school started at the beginning of Genesis, with the account of creation, followed by Adam and Eve, maybe Cain and Abel, and so forth. Aside from the very beginning being a “very good place to start,” stories are a natural starting place for children, and Genesis is full of them. So you might be surprised to learn that it’s a Jewish custom – still practiced in certain communities – to begin a child’s education with the book of Leviticus. The source for this tradition is a midrash that teaches, “Rabbi Asi said: Why does one begin [teaching] children from the book of Leviticus and one does not begin with Genesis? It is because the children are pure and the offerings are pure, [so] let the pure come and engage in the pure” (Lev. 7:3). Leviticus is the handbook for the priests who were in charge of offering animal sacrifices to God. So imagine a five-year old starting her Jewish education with this: 

“[GOD] called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, 

saying: ‘Speak to the Israelite people, and say to them: When any of you presents an offering of cattle to GOD: You shall choose your offering from the herd or from the flock. If your offering is a burnt offering from the herd, you shall make your offering a male without blemish. You shall bring it to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, for acceptance in your behalf before GOD. You shall lay a hand upon the head of the burnt offering, that it may be acceptable in your behalf, in expiation for you. The bull shall be slaughtered before GOD; and Aaron’s sons, the priests, shall offer the blood, dashing the blood against all sides of the altar that is at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. The burnt offering shall be flayed and cut up into sections. The sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire on the altar and lay out wood upon the fire; and Aaron’s sons, the priests, shall lay out the sections, with the head and the suet, on the wood that is on the fire upon the altar. Its entrails and legs shall be washed with water, and the priest shall turn the whole into smoke on the altar as a burnt offering, an offering by fire of pleasing odor to GOD’” (Lev. 1:1-9). 

Not only is the concept of sacrificing an animal as an act of worship of an unseen God a little abstract for a kindergartener, but the instructions are, to use a technical term, gross. The animal isn’t just killed; it’s flayed and eviscerated. And the punchline is that this offering is pleasing to God! I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to try explaining this passage to a small child, especially if I wanted them to love being Jewish. It’s not just children who might have trouble studying these passages. The sacrificial system is one of the most foreign, primitive, and troubling pieces of ancient Israelite culture. Yet every year, we read these portions and try to find some relevance or meaning for our lives today. 

In reading the parashah this year, I was strangely drawn to the descriptions of the body parts: the entrails, the suet, the kidneys, and, my personal favorite, the protuberance of the liver. It occurred to me that in certain cases, the Israelite bringing the sacrifice is the one who does the slaughtering, while the priests then put the animal on the altar. Everyone involved is close to the animal: to its life and to its death. This mirrors the literal meaning of the Hebrew word for sacrifice, korban, which means to “draw near.” First the Israelites draw near to the animal, and then through that animal’s sacrifice, they draw near to God. Seeing the animal’s death up close, seeing all of the parts of its body that once gave it life being offered to God, must have made an impression on the people. The ritual suggests that worshipping God is no small thing; it is a matter of life and death. It also suggests that taking a life is no small thing; it should be done with deliberateness and care, and preferably for a holy purpose.  

This is so different from our experience today. Most of us are far away from seeing death, whether it’s the death of an animal or a person. Those of us who eat meat buy it in a store, where it’s neatly packaged and totally disconnected from the animal it came from. I suspect that if I had to slaughter my own chicken, or even watch it being slaughtered, I’d eat a lot less chicken. Distance from the actual taking of the animal’s life allows us to more easily justify our eating choices. 

The same principle is true for human life. When wars are fought on the other side of the world by dropping bombs from planes or drones high above, the loss of life is easy to ignore. The nameless, faceless casualties are so far removed from us, they barely seem real. That is why we count on our leaders to be clear-eyed about the costs of war. We need our leaders, those who are most proximate, who know all the details of the current destruction, or who have personally seen war up close in the past, to never forget the preciousness or the precariousness of life. So when the leaders who make the decisions to drop the bombs do the opposite, when they make light of the consequences of war, saying flippantly that the Iranians are “toast;” when they post videos cutting together footage of attacks on Iran with scenes from movies like Gladiator and Braveheart or video games like Call of Duty, when they turn war into entertainment, they not only expose their own lack of respect for life, but they encourage all of us to follow their lead. Treating life cavalierly will only lead to more violence, cruelty, and death in the world.

Vayikra is a difficult portion to read. Maybe the Sages taught it to children first just to get it over with! But since most of us have so little actual contact with death, reading this section of Leviticus brings us a little closer to it. Vayikra calls us to face the reality of death with the hope that it will make us cherish and protect life all the more so.