The Great Shabbat

Rabbi Joel Fleekop

Saturday, March 31, 2007

If you look on a Jewish calendar at today’s date, you will see that it has a special entry. Along with telling us that the Torah portion for this week is Parshat Tzav, it identifies today, the Shabbat before Passover, as Shabbat Hagadol, the Big or Great Shabbat.

For Maddy and her family this is certainly a great Shabbat, the Shabbat of her Bat Mitzvah and the Shabbat that marks a permanent reprieve from all of her Bat Mitzvah preparations.

But since the Shabbat before Passover became known as Shabbat Hagadol long before Maddy’s Bat Mitzah was scheduled, long before there was even such a thing as a Bat Mitzvah, the origin of the name must come from somewhere else.

With that said, no one knows for sure where it came from. In fact, the term Shabbat Hagadol is not mentioned once in the Tanakh or the Talmud. And so over the years, Rabbis, particularly during the Middle Ages, spent a lot of time coming up with different explanations for why the Shabbat before Passover is called Shabbat Hagadol.

One of the most popular is based on midrashim from Exodus Rabbah. Tradition teaches that while in Egypt the Israelites adopted many Egyptian customs. These included Egyptian names, Egyptian clothes, and most importantly Egyptian religion. In other words, they worshipped all sorts of Egyptian idols.

 God wanted to free the Israelites but told Moses, “as long as they are worshipping Egyptian gods, I can’t redeem them. They need to worship only me which they can do by sacrificing a lamb.”

As we know, the sacrifice of a lamb is really important to the Passover story since. It is the lamb’s blood that the Israelites used to mark their doors so the angel of death would pass over, and in later times it became the standard sacrifice offered on Passover, commemorated today by the shank bone on our seder plates. But for the ancient Israelites enslaved in Egypt God’s request was quite a big demand.

 Lambs were representative of one of the most important Egyptian Gods. And so for the Israelites, who had adopted parts of the Egyptian religion, this was quite a big request. Plus, the Egyptians cared so deeply about lambs they didn’t even like shepherds who used them for their wool. Who knows what the Egyptians would do to people who actually killed sheep?

Well despite the enormity of the request, both in terms of breaking with Egyptian religion and possibly endangering their physical safety, all of the ancient Israelites miraculously offered the sacrifice God requested. And so on Shabbat Hagadol we celebrate the sacrifice that qualified the Israelites for freedom and brought them closer to God.

As Maddy discussed earlier, being close to God was also the purpose of the sacrifices Moses and the Israelites learned about during their time in the wilderness, the sacrifices we read about in this morning’s Torah portion.

The idea that a sacrifice is more than just a gift to God but rather an actual way of getting closer to God is one of the things we lose by studying the Torah in translation. While the English word sacrifice conjures images of relinquishing or foregoing, the Hebrew word korban, has none of those connections. Instead, its three letter root, Koof, Bet, Resh, is shared with the Hebrew word karov, close.

 Jews no longer offer animal sacrifices or korbanot. And like Maddy, not all of us are sad about that. But we still must find ways to be karov l’Adonai, close to God. One of the ways Maddy suggested in her speech was to talk to God, and the Rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud fully agree. They teach that prayer is what we should use to replace korbanot because it is through prayer we can recreate the connection our ancestors experienced when they brought sacrifices.

But if prayer is going to replace the sacrifices described in this week’s Torah portion and several others, than we must approach prayer with the same level of commitment the ancient priests and Israelites approached the ritual sacrifices.

The last chapter of Parshat Tzav is spent outlining the procedures the priests should undergo prior to offering sacrifices. There are elaborate steps that don’t really fit with our modern sense of aesthetic. But the details aside, this section of text clearly illustrates the importance of preparing oneself for worship, be that in the form of a sacrifice or prayer.

 Today people prepare to pray by learning about the service and specific prayers. They also get ready by putting on special garments like a kippah or tallit, which are sort of a uniform for Jewish prayer. And some people use meditation. Last night, before the regular service at 8:00, there was our monthly meditation service. One of the goals of this special service is to help people let go of the stress and demands of the week so that they can relax and have a true Shabbat experience, fully present in their prayers, in their conversation with God.

 Whether in ancient days through sacrifice, or today through prayer, this week’s Torah portion reminds us that being close to God requires preparation. I hope that we will take the time to prepare ourselves for future services and future Shabbats so that all of them can be aptly named Shabbat Hagadol, a Shabbat on which we felt a special closeness to God.