What Remains? The Salt Remains
On Sacrifice, Contemplation, and Renewal
You shall season your every offering of meal with salt; you shall not omit from your meal offering the salt of your covenant with God; with all your offerings you must offer salt. (Leviticus 2:13)
Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: The word covenant is used with regard to salt, and the word covenant is used with regard to afflictions. The word covenant is used with regard to salt, as it is written: “The salt of the covenant with your God should not be excluded from your meal-offering; with all your sacrifices you must offer salt” (Leviticus 2:13). And the word covenant is used with regard to afflictions, as it is written: “These are the words of the covenant” (Deuteronomy 28:69). Just as, in the covenant mentioned with regard to salt, the salt sweetens the meat, so too in the covenant mentioned with regard to suffering, the suffering cleanses a person’s transgressions. (Talmud Brachot 5a)
This week, we open the book of Vayikra (Leviticus), and are thrust into the priestly world of animal sacrifice. For most of us, the details are difficult to absorb, retain, and process. The Biblical laws which we read are inoperative.
The Talmud says that one who studies the laws of sacrifice—it is as if that person brought a sacrifice. For the rabbis, study itself became a substitute for sacrifice (along with prayer). I understand why. It’s hard (self-effacing) work to understand a system that is, historically and existentially, a black box. It’s like learning a language that nobody speaks. Perhaps the study of something inapplicable is the ultimate exercise in futility, and thus a kind of penitence in its own way, as it makes us appreciate the places in our life where we do have agency and meaning.
Perhaps the wanton destruction of animal life, albeit contained in some ritualized spectacle, was meant to evoke horror on the part of the one bringing it. Don’t waste that precious goat! the inner voice cries out. To which another responds, “You’ll cry for the goat, but not for yourself! Wake up.”
Yes, it’s tragic the animal had to die so we could get the message, but sometimes it takes loss to remind us what we have. Since the destruction of the Temple, the study of sacrifices is its own sort of excess, not the spilling of animal blood, but the spilling of the invisible human blood of time. Is this really what I want to spend my precious life learning? Which animal for which sin? Why am I studying Torah when I could be out doing something productive, “applicable”? But in so asking I remember that my life is indeed precious, and that part of its preciousness derives not from any appeal to productivity, achievement, application, or impact, but simply from existing. Shabbat and the sacrifices are holy, in part, because they embody a useful uselessness, a rest from the laborious grind, an empty space.
One way to think about sacrifice is that it’s taking something useful and rendering it startlingly defunct. Duchamp, in his way, does this when he turns the urinal upside down and makes it an artwork; or when he removes a bicycle wheel from its functional place and turns it into an object of contemplation. Our ancestors took their precious livestock and rendered them inoperative; they gave them up as tools and turned them into occasions for reflection. And when we do teshuva, repentance, we do this, too; we stop looking at our dashboards and look at ourselves looking.
In Being and Time, Heidegger describes two kinds of ways that we relate to things. Things can either be “ready to hand” (Zuhandensein) or “present at hand” (Vorhandensein). Things which are “ready to hand” are things which we take for granted and aren’t even aware of. When I turn the doorknob to enter the room, I don’t think to myself, “now I’m going to move the doorknob slightly to the right.” I just do it. But if the doorknob is jammed, or there isn’t one and the door doesn’t open, all of a sudden I ask, “Where’s that doorknob?” The being, doorknob, shifts from being ready to being present, from being background to foreground. When you watch a play and the actors are great, you sometimes forget you’re watching actors. But if one of them forgets a line, now you remember, “That’s not King Lear, that’s Kenneth Branagh.” Sacrifice, in a sense, is the breaking of the tool. In breaking an animal, or a text, or some other being, we call attention to our own brokenness. The jammed doorknob—that’s us.
For the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a lot of good can come from inoperativity, even though his examples are often precarious and fearsome. For example, Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener—Agamben’s favored character—is a copyist who goes around saying, “I would prefer not to.” His whole life becomes a kind of sacrifice or self-sacrifice as he stops being useful and commits wholeheartedly to being useless (no small feat!). The forlorn Bartleby reveals to us some aspect of ourselves that is not defined and definable by our work, our function, our output. For Agamben, at any rate, this seems to be a source of meaning, freedom, and paradoxical hope.
With the disappearance of animal sacrifices—the sacrifice of sacrifice, as it were—we are offered an opportunity to ask, “Now that we can’t rely on a priestly system, how shall we continue”? Each time our system breaks, culturally and personally, we are given an opportunity to find our way, to begin again.
There is a detail in this week’s parasha whose irony ages with time, and that’s the salt. At first it’s a minor player. Now it seems to me to be a protagonist, the sole surviving witness to the Temple.
The salt is benign enough. Ibn Ezra explains that it’s disrespectful to bring a sacrifice that is bland (notwithstanding the fact that God doesn’t actually eat it). Rashi, more colorfully, says the salt is a reference to the waters of Creation, which evokes some fascinating parallels between the act of atoning for one’s transgressions and (re)creating the world. As if to say that when we atone, we are parting the original waters. But the explanation seems like a stretch. The Ishbitzer Rebbe says the salt is a metaphor for our awe—we can’t just bring the sacrifice; we have to intend it. But the most obvious explanation offered by our commentators is that just as salt preserves meat, so the covenant preserves us. The phrase “covenant of salt” is weird, but if you consider the people were living in the desert where things rotted quickly, it makes a lot of sense—we salt to preserve and we hope in turn to be preserved, to be salted, as it were.
What is left of the sacrifices today? Not the meat; just the salt. Not the substance, just the seasoning, the trace. We salt our challah on Shabbat as a reminder of the law we read this week, a reminder of the reminder to preserve what is lost, to feel preserved even as we feel we are lost.
The Talmud (Brachot 5a) draws a strange parallel between the commandment to salt the sacrifices and a list of punishments offered in Deuteronomy. Just as we salt our sacrifices, so the suffering we endure (as punishment for our transgressions) salts us, i.e., it preserves us—as sacrifices—and also brings out our flavor. Well, that’s an alienating and disturbing analogy, but I hope to make it meaningful in the following way:
The salt represents our personality, our individuality. Part of what makes us who we are are the painful memories we carry, the lessons we’ve learned through duress. Whether they were punishments or not, they made us—odd as it sounds—less bland. This isn’t to glorify suffering. As the Piaseczna Rebbe notes (writing in the Warsaw Ghetto soon before being murdered), it’s possible to oversalt meat; to ruin someone with too much suffering. As I understand it, though, the commandment to salt the sacrifice is a commandment to be singular, to bring our full selves into everything we do, or to try to.
Why would this call to individuality be necessary precisely in the moment of sacrifice, in a moment of seeking expiation and renewal?
One hazard of seeking moral and spiritual purification is that one ends up whitewashing the parts of oneself that make one zesty—all in the name of conformity. We should never atone for who we are; we can atone for what we’ve done, but we also need to understand that what we’ve done is an expression of who we are (even if it’s misguided and a source of regret). We also can’t properly atone unless we seek to understand ourselves. Moreover, our errors are also part of who we are. Should we wish them away? That would mean wishing ourselves away.
To say it in a somewhat shocking way: the salt is a reminder that it is our flaws that make us delightful to God, that fulfill our status as divinely created beings. We shouldn’t therefore stop trying to work through “our stuff” and rest happily knowing that God loves us for our shortcomings. But we should take a dialectical view of ourselves, and see our failures as holy and blessed in their own way, or at least potentially so.
To draw close to the Source of Life, we must alchemize our deficiencies into gifts. We must preserve and draw out our deviant flavor in the process of aiming to be good. Reading Ibn Ezra existentially, the difference between the God of the Torah and the God of the philosophers is that the former forbids us to be bland. To wake up to the specificity of one’s existence it helps to pause, even to admit a little boredom, to waste a little bit of time on the altar of being. In so doing, one discovers how good it is to be. “Give thanks to the Lord, although it is good; although God’s generosity is inviolable” (Psalms 107:1). Now pass the salt!
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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