Bringing Leviticus to Life

This week’s Torah reading, Parshat Tsav, continues the misunderstood and unloved Book of Leviticus. The late Jacob Milgrom, however, a towering biblical scholar, spent his life revealing its deeper purpose. Far from a manual of death, Leviticus is a radical affirmation of life, reinterpreting ritual as a celebration of God’s creative power.

The Jewish tradition of affirming life’s sanctity, seen in the rabbis and beyond, is not a departure from its origins but an elaboration of them. When the shtetl folk in Fiddler on the Roof toast “L’chaim” (to life), they echo Leviticus’s ancient voice. The “Chai” symbol (חַי), worn as a mark of Jewish identity, is no modern invention—it distills our enduring essence as a people committed to life.

Set in the Wilderness after the Exodus, Leviticus follows Israel’s escape from Egypt—a tyranny fixated on death, building colossal tombs and crafting texts like the Book of the Dead. Deuteronomy, Moses’s farewell in the Wilderness, comes from a different school than Leviticus’s priests. Yet scholars note the priests likely compiled the Pentateuch and they chose to fully include Deuteronomy. In verse 30:19 of the latter, God urges, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life” (הַעִדֹתִי בָכֶם הַיּוֹם אֶת־הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת־הָאָרֶץ הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי לְפָנֶיךָ הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה וּבָחַרְתָּ בַּחַיִּים)—a covenantal call Leviticus embodies.

Leviticus’s ritual code radically departs from neighboring cults, rejecting the idea of “feeding” or propitiating gods. Instead, it establishes a connection with the one God who creates all life, transforming sacrificial material into a symbol of life. Only a few things can be offered—no human life, no non-kosher animals (most of which are excluded)—reflecting a reverence for all creation as God’s work.

Kosher animals, symbolizing completeness and settled order (e.g., cud-chewing, not amphibians), are limited to herded ones, making sacrifice a personal investment. The Tabernacle mirrors God’s ordered universe, ascending from plants to animals to humans. Sacrifices remedy ritual and ethical disturbances, like false oaths, while impurities—tied to reproduction or death-like skin conditions—temporarily bar participation.

All corpses, even insects, are impure and unusable in worship. The few permissible animals are sacrificed humbly, their blood—a symbol of life—reserved for God and offered as smoke.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, the setting for sacrifices ended. We remember this system today—the shankbone on the Seder plate recalls the Passover sacrifice of the pilgrimage festival. Yet the rabbis replaced sacrifices with prayer, study, and expanded calls for good deeds. The daily service centers on two prayers: the Shema—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל ה’ אֱלֹהֵינוּ ה’ אֶחָד)—affirming a coherent creation; and the Amidah, praising God as “He who revives the dead” (מְחַיֵּה מֵתִים), expressing gratitude for life and hope for a messianic era when the world reflects God’s vision of order, harmony, justice, and mercy.

Building on this, the rabbis elaborated on the kosher code set out in Leviticus 11, weaving it into the daily life of every Jew from earliest childhood. Eating is accompanied by gratitude for a created world that sustains us—expressed in blessings like HaMotzi (הַמּוֹצִיא לֶחֶם מִן הָאָרֶץ, “who brings forth bread from the earth”)—preserving life against decay and giving strength to face external threats. At Passover, the Seder meal evokes our history, from before Egypt through liberation from a death-obsessed land, celebrating an emerging order founded on reverence for life.

In the Wilderness, the Israelites received manna, a divine gift, yet grumbled for more variety (Exodus 16). Numbers recounts their complaints led God to send quail—abundant but paired with a plague as punishment for ingratitude (Numbers 11:31–34).

Leviticus itself does not refer to the availability of manna. Offerers and priests can eat portions of sacrificed food, though strict limits apply to which parts (Leviticus 7:15–21). Yet, in Leviticus’s view, this is not merely satisfying hunger; it is a spiritual exercise. They gain material sustenance, but more fundamentally, they partake of offerings dedicated to the Creator, sharing in the life’s source that binds them to holiness.

In modern times, some Jews see a commitment to life, as rooted in the Torah, including Leviticus, as a call to strict vegetarianism, honoring creation’s sanctity. Others look to innovation—if the technology of lab-produced meat matures—and Israeli researchers are at the forefront—halakha might embrace it as a slaughter-free alternative, potentially mandated to align with this reverence for life over death.

Compare the worldview of Leviticus with the teachings of modern physics. Life involves organization; the universe trends toward increasing entropy, growing randomness, and diminishing structure. Sustaining life requires the local concentration of energy to counter the course of disintegration. The rituals of Leviticus channel the energy of the congregation in overcoming decay and disappearance. More broadly, as Hillel says in Pirkei Avot, “the more Torah, the more life” (מַרְבֶּה תּוֹרָה, מַרְבֶּה חַיִּים).

My Jewish education as a child was minimal, yet my parents kept a kosher home at great expense and effort—I still recall my mother kashering meat. Though I didn’t observe every aspect of the Tradition, I clung to kashrut my whole life, sometimes left dizzy from hunger at dinners or over weekends with little to eat. Different strands sustain the Tradition’s spark for each of us; for me, this thread held me fast—leading, in my fifties and sixties, to learning Hebrew and, analogously to Ben Zoma in the Haggadah account, only now grasping Leviticus’ spiritual heights.

Tsav, this week’s Torah reading, marks Shabbat HaGadol before Passover. In recent years, my journey led me to produce a little book, It’s About Time: 104 Dimensions of Time During Passover, announced last year on The Times of Israel (read it here) and available for free download at https://www.sacredgoof.ca/the-passover-seder/  An idea explored in It’s About Time is that there is a distinctive understanding of time in Judaism—let’s call it Jewish Integrated Time—where every moment recalls the past, exists in the present, and reflects our hopes for this world’s future. Beyond that lies a belief, or at least a yearning, for an intelligent, life-affirming Creator who stands outside of time. Leviticus lives as a vision of a constructed world that connects us with a harmonious order in the mind of that Creator. At the Seders this coming Passover, my wish is that the Tradition and its vision will, for all of us, come alive.