The incident happened so quickly there was little time to react. One of my children decided to heat up oil on the stovetop to make French fries. When they took the top off the pot, a giant flame burst forth. If it wasn’t for my heroic wife Ashirah quickly reaching for the fire extinguisher our entire house might have burned down. We were lucky to just have smoke damage across our kitchen ceiling. In those moments, the string of terrible outcomes flashes across your mind, and you just feel so very thankful you avoided the worst. More recently, our sump pump stopped working in the middle of the night. Thankfully, there had been a sleep over down our basement and one of my children’s friends came up to tell me what was happening. Several hours of schlepping water up and down our basement stairs to bring it outside, and sage advice from our synagogue president Joe Glickman about how to get the sump pump restarted saved the day with little to no damage.
For every disaster, there are countless others where no matter how bad things had gotten, you leave knowing it could have been far worse. For these we offer a symbolic olah or burnt offering up to God. As described in this week’s Torah portion Tzav, a burnt offering is one where the entirety of the animal is consumed by the fire. The olah is the purest form of sacrifice, a gift to the almighty for the many things we have to be thankful for in the world. Here is how Google describes it: “A burnt offering (Hebrew olah) signifies total dedication, atonement, and voluntary surrender to God, acting as a “soothing aroma” that makes fellowship possible. The offering represents the entire life of the worshiper being given to God, with the smoke rising to heaven to establish reconciliation and peace between God and humanity.”
The ner tamid, or eternal light, that hangs in our sanctuary is a reminder of this specific type of sacrifice. Olah literally means “going up,” from the same root as aliyah, a word used both to describe the blessings we offer before and after a Torah reading and when we move to Israel. It is easy to be consumed by our disasters or even our near disasters. This, I believe, is why our ancestors instituted these types of offerings, as a way of bringing holiness to even the most unholy of occasions. Next time, you are in our sanctuary, take a moment to notice the ner tamid and offer a quiet prayer for all the moments in your life where you survived the worst in order to be able to celebrate the best.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex