During Chabad of the Upper East Side’s 2011 Avraham Fried Annual Auction and Concert, the singer related a moving story. About eighteen months ago, on a fateful Friday night, a catastrophic fire broke out in a Jewish home in Kfar Chabad, Israel. The members of the family all managed to escape, except for one nine year old boy who suffered burns on ninety percent of his body. He was transported to Ohio’s famous burn center in the Shriners Hospitals for Children.
The family forwarded a request to Avraham Fried to sing to the ill child and raise his spirits. Upon his arrival in Cincinnati, nothing could have prepared him for the sight that met his eyes, for the severity of the little boy’s injuries required the total amputation of his legs. After several joyous songs, the patient declared to Fried, “You know, G-d did a good thing by burning me. Because by so doing, He has totally burned my yetzer hara (evil inclination).”
This story got me thinking about the sacrifices mentioned in this weeks Torah portion.
The verse reads, "אדם כי יקריב מכם קרבן לה'..." – “A man, when he sacrifices, from among you a sacrifice...” The obvious question is why the Torah chose to employ such nonsensical wording. It would be more fitting for the Torah to have written something along the lines of, “A man, from among you, who offers a sacrifice...”
The Chassidic Masters explain that the wording of the verse urges us to conclude that Torah does not only imply a physical sacrifice, but also, a much deeper and more personal offering. The word “sacrifices” in the verse, “A man when he sacrifices from you a sacrifice...” shares the same root as the phrase “to come close”. In other words, the verse is guiding us—when a man desires to come close to G-d, he must sacrifice from himself.
Some people sacrifice their hard earned money by distributing it to charity, others refrain from non-kosher foods in favor of permissible ones. A woman sacrifices a minute of her time a week when she lights Shabbat candles. We also sacrifice our evil impulses and temptations by controlling them. This is the ultimate condition of Judaism - you want to come close to G-d, you’ve got to sacrifice something.
Scrolling through Ynet earlier this week, a gruesome headline caught my eye: “Student Amputates Own Hand”. Intrigued, I clicked on it -- and was not let down. A young man walked into a fish store in Jerusalem’s Me’ah She’arim, headed straight to the electrical saw and proceeded to amputate his right hand, elbow down. Turning to the horrified onlookers, he explained that he had to do something to curb his terrible temptations and evil inclination—alas, this was his last resort.
As a religion that honors life above all else, the concept of human sacrifice has no place in Judaism. So the guy who severs his own limb to restrain his immorality has really missed the point. The true sacrifice lies in the utilization of our G-d given assets and circumstances for a higher purpose. This is the way we come closer to G-d.