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THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PRAYER and sacrifice is deep. As we have seen, sacrifice is not the only forerunner of our prayers; many prayers were spoken by figures in the Bible. These were said without any accompanying offering. Yet the sacrificial system is a major tributary of the Jewish river of prayer. After the destruction of the Second Temple, prayer became a substitute for sacrifice. It is avodah she-be-lev, “the sacrificial service of the heart”. Yet it is just this feature of the prayers that many find difficult to understand or find uplifting. What, then, was sacrifice?

The Hebrew word for sacrifice is korban, which comes from a root that means “to come, or bring close”. The essential problem to which sacrifice is an answer is: how can we come close to GOD? This is a profound question – perhaps the question of the religious life – not simply because of the utter disparity between GOD’S infinity and our finitude, but also because the very circumstances of life tend to focus our gaze downward to our needs rather than upward to our source. The Hebrew word for universe, olam, is connected to the verb meaning “to hide” (see Leviticus 4:13; Deuteronomy 22:1). The physical world is a place in which the presence of GOD is real, yet hidden. Our horizon of consciousness is foreshortened. We focus on our own devices and desires. We walk in GOD’S light, but often our mind is on other things.

How then do we come close to GOD? By an act of renunciation; by giving something away; specifically, by giving something back. The sacrifices of the biblical age were ways in which the individual, or the nation as a whole, in effect said: what we have, GOD, is really Yours. The world exists because of You. We exist because of You. Nothing we have is ultimately ours. The fundamental gesture of sacrifice is, on the face of it, absurd. What we give to GOD is something that already belongs to Him. As King David said: “Who am I and who are my people that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from You, and we have given You only what comes from Your hand” (I Chronicles 29:14). Yet to give back to GOD is one of the most profound instincts of the soul. Doing so, we acknowledge our dependency. We cast off the carapace of self-absorption. That is why, in one of its most striking phrases, the Torah speaks of sacrifice as being re’ach nichoach, “sweet savour” to GOD.

One of the sweetest savours of parenthood is when a child, by now grown to maturity, brings a parent a gift to express his or her thanks. This too seems absurd. What can a child give a parent that remotely approximates what a parent gives a child, namely life itself? Yet it is so, and the reverse is also true. The cruellest thing a child can do is not to acknowledge his or her parents. The Talmud attributes to Rabbi Akiva the phrase Avinu Malkeinu, “Our Father, our King” Those two words encapsulate the essence of Jewish worship. GOD is King – Maker and Sovereign of the vast universe. Yet even before GOD is our King, He is our Father, our Parent, the One who brought us into being in love, who nurtured and sustained us, who taught us His ways, and who tenderly watches over our destiny. Sacrifice – the gift we bring to GOD -is the gift of the made to its Maker, the owned to its Owner, the child to its Parent. If creation is an act of love, sacrifice is an acknowledgement of that love.

The late Rav Joseph Soloveitchik emphasised the difference between ma’aseh mitzvah, the external act specified by a commandment, and kiyyum mitzvah, the actual fulfilment of a commandment. When the Temple stood, for example, a penitent would bring a guilt or sin-offering to atone for his sin: that was the external act. The fulfilment of the commandment, though, lay in confession and contrition, acts of the mind and will. In biblical times, the sacrificial order was the external act, but the internal act – acknowledgement, dependency, recognition, thanks, praise – was essential to its fulfilment. That is why Judaism was able to survive the destruction of the Temple and the cessation of the sacrificial order. The external act could no longer be performed, but the internal act remained. That is the link between sacrifice and prayer.

The difference between prayer-as-request and prayer-as-sacrifice is that request seeks, sacrifice gives. The prophets asked, usually on behalf of the people as a whole, for forgiveness, deliverance and blessing. The priests who offered sacrifices in the Temple asked for nothing. Sacrificial prayer is the giving back to GOD what GOD already owns: our lives, our days, our world. Prayer is creation’s gift to its Creator.

The prophets were critical of the sacrificial system. They reserved for it some of their most lacerating prose. Yet none proposed its abolition, because what they opposed was not the sacrificial act, but the ma’aseh without the kiyyum, the outer act without the inner acknowledgement that gives the act its meaning and significance. The idea that GOD can be worshipped through externalities alone is pagan, and there is nothing worse than the intrusion of paganism into the domain of holiness itself. Then as now, the sign of paganism is the co-existence of religious worship with injustice and a lack of compassion in the dealings between the worshipper and the world.

Sacrifice, like prayer, is a transformative act. We should leave the synagogue, as our ancestors once left the Temple, seeing ourselves and the universe differently, freshly conscious that the world is GOD’S work, the Torah GOD’S word, our fellow believers GOD’S children, and our fellow human beings GOD’S image. We emerge re-focused and re-energised, for we have made the journey back to our source, to the One who gives life to all. Distant, we have come close. That is prayer as sacrifice, korban, giving back to GOD a token of what He has given us, thereby coming to see existence itself as a gift, to be celebrated and sanctified.