Why We Still Say the Sacrifices

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 29.

Today we cross into a section of the siddur that a lot of people skip, and almost nobody understands: the Korbanos. The sacrifices. Page after page describing the daily offering, the incense, the laws of which animal, which corner of the altar, which sprinkling of blood. And the honest question every thinking person eventually asks is: Why? The Beis HaMikdash has been gone for almost two thousand years. There is no altar. There is no offering. So why do we read the instruction manual for a Temple that doesn't exist?

The siddur itself answers the question, right at the top, in a paragraph called Ribon Ha'olamim. Listen to what it says. "Master of the worlds, You commanded us to bring the daily offering at its appointed time... and now, because of our sins, the Holy Temple is destroyed... so may it be Your will that the speech of our lips" - si'ach sifsoseinu - "be considered before You worthy and accepted k'ilu hikravnu - as if we had actually offered the korban."

That's the whole idea. We can't bring the offering, so we say the offering. And we ask God to count the words as if they were the deed.

Now where does that come from? It's not a nice sentiment someone invented. It's a verse. The prophet Hoshea, chapter 14, verse 3, says: "u'neshalmah parim sefaseinu" - "let our lips pay back in place of bulls." In other words: let the words of our mouths stand in for the bulls we can no longer bring. And the Gemara, in Menachos on daf 110a, makes it explicit. It says: whoever engages in the Torah of the chatas - the sin offering - it is as if he brought a chatas. Whoever learns the laws of the olah - the elevation offering - it is as if he brought an olah. The study is the sacrifice.

But there's an even deeper layer here, and it goes back to Avraham Avinu. The Gemara in Taanis, daf 27b, tells a remarkable story. Avraham says to God: Master of the universe - what will happen when the Temple is destroyed and my children sin? How will they get atonement? And God answers him: I have already arranged the order of the sacrifices for them. Whenever they read the order of the korbanos before Me, I will consider it as if they offered them, and I will forgive them. That is the divine guarantee, given to Avraham, that the reading would work when the bringing could not.

And there's one more piece, which is really the foundation of everything we're doing in this whole series. Our prayers - the three daily tefillos - were established to correspond to the offerings. The Gemara in Berachos, daf 26b, has the famous machlokes: Shacharit, Mincha, and Maariv were instituted by the Avos - Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov - and they correspond to the temidim, the daily offerings in the Temple. Shacharit stands in for the morning tamid. Mincha for the afternoon tamid. So davening itself - the thing you're doing right now - is the inheritor of the altar.

Here's the Chassidic warmth in this. When the Temple stood, a Jew brought an animal and watched it go up in smoke on the altar - the word korban comes from karov, to draw close. The whole point was never the animal. It was the drawing-near. And the Sages are telling us: that drawing-near never ended. The address changed. It moved from the altar to your lips, from the Kohen's hands to your words. The Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim, siman 1, paragraphs 5 through 9, actually encourages saying the parshiyos of the korbanos every morning precisely for this reason.

So tomorrow morning, when you hit this section, don't skip it. You're not reading a museum brochure. You're standing at the altar. You're drawing close.

Tomorrow: we go to the most famous korban of all - the one that wasn't. Parshas HaAkeidah, the Binding of Isaac, and why we read it first thing every single day.