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Please
include Israel's captive soldiers in your tefillot: Zecharia Shlomo
ben Miriam Baumel, Tzvi ben Penina Feldman, Yekutiel Yehuda Nachman ben Sarah
Katz, Ron ben Batya Arad, Guy ben Rina Chever, Gilad ben Aviva Shalit. Sunday, 28 Adar 5770 – March 14, 2010 Yesterday,
we noted the Torah’s puzzling description of the shelamim
offering, the animal sacrifice whose fats were placed upon the altar while
the meat was eaten by the kohen and,
mainly, by the individual bringing the sacrifice. The Torah writes that the kohen tending
to the sacrifice would place the animal’s fats “on the ola which is upon the wood which is upon the
fire” (3:5). The fats were not simply
placed upon the altar, but were placed “on the ola.” The ola is the first kind of
sacrifice discussed by the Torah in Sefer Vayikra. The obvious question arises as to what the
Torah means when it requires burning the fats of the shelamim “on the ola.” The Meshekh Chokhma
suggests that the Torah here makes a halakhic clarification regarding the
burning of the shelamim fats.
The obligation to place the fats upon the altar would, seemingly,
require that the fats be placed directly on the altar, without anything in
between them and the firewood. At the
very least, we might assume, the fats may not be placed on anything other
than firewood or other fats. The
halakhic rule of “min be-mino eino chotzeitz” establishes that two
objects of the same kind do not constitute a “disruption” (chatzitza)
for one another. Thus, we would concede
that if animal fats from a previous sacrifice are burning on the altar’s
firewood, one may place the shelamim fats upon those fats, and the shelamim fats would be considered as placed directly upon the firewood. However, it would be invalid, at first glance,
to place the shelamim fats on an ola sacrifice that had
been previously placed on the altar.
The ola sacrifice is entirely burnt; both the
meat and the fats are burned on the altar.
Seemingly, then, if one places the fats of a shelamim over an ola, the meat of the ola – which is a different substance than the animal fats – “interrupts”
between the fats and the altar, such that the mitzva remains
unfulfilled. For
this reason, the Meshekh Chokhma
suggests, the Torah wrote that the shelamim fats may
be placed “on the ola.” Since we would have intuitively concluded
that the shelamim fats may not be placed on an
ola, for the reason discussed, the Torah made an explicit stipulation
allowing this placement of the shelamim fats. Why,
in fact, did the Torah permit placing the shelamim fats on top of an ola? Why does the meat of the ola not
constitute a “disruption” between the fats and the altar? The answer, perhaps, relates to
the nature of the ola sacrifice. Later, in the beginning of Parashat Tzav (6:2),
the Torah says about the ola sacrifice, “eish ha-mizbei’ach tukad bo”
– “the fire of the altar is kept going on it.” The ola sacrifice
essentially served as part of the fuel that sustained the fire on the
altar. There in Parashat Tzav the
Torah requires that the fire on the altar continuously burn (“Eish tamid tukad al ha-mizbei’ach lo
tikhbeh” – 6:6). It appears that the ola was one of the means by which it was ensured that the flame on the
altar would not be extinguished, as the fire burned on the meat and fats of
the animal. If
so, then we can readily understand why an ola
sacrifice would not “interrupt” between the shelamim fats on
the altar. The ola was
considered part of the altar’s firewood, and thus the obligation to place the
fats on the altar’s fire could indeed be fulfilled by placing the fats over a
previously-offered ola
sacrifice. David Silverberg THE
COMPLETE SALT ARCHIVES CAN BE FOUND AT: www.vbm-torah.org/salt-archives.html (c) 2010 Israel Koschitzky Virtual Beit Midrash, Yeshivat Har Etzion.
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