Leviticus, Sefer Vayikra, is a text many modern readers struggle to enter. It is dense, detailed, and, most viscerally, filled with blood. Animal sacrifice confronts us with a form of religious expression that feels distant, even unsettling.

For generations, we have tried to understand what these “Korbanot,” these sacrificial offerings, were meant to accomplish. Maimonides taught that sacrifice was not the endpoint of Jewish spirituality but a concession to human context. The ancient world knew worship through animal sacrifice, and so Torah met the Israelites where they were, redirecting that impulse toward the service of the One God. It was, in his framing, a step along a longer path, one that would ultimately lead to prayer, to inward devotion, and ultimately aimed at cultivating a more refined spiritual consciousness.

History bore that out. With the destruction of the Temple, sacrifice ceased, and Tefilah, verbal prayer, became our primary mode of worship. And yet the Rabbis did not abandon the language of sacrifice. They called prayer “Avodah Shebalev, the Service of the Heart.” The very word Avodah, still echoes with its original meaning:........

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