By Basha Harris
This week's parsha is Tzav, or Command. It starts off with God telling Moses to command Aaron and his sons to perform sacrificial offerings in the Temple and Tabernacle. The Torah service that happens throughout Tzav is surrounding that command, where a number of offerings happen in the Temple and Tabernacle (you can read them in detail here).
Moses instructs the priests to repeat this process for six days, and on the seventh day to stay in the Tabernacle (sort of like a day of rest).
This first day of offerings is split up into seven aliyot, each aliyah vital in order to fulfill God's commands. The third aliyah describes an offering by someone who has survived a near-death experience. This sounds like something people often do when they are reminded how precious life is - step back and say, "Holy cow I'm lucky to be alive!". So yeah, people have this revelation often, but I think what is pertinent to myself & all of you is that we are able to step back and say, "Holy cow I'm SO lucky to be alive so that I can continue to work towards shivyon erech ha'adam (equality of human value) and help others grow and challenge my peers to think about [insert your values here]....".
While in the movement we don't necessarily put our lives at deadly risks, we do sacrifice our well-being (umm madrichim run on empty for two months straight), and even more so we sacrifice our personal wants & needs for the betterment of our greater communities. From being a part of Habonim Dror, we have helped each other develop the skills needed to step back and see the big picture, & to be a little/a lot selfless a little/a lot of the time. Those acts of selflessness are the holiest freaking offerings that occur on this planet.
As the Passover chag enters our lives, I challenge you all to compare yourselves to Moses (I know that sounds messed up or LOL worthy). Just think about how you have impacted the communities that you are apart of, and how to continue to challenge the people around you to step away from what they're doing and reflect. That being said, I want to share a blessing from kvutsat Telem's workshop hagaddah that will help us do such during & after Pesach:
Karpas by Leo Robinovitch
"The karpas! The first of two passover dippings. The green vegetable is conventionally dipped into salt water to allow us to more fully imagine the plight of our people under Egyptian rule, and to remind us that tonight we are free and should be grateful for our emancipation from slavery. These thoughts could be proven important, unproductive, relevant, or useless in any number of ways, and to avoid vague discussion I want us to discuss fulfillment and sense of purpose in our own lives.
Zooming out a tad and thinking of the plight of all oppressed people across the world when we dip the greens in salt water gives relevancy to our thoughts and doesn't put the Jews troubles above anyone else's (which I don't like doing very much).
So knowing that we're looking at mankind's struggle against oppression and our own lives' role in this epic battle, we could approach the situation a few ways. If we only look at the massive mound of sadness on Earth, we feel small