Recalling importance of what we carry within us
The only time my wife’s grandfather, Akiva Yosef Weinberger, ever spoke about his experience during the Holocaust was at the Pesach Seder.
During the war, Akiva Yosef hid his tefillin and carried it with him even in Mauthausen.
On one of the death marches, the Nazis discovered the tefillin. They beat him and threw the tefillin into a pit of fire filled with burning human corpses.
Without thinking, he jumped in after them.
He lay among the burning bodies and somehow miraculously survived. After liberation in 1945, he had the tefillin checked by a sofer. They were found to be completely kosher. He wore them every day until he passed away in 1999.
That story is the deepest commentary on Parshas Vayikra.
The word korban, usually translated as sacrifice, does not really mean to give something up. It comes from the root Karov, meaning to draw close. When the Torah commands a person to bring a korban, it is not asking that person to lose something. It is asking them to use that act to come closer to Hashem.
The Pasuk (Vayikra 1:2) states, “Adam Ki YaKriv MiKem Korban LaHashem (when a person brings an offering to Hashem).” The grammar is unusual. It should have said that a person brings a korban from among the people. Instead, the Torah says MiKem, from within you.
The commentators note this phrasing. The Alshich explains that the Torah is teaching that the offering must come from within the person bringing it. The animal on the altar is only the outer act. What Hashem truly desires is the inner offering of the one bringing the Korban. The sacrifice must come from somewhere deep inside the human being.
• • •
When a person stood in the Mishkan and watched their offering rise in smoke, the external act was meant to mirror something internal. The korban on the altar represented the Korban within.
The Sfas Emes explains that the purpose of the Korban was not the animal itself but the inner movement of the person bringing it, the act of drawing one’s own heart closer to Hashem. The animal could be replaced. The inner movement could not.
We no longer have the Mishkan. We no longer bring animals to an altar. But the capacity for mi kem has never disappeared. The ability to reach into the deepest part of ourselves and draw it closer to Hashem remains available in every generation.
Akiva Yosef did not bring his korban on an altar. He brought it in a pit.
The tefillin were the future.
• • •
In a few years, my son Akiva Yosef will, G-d willing, stand before the Torah and wrap around his arm the same tefillin his great-grandfather carried with him through Mauthausen. He will say the same bracha his great-grandfather said every morning after walking out of that pit.
The Torah tells us that a korban must come mi kem, from within you.
Some people carry that truth so deeply inside themselves that even fire cannot take it away.
And sometimes the purest korban a person can bring is the refusal to let go of a pair of tefillin, of a past, of a future, and of the bond that connects them all.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach, www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
