(Delivered July 19, 2025)

Shabbat shalom! It’s good to be back.

It was wonderful over my two week vacation to visit with my parents and sisters in Michigan and to see my son Akiva in Washington DC, but along the way, I made a discovery about myself. Two weeks is too much time for me to be idle. After about ten days, I started to get itchy to come back to work. I had seen all the movies that interested me. I had read a couple of books. I had schmoozed with the people I miss the most when I’m in Massachusetts. But the slow pace was starting to wear on me, and I began to feel ready for more activity.

And then I came back to our Torah reading: the third triennial of Parshat Pinchas, another one of those repetitive, seemingly boring passages that describes in detail something that is so foreign to our present-day lives as to feel unapproachable. Verse after verse—of bulls and fire and unblemished yearling lambs, of grain offerings of finest wheat and beaten olive oil—can cause the eyes to glaze over in stultifying boredom.

But as you know, I’ve staked my claim on wonder, and so as always, I ask myself, What happens when you slow down over the verses? What is the invitation the Torah is making?

Why are these endless verses of animal sacrifice different from all other endless verses of animal sacrifice?

It turns out they are! The offerings in Pinchas are not behavioral in nature: it’s not talking about offerings for purification, or for well-being, or for remediation of sin. Rather, the offerings in Parshat Pinchas are temporal and calendrical. They are all linked with the passage of time and with marking certain kinds of moments in one way and marking certain other kinds of moments in another way. 

Remember back to the first aliyah, where there was the juxtaposition of the Pesach offerings and the תמידין—the everyday offerings. Seeing the sacred and the daily side by side in the Torah is a little jarring, but I think ultimately the consideration of offerings in Parshat Pinchas is inviting us into contemplation of the interplay between the commonplace and the sacred. 

This week in the life of our congregation has given us ample practice in noting the contradiction. In this emotionally rich week, we have held two grievous losses and the joy of affirming our embrace of a young child with deep roots in this congregation—all as we navigated the normalcy of sunburns, and fresh greens from the garden, and paying the bills, and making toast for breakfast. The truth is, our lives are a constant swing—sometimes a roller-coaster—between the ordinary and the sublime.

The Torah knows this, too. Bamidbar chapter 28, verse 4—a verse from the second triennial of Parshat Pinchas—reads: 

אֶת־הַכֶּבֶשׂ אֶחָד תַּעֲשֶׂה בַבֹּקֶר וְאֵת הַכֶּבֶשׂ הַשֵּׁנִי תַּעֲשֶׂה בֵּין הָעַרְבָּיִם
Take one lamb in the morning for sacrifice,
and take the second lamb in the evening.

If you came to the Shavuot tikkun this year, these words might ring a bell. This seemingly unprepossessing verse comes up in a few places in the Midrashic literature, tucked into a parable that involves three sages discussing the question of what’s the most important verse in the Torah. This is the kind of conversation that smacks of late nights in the dormitory lounge freshman year: nobody really thinks they’re going to answer the question, but it’s sort of delicious to talk about it and reflect together. So these three rabbis, as I picture the Midrash in my imagination—take it on themselves to come up with the one pasuk that encompasses the meaning of the whole Torah. Now you and I know that if such a verse existed, we wouldn’t need the whole Torah! But even so, the story becomes a kind of Rorschach Test, a lens through which to examine our own theological and moral commitments.

Ben Zoma is the first to speak in the Midrash, and he says the most all-encompassing verse is שמע ישראל יי אלהינו יי אחד—Listen, Israel! Adonai is our God, Adonai is singular. Then Ben Nanas—or in some versions Rabbi Akiva—makes the case for ואהבת לרעך כמוך—Love your neighbor as  yourself. Finally, our verse about the morning and evening sacrifices comes up as a possibility, raised by Shimon ben Pazi, and an anonymous sage affirms that one—our verse from Pinchas—as the most all-embracing verse in the Torah.

It might seem counterintuitive to imagine that the תמידין—the everyday offerings—would outshine the summative statement of monotheism, what a family friend from childhood, a Reform rabbi, called The Watchword of our Faith. Hard to imagine how a lamb in the morning and a lamb in the evening could possibly be more important than that! 

And then, how could the everyday offerings compete against the lofty aspiration and lifelong challenge of teaching ourselves to love our neighbors? Despite, or perhaps because of, its difficulty, this is surely the Torah’s essential message! 

And yet the Midrash holds to the daily sacrifices.

So what makes the תמידין more compelling than monotheism; more compelling than a religion of love? 

I wouldn’t dare to answer for the sages, but my reading of this Midrash is that monotheism and a love-oriented religious life are the goals, while the emphasis of the daily is the means by which we pursue them. Engagement with the תמידין draws us to the importance of practice; the gorgeous, heartbreaking value of the prosaic. Daily awareness, moment by moment, allows us to approach, however haltingly, the core values our tradition insists on. The path is rocky with both pebbles and boulders, and concentrating on daily appointments to offer something of value to the divine—whether we feel like it or don’t—enables us to take the next step. 

The American poet Andrea Gibson, who died this past week, wrote eloquently on this theme, which came into bitter focus during the illness that eventually ended their life at the young age of 49. Gibson wrote:

Wasn’t it death that taught me 
to stop measuring my lifespan by length,

but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things 
can be seen in a single second? 

Friends, this is a תמידין approach to life, a spirit that says, even the boring moments are full of meaning and gorgeousness. It’s the practice of attention that makes it so, those daily lambs and repetitive words we are tempted to skim over. It’s the impulse to elevate the turning points, in a world that’s always turning.

Shabbat shalom!