This week we begin a portion, Metzora, which is usually combined with the prior parasha, Tazria, but because of the leap year, we have the privilege of reading separately this week.
In the first aliyah, there is an instance which I believe we only see one time throughout the entire Torah, in which a live animal (a bird) is used as part of a korban offering and that bird is to be explicitly kept alive and then set free at the end of the ritual.
The ritual is that, after one bird is shechted into an earthenware vessel with "live water" - (literally, life water or water of life), and the blood is combined with that water, a live bird is held with a piece of cedar wood, a piece of crimson-dyed wool, and hyssop, dipped into the earthenware vessel, and then used to "sprinkle the person being purified" seven times.
(Don't let anyone ever tell you that the roots of New Age rituals including those with herbs, wood, and other elements, don't have their reflection - and probably origin - in Torah itself. There is nothing more "magical" and "mystical" than taking a handful of bird, wool, plant, and wood and using it in an objective purification process.)
Of course, this procedure is only one small step in the overall process, which also involves rather intense cutting off of all hair, other korbanot, and social isolation and reflection. But surely there is deep meaning in every stage, including, in this step, the combination of various elements of life as well as the bird being set free at the end.
Regarding the former, what mystical implications are there in the fact that animal life, tree life, refined animal life (wool), and plant life are used in this specific combination? I was reading about the importance of hair in the tefillin, and how it is essentially an avenue and recognition of the existence of evil, so perhaps there is something to using various forms of life in combination with the absence of it that is part of the purification process. Something to continue to meditate on...
And what is the purpose of the live bird? There is what I think is a mistaken conception that some animals used in the korbanot are there to fulfill their sole purpose as part of the sacrifice. At least one commentator has stated that when making an offering, the offeror should look at the animal and think "that could and should have been me."
But no, that isn't the case as this verse comes to teach us. If so - if the only purpose of korbanot was to take an animal's life instead of ours - then we certainly wouldn't have this conception. Perhaps it points to a much more optimistic, redemptive future in which even the "offerings" we make can and in fact must stay alive. And that, as with anything, we are given just a taste of this future today, that one day, there will be no reason to end life at all. And the fact that his comes as part of the most intense purification process, that of the metzorah, shows that even in those most shameful times, a taste of redemption is always there.
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