Vayikra 5786
Aroma
This week we are reading the beginning of the book of Leviticus, Parashat Vayikra, Leviticus 1–5, and I thought I might focus on an interesting phrase that occurs three times in Leviticus 1 and many times throughout the Bible: רֵ֫יחַ נִיחֹ֫חַ réi’aḥ niḥó’aḥ. (Do cover your mouth before you attempt to pronounce those words.) A réi’aḥ is an odor or a smell or an aroma; niḥó’aḥ is a much more unusual word, used — except for two Aramaic occurrences in Daniel and Ezra — only in combination with réi’aḥ.
The phrase is translated in the NJPS version as “a pleasing odor.” The old JPS translation, lifting a phrase from the King James Version, calls it “a sweet savour.” I’m going to discuss it here in the context of Leviticus 1, where a number of different animals are potentially presented to God as sacrificial offerings, and our chapter gives the instructions for how to do that. Here (in the NJPS translation) are the verses from Leviticus 1 that are relevant for our discussion:
Lev 1:3 If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd … 9 … the priest shall turn the whole into smoke on the altar as a burnt offering, an offering by fire of pleasing odor [רֵֽיחַ־נִיח֖וֹחַ] to the LORD.
Lev 1:10 If his offering for a burnt offering is from the flock… 13 … It is a burnt offering, an offering by fire, of pleasing odor [רֵ֥יחַ נִיחֹ֖חַ] to the LORD.
Lev 1:14 If his offering to the LORD is a burnt offering of birds … 17 … It is a burnt offering, an offering by fire, of pleasing odor [רֵ֥יחַ נִיחֹ֖חַ] to the LORD.
In Hebrew, the “burnt offering” is an עֹלָה ola, from the root עלה ayin‑l‑h ‘go up’ — because, after all, the entire animal “goes up” in smoke to the sky. I was about to say it goes up to YHWH, and that’s obviously the intent, but what really happens is part of what we are going to be thinking about today.
Rashi, the great 11th-c. biblical commentator (and Talmud commentator), the greatest Jewish commentator of all time, says the following (adapted from my Commentators’ Bible translation) in his comment to Lev 1:9 on the “pleasing odor”:
“Pleasing” (NJPS) is preferable to “sweet” (OJPS). “It pleases Me because I commanded it and My will was done.”
In his comment to v. 17, where the same expression occurs with the bird sacrifice, he adds:
The same phrase is used for the sacrifice of cattle as is used here, to make clear that it is not important whether you bring much or little—only whether your heart is directed to heaven.
If the sacrifice is something “real,” that God benefits from, then sacrificing a bull is a much more substantial gift than sacrificing a bird. But if what God gets out of this is that you fulfilled a commandment to the extent that you could, then a bird is as good as a bull. The odor is equally pleasing to God because in all three cases that we’ve mentioned so far he has commanded and you have fulfilled the commandment.
Maimonides has a very different theory about what the commandments are for. Maimonides, “The Great Eagle,” was perhaps the greatest Jewish thinker, and one of the greatest human thinkers, of all time. In Part 3, chapter 46 of his Guide for the Perplexed, he has a long discussion about the sacrifices in which he explains that cattle, sheep, and goats were worshipped by the other nations at the time of the Torah (sheep by the Egyptians, goats by the Sabeans, cows by the Hindus); sacrificing them was to demonstrate that worshipping them was foolish. The only fragrance I see mentioned there is this:
Frankincense was chosen because of the good odor of its fumes in places filled with the odor of burnt flesh.1
A couple of generations later, Nahmanides, the great Spanish biblical commentator, cites Maimonides’ explanation and offers the following criticism (in his comment to Lev 1:9 in the Commentators’ Bible):
But these are idle words. It is at best dealing offhandedly with a great problem and at worst an actual defilement of the Lord’s altar to suggest that the purpose of the sacrifices was simply to root out false beliefs from the minds of these wicked fools. For 3:16 says explicitly that the sacrifices are “food—an offering by fire, of pleasing odor” …
Think about it. When Noah and his three sons came out of the ark, there was not a Babylonian or an Egyptian on the face of the earth. Yet he offered sacrifice, and God found it good: “The LORD smelled the pleasing odor, and the LORD said to Himself: ‘Never again will I doom the earth because of man’ ” (Gen. 8:21). Even Abel “brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock,” and “the LORD paid heed to Abel and his offering” (Gen. 4:4) at a time when there was not yet so much as a whisper of idolatry anywhere on earth …
The word “pleasing” here, niḥoʾaḥ, is etymologically related to the verb nuʾaḥ, “to rest,” as when the spirit “rested” on Eldad and Medad (Num. 11:26) or “The spirit of Elijah has settled on Elisha” (2 Kings 2:15).
What is at stake here? Rashi says this réi’aḥ niḥó’aḥ is an action that pleases God, not anything substantial. Nahmanides says it is something substantial. It’s not the fact that you have offered sacrifice to God that is pleasing; God gets something from this réi’aḥ niḥó’aḥ. I think, therefore, that Nahmanides would probably prefer the English translation “sweet savour” (or “savor,” if you prefer).
To my mind, the question of whether God does or does not get something physical, material, from the sacrifices translates into the following question: Is God approachable? To put it in the language they use in the Religion department, is God immanent or transcendent?
Rashi is saying God is transcendent. There’s nothing physical about the sacrifices that actually gets to the level where God is. The thing that gets there is merely the fact that you offered it.
Nahmanides says No. There is something that gets to God: this réi’aḥ, this sweet savour, somehow does reach him and “feed” him in some way that Nahmanides is very cagy about expressing. He certainly agrees that it’s nothing like the pagan idea that the gods actually need this food to survive. Nonetheless, Nahmanides is trying to say (I think) that God is immanent, directly connected to the physical world and getting something from it.
What the Torah asks us to give God is not the meat of the animal, which would be a little bit too gross — not in the teenage sense of the word, but in its standard sense: too material, too much made out of “stuff” to be able to approach God. The smell of that aroma, though — the least physical of all of the senses and yet somehow the most direct — that is what can somehow bridge the gap between the material world and the non-material God.
The bottom line is that bridging that gap is what the sacrifices are for. Do you come down on the Rashi side or on the Nahmanides side? We’ll look at the sacrifices from a different angle next week.
Pines translation, 583.