By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

Some scholars believe that the ancient rabbis’ answer to the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem was to create a world where animal sacrifices were no longer considered necessary. In fact, there are claims that the rabbis were pleased with this turn of events because it brought their version of Judaism to prominence. Mira Balberg, professor of history and ancient Jewish civilization at the University of California, San Diego, believes the reality of the situation was far different. In her complex “Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature” (University of California Press), she shows how the rabbis embraced a different purpose for sacrifice, transforming the reasons for its use to resemble the halachic (legalistic) world of the rabbinic Judaism they were creating. Her focus is on the texts of the early generation of Tannaim with a concentration on those written before the Palestinian Talmud was compiled, for example the Mishnah, the Tosefta and the works of Tannaitic midrashim, which focuses on legal issues. 

Balberg notes that, even within the Bible, the nature of sacrifice changed over time. The spontaneous sacrifices offered by the patriarchs in the book of Genesis became, in later books, a list of offerings, which were to be done in a specific location and in very specific ways. One thing that remained steady was the connection between the person offering the sacrifice and the deity who received that offering. According to Balberg, the rabbis changed the focus of sacrifice so that neither the giver or the deity were considered important. What now mattered instead was the priests’ accurate performance of the sacrifice. 

While the giver was not considered completely inconsequential, it was the ritual actions – particularly the ritual actions focusing on the blood of the animal – that made a sacrifice valid. This change was also informed by the idea that the deity did not desire the sweet smells of the offering or the meat/food itself. The rabbis also emphasized the communal aspects of the sacrifices – that they were now thought to come from the people of Israel as a whole rather than the specific individual.

The author notes that, according to the rabbis, the essence of animal sacrifice was the shedding of blood. She writes about “the rabbis’ heightened attention to the blood within the sacrificial process. But a close look at Tannaitic sacrificial legislation reveals that the rabbis do not simply underscore that the treatment of blood is the most efficacious part of the sacrificial process, but rather construe the treatment of blood as the sacrificial process per se. They both expand the ritual component of the manipulation of blood from a single action to a series of actions, and make the point that the manipulation of blood is the most critical and determining part in assessing the validity of sacrifices. Some rabbis even maintain that the sacrificial flesh is secondary in importance to the blood and that a sacrifice may be considered complete and valid even if no flesh is at hand.” To show how important these sacrificial actions were, Balberg shows how the rabbis took what was once a single action and divided it into four separate steps. 

In addition to the rabbinic focus on the communal aspects of sacrifice (so that even gifts given by individuals were considered part of the communal sacrifice), Balberg shows how the rabbis also changed how the priesthood was viewed. Rather than say that specific priests were to perform specific actions, they brought a communal idea to the choice of priests: now each priest could perform any of the actions. Even the role of the high priest changed: from her reading of rabbinical writings, Balberg believes that the rabbis suggested that a different person was picked to play the role of the high priest on Yom Kippur each year. The priests’ individual identities were subsumed into the whole: it was the communal aspect of the priesthood that now mattered. This meant that – just as when reciting prayers and keeping halachic laws of dietary, Shabbat and holiday practices – the sacrifices were for everyone and could be done by every priest. 

Balberg notes that this was how the rabbis dealt with their rapidly changing world. She writes that “the rabbis developed a picture of congregational offerings as idealized manifestations of unity and solidarity at a time in which ethnic and religious identities and boundaries were going through rapid transformations, and in which those transformations were often deeply entangled in sacrificial discourse and sacrificial practice... the rabbinic discourse on congregational offerings can be seen as an attempt to fantasize a stable and self-contained Jewish identity, generated by sacrifice.” Rather than dismissing sacrifice, the rabbis used it to create a vision of Jewish oneness that could now be accomplished through halachic practice. They created an idealized version of the Temple, one that had – at least, according to most scholars – never existed in this form.

This played into the rabbis’ idea of halachic process, which focused on the purpose of sacrificing as attaining atonement for the community. That meant atonement for every member of the larger collective. Following halachic rules were considered necessary because one’s private actions affected the community: “No place is hidden, and no action is silent or secret: the fundamental premise of rabbinic halakhah is that the private is public and the public is private, the internal external and the external internal.” 

This short review can’t do justice to Balberg’s complex ideas or her discussion of rabbinic texts. “Blood for Thought” is not an easy work to read: the prose is scholarly and dense so it is not for the casual reader. However, anyone interested in the sacrificial cult and how the ancient rabbis envisioned a post-Temple world may find it worth the struggle.