Vayiqra - Adam and Opportunity

On the surface, much of the book of Vayiqra contains the type of details that will make one’s eyes glaze over. The idea of sacrificial worship is virtually meaningless today, as it has been for close to two thousand years. These technicalities, however, did not prevent exegetes from looking at it at a deeper level, allowing them to derive many pearls of wisdom from its arcane verses.

The book opens with an interesting and unusual comment:

אדם כי־יקריב מכם קרבן לה

When/If an individual among you should bring a sacrifice unto Hashem...(Lv 1:2)

This is the general introductory comment to the laws of sacrifices. But why begin with the word אדם? As we continue reading this parasha, we will see passages like this again and again; however, no where else will we see אדם. We will see נפש, and elsewhere we will find איש. What is the significance of this usage here?

There is something striking about the usage of אדם here. The noun in itself is symbolic of the limitations of mortality. Throughout the narratives in the first chapters of Genesis, the first man is referred to as האדם, the man - אדם first appears as a proper noun in the genealogy in Ch. 5 - making the name appear more as an afterthought. The name is derived from אדמה, earth, as in dirt, from which man was created. (I sometimes translate אדם as earthling, though admittedly with tongue firmly planted in cheek.)

אדם conjures the image of the solitary, primordial man, created alone, naked, and unashamed, apart from the social animal of איש (you can have a plural of איש, but never of אדם unless you append בני to it.)

We know one thing about אדם - that his solitary nature is not good. ויאמר ה’ אלקים לא־טוֹב היוֹת האדם לבדוֹ - Hashem said: it is not good for man to be alone. (Gn 2: 18) While nearly everything created was described as good, כי טוב, this is the one thing that is not good, לא טוב. With this, the woman, אישה, is created, and אדם is now referred to, for the first time, as איש.

Now, אדם is followed by another interesting word, כי, a conditional particle way too easily overlooked, but that can convey two possible messages. It can mean when (as a relative, not an interrogative, adverb,) or it can mean if. We have two very different possibilities: One takes an offering for granted, when he makes an offering, the other a possibility, if he makes an offering. Under both circumstances, we read this first offering as a voluntary one, not one that has conditions of obligation attached to it.

Let us look back at the choice of אדם here as opposed to איש. As I said, אדם exists alone, but איש lives in a social domain. He lives in a world of order and hierarchies. Likewise, איש can have a master, but אדם has no master, other than God. And with this understanding, we can determine how we might understand the use of כי in this verse.

אדם is the essential existential individual, who alone is presented with an opportunity. He can act, or he can ignore. He can engage in worship, in praise, in fulfilling mitzvah, in offering service to Hashem. Everything that אדם, that lonely human, does is predicated on כי, if. For him, everything is volitional, and he accounts to no one except Hashem alone. But אדם does not exist in a vacuum. He is given opportunities, and it is up to him to chose whether or not to respond to the opportunity presented to him.

לא טוב היות האדם לבדו - It is not good for man to be alone; he cannot exist in this world as a solitary individual. He cannot remain aloof of others, but must engage in a world that makes demands of him, and of which he will make demands as well. This is particularly true of the religious person. Religion, which is supposed to act as a civilizing force in life, is not intended to isolate, but to integrate the individual into the larger framework of life. We can derive a lesson from this verse as follows: אדם, כי יקריב - מכם When an individual makes an offering, he becomes one from among you. His commitment to worship, by the very nature of that worship, makes him part of the greater whole, something larger than himself.

If we look carefully at the content of Jewish liturgy, we find the truth to this. Because Jewish prayer does not focus on the needs of the individual, but on all of us. The Amida, the core of Jewish liturgy, is composed of prayers that are all first person plural.

Ideally, the individual transitions from אדם to איש, and once he steps beyond his own limitations, his approach to worship changes. He is no longer isolated in his existential bubble, and his prayer is no longer a matter of כי - if, but כי - when. Because he is now an inhabitant of a world where he is no longer an אדם, a finite human being limited by his singularity or his own mortality, but as one נפש among many, one איש among others.

In this world that Hashem created, we serve Him best when we reach beyond ourselves, when we care for others, when we find a mate, and engage in others as created בצלם אלקים, in the image of Hashem, as He created each one of us.