LEV17 The laws of sacrifices that dominate the early chapters of the book of Leviticus are among the hardest in the Torah to relate to in the present. It has been almost two thousand years since the Temple was destroyed and the sacrificial system came to an end. But Jewish thinkers, especially the more mystical among them, strove to understand the inner significance of the sacrifices and the statement they made about the relationship between humanity and God. They were thus able to rescue their spirit even if their physical enactment was no longer possible. Among the simplest yet most profound was the comment made by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Laidi, the first Rebbi of Lubavitch. He noticed a grammatical oddity about the second line of this parasha: "Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them: "When one of you offers a sacrifice to the Lord, the sacrifice must be taken from the cattle, sheep, or goats." [this verse]. Or so the verse would read if it were constructed according to the normal rules of grammar. However, in Hebrew, the word order of the sentence is strange and unexpected. We would expect to read: adam mikem ki yakriv, "when one of you offers a sacrifice." Instead, what it says is adam ki yakriv mikem, "when one offers a sacrifice of you." The essence of sacrifice, said Rabbi Shneur Zalman, is that we offer ourselves. We bring to God our faculties, our energies, our thoughts and emotions. The physical form of sacrifice--an animal offered on the altar--is only an external manifestation of an inner act. The real sacrifice is mikem, "of you." We give God something of ourselves. ... [Lengthy discussion omitted] ... We can redirect our animal instincts. We can rise above mere survival. ... By bringing that which is animal within us close to God, we allow the material to be suffused with the spiritual and we become something else: no longer slaves of nature but servants of the living God.