Chagiga 8: When the Halachot Don't Work: Wrestling with Multiple Truths

The burnt offering of attendance is for G-d.  It burns until it becomes smoke which is given to G-d.  The Festival peace offering is for rejoicing.  It is eaten by the adult male who is obligated to attend as well as his family and anyone else he brings into his group.  Today's daf looks at some of the practicalities surrounding these offerings.

When might it be necessary to combine more than one animal as a peace offering?  Is this allowed when sacrificing a burnt offering? The rabbis think about combining sacred and non-sacred offerings, monies, etc.  They consider the strict proofs that suggest direct answers, and they consider proofs that speak to different circumstances (for example, do those who have lots of property and few people to feed bring the same offerings as those who have no property and many people to feed?).

At the end of amud (b), we are introduced to an argument between Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan.  They are arguing about a similar point: whether we must consume all of the peace offering on the first day, or whether some of that offering can be cooked on the first day but eaten on the second day.  This would be particularly important when families sacrificed, say, ten animals.

Today the rabbis are forced to blur the finite lines that separate one category from another.  The idea of combining sacred and non-sacred is threatening; it could lead to other decisions where the halachot do fit the needs of the community and thus the halachot are modified.

This notion of G-d-given Torah poses tremendous difficulty for our rabbis, who wanted desperately for their teachings to be carried out in the 'real' world.  The rabbis want all of this to 'make sense'.  Consistency, logic, reason - with these tools we should be able to devise principles that allow us to correctly interpret the meaning behind G-d's words.  And yet sometimes things don't fit.  Today's daf offers insight into how our rabbi manage that situation.

There is permission in our modern world to change our beliefs, change our opinions, to believe in a higher power or not, to use post-modernism to inform our critiques or to sit within a closed, classical thought structure.  Which is better, to have a million options that will never truly satisfy us or to have only one option that offers at least the feeling of 'knowing'?  I suppose it depends on who we are, where we are in our lives, what supports we have in our environments, and where we believe we will find a more meaningful truth.