Parashat Vayikra: On Prayer, Sacrifice, and Largeness

We talk a lot about largeness in tefillah (prayer). Gadol Hashem umehulal me’od; ki kel gadol; yitgadal yitkadash. They all use the word gadol, which literally means “large,” although most often is understood to mean something like “great.”

But lately it is the sense of largeness that I lean toward. Praying is an act of expanding the perspective, of seeing that one is part of a large infinite cosmos and a large infinite divine being. Praying is like becoming a bird for one small section of time – flying high, seeing the earth and oneself from the perspective of 2,000 feet – having a sense of the whole expanse and of one’s part in it. I am a wave in a large ocean, a blade of grass in a never-ending field.

Close experience of death brings one to this perspective in a paradoxical way. Suddenly the truth of each of our very limited lives on this earth stands out starkly before us – we are tiny specks and then we disappear. And yet, it also speaks to a much much larger perspective – the dead become not smaller, but larger, because they become part of something infinite – the truth of all of our connections to the infinite, to the largeness of the divine seems suddenly impossible to refute. Perhaps that is why the first word of the kaddish is yitgadal – May His name be great or large – meaning – May we remember to have this sense of His largeness and of our own deceased’s part in that largeness.

Something similar is going on in the parsha with all of these sacrifices. What happens to an animal or flour offering is the truth of what happens to all flesh – it rises up to meet its Maker. In disappearing into smoke it becomes a part of-- is given over to-- something non-tangible, but larger, infinite in scale.

Perhaps that is why prayer is the parallel to these sacred offerings. They both function to elevate us – to help us feel what it is like to fly from above, to become a wisp of smoke floating upward, to lose ourselves in the largeness of the divine.