Parashat Pinchas: On the Tamid Sacrifice, Mountains, and Eternity

Included in this week’s parsha is the Olat Tamid  -- the burnt offering that was sacrificed on the sanctuary altar twice a day, every day.   Tamid means “always” -- not just now and then, but all the time, regularly -- reminding us of the importance of constancy and steadfastness in our connection to God. 

The verse inexplicably connects this particular offering to Mount Sinai, saying that we should bring the olat tamid “that was done on Mount Sinai” (Numbers 28:6). Commentators have various explanations -- that it refers to the practice days before the erection of the Tabernacle or to a sacrifice that was in fact brought at the time of Mount Sinai -- but perhaps there is also a metaphorical meaning here, a connection between the theme of steadfastness implied by tamid and a mountain such as Mount Sinai, the Israelites’ most recent and prominent experience of mountains.  Perhaps the message is -- if you want to understand how to do this tamid, learn from the mountain; be a mountain.  

A mountain is nothing if not steadfast.  It stands still through all types of weather, stable and constant through rain and wind and sun, simply staying the course.   That’s what it means to have this tamid quality in relation to God, as well.  To be an olah, to reach up, like the verb alah, “to rise up,” to reach up to connect to God and to keep that connection going, to stay with it through whatever external or internal weather we experience -- through life challenges and sickness and health and emotional ups and downs -- just to stay the course, to keep stable like a mountain in our unwavering connection to heaven.   

Shiviti Hashem lenegdi tamid.  I place God before me at all times, tamid, says the Psalmist, always.   Do we need to place God before us -- isn’t God already there?  Yes, and yet we need to continually be placing Him there.  Part of this tamid quality involves the constant re-awakening to God’s presence before us, a constant re-remembering the mountain-like stillness that is at our center, a constant rising up again to connect -- with each new in-breath, a new start, a new rising up.   Our connection, our home, is always there, and yet we need to continually place it, place God, before us, continually remind ourselves, twice a day bring an olah, twice a day say the Shma, at each moment re-awaken to this eternal stillness.   Our minds and hearts swirl with activity and busyness and worry and fear and so much human vulnerability; we are distracted from this truth, from this ner tamid, eternal light, that always flickers in us, is always connected.  Only when we are perfectly still, like a mountain, do we remember.  

Each moment of remembering is a kind of teshuva, a return to knowing our tamid connection.  We are given a thousand opportunities a day to return, to be steadfast, to remember.  Life seems so complicated to us, but is really so simple; just to keep returning home, to be constant in our devotion, in our connection, in our knowledge of the divine.   It’s ok that we forget; it just gives us more opportunities to remember, to re-ignite the olah flame and burn brighter, more completely, as was the special trait of the olah, to burn up entirely on the altar.   

Something happens in these tiny moments of returning, some tiny glimmer of some other realm.  It’s as if when we, on our human plane, are tamid, we get a taste, on the divine plane, of le’olam, of eternity.   The word tamid, “always,” is used almost exclusively for humans, and the word le’olam, “forever,” almost exclusively for God (think: ki le’olam hasdo, “for His loving kindness is forever”).  But the two are similar -- “always” and “eternity.”   “Always” is our human approximation of “eternity,” an attempt to enter that space beyond time, to be so still and steadfast that we are still here and still here and still here, so that we are actually so present that we enter some other “here” where time stretches out before us with no end; we are in divine time, no time. Our ability to “stay” opens up eternity for us. This is part of what is meant to happen on Shabbat.  We pause; we are still and present in a steadfast, “always,” mountain way; and we get a taste of olam haba, the world to come, the divine world that is “always coming,” the future merging with the present through our simple act of standing still and remembering, zachor.   

To be tamid on some level seems impossible to us humans.  We can’t promise or even hope to ever be “always” anything; we are notoriously fallible and unpredictable and unreliable.  We are not mountains and not meant to be mountains.  But the olat tamid was not really an “always” offering.  It was brought twice a day.  To be tamid, steadfast in this way, is to commit not to something we can’t do -- constant, every moment presence -- but simply to keep returning every day, to know that we will leave, but also to know that we can remember and return, become a mountain, again and again, and that this is enough; this, too, this momentary re-awakening to divine presence, done a thousand times over, this, too, is an entryway to eternity.