Dan's Papers - April 24, 2009

"And so this shank bone of the lamb represents the sacrificial lamb that in ancient times was offered up to the Almighty God, the creator of the Universe, Blessed be He."

I heard this a lot over the holiday weekend just past. And I wondered about this business of sacrifice. I don't clearly understand the idea of slaughtering something and presenting it to the Almighty as a sacrifice.

Also, if it is such an important thing, then why do we just hold up the shank bone to show how they used to do it? Why don't we just do it? And if we are not going to do it, what is God going to think?

Surely, it is an important thing. The modern era, which frowns on sacrificing living things, goes back only about 2,000 years. But before that, practically everybody was sacrificing to the gods. Considering that man has been on this planet for two million years, that means that for 1,998,000 of them, humans were making sacrifices to deities. But in the last 2,000 years, we - in the Jewish and Christian religions anyway - only talk about how they used to do it. As I said, this seems like a risky business.

I have personally seen sacrifices. Many years ago, when Dan's Papers shut down in the fall and reopened in the spring, I would take my family and travel somewhere interesting in the winter.

One winter, we lived in a house we rented in the mountain town of Panajachel, Guatemala. You could take a bus on switchback roads further up the mountain to the town of Solola. And about halfway up, there was a bus stop where, if you wanted to, you could get out, walk down a gravel path on the cliff face and go into the witchdoctor's cave.

He wasn't there the time we did that, but inside the cave, way in the back, there was a shrine to a deity, and in front of it were the offerings and sacrifices of the local citizenry. I saw cigarette packs, incense candles, scarves, old shoes, hats and jewelry. It was all laid out neatly. It all looked like it had been there a long time. The deity, whoever he was, had not yet come down to accept any of this stuff. But I guess they were still hoping.

On another trip we visited Tikal in northern Guatemala. Here, deep in the jungle, are 10-story tall pyramids that have, up on top, sheltered platforms where the Mayans performed the sacrifices to their gods. Again, nobody was up there doing that - the Mayans were all gone by 1400 A.D. - but the platforms were up there and, according to the archeologists who translated the carved writings on the bases of these pyramids, the sacrifices to the gods included not only goats and lambs, but also captured enemy soldiers, virgins and slaves.

But what, exactly, were these people trying to accomplish with these sacrifices?

Presumably, they were trying to assuage or bribe the gods into treating well those who made the sacrifices. Was it like, "Look, we are having lamb tonight, but we have the biggest one for you?" Or was it like, "This is all the lamb we have, and we are going to sacrifice ourselves by not eating it and instead offer it up for you to eat while we remain hungry, so if it's okay with you, please send us something from heaven to eat when you've finished the lamb."

Or, considering the cigarette packs and jewelry, is it just about food? And what were the sacrificers to make of the fact that the god never does, actually, come down and partake of the sacrifice offered up to him?

I've tried putting myself in some of these people's shoes. (Well, sandals.) They are born. They grow up. They wonder about all the wondrous things they discover everywhere. Surely somebody extremely great and powerful did all this. How can we show our appreciation?

Our religious leaders tell us that if we get together as a group and praise the Lord and sing really loud announcing that we will obey him and believe in him, he will treat us kindly. And that makes a certain amount of sense.

Abraham, the father of both the Jewish and Christian faiths, was walking along minding his own business when he saw a bush burning without being consumed. God spoke to him from inside the bush. He told him to build a fire up on Mount Ararat and upon it to sacrifice his eldest son, Isaac. Abraham said okay. And then, at the last minute, with Abraham just about to place his young son in the fire he's built, God intervenes to say, "Oh, I was just testing to see if you would do that. You really don't have to now."

I am thinking that in ancient times, when the priests got the local citizenry together to make a sacrifice to a deity, perhaps it was about the smoke. The smoke from the consuming of the sacrifice rises up.

"There, you see?" the priest says. "He's accepted the sacrifice." God, back then, was up. They'd try to make sure the sacrifice was not held on a windy day when the smoke might go sideways. On those days, if you attempted one, the priest would have to report that the god was refusing the sacrifice. This would not be good.

Well, I am only guessing. As for me, I personally think there is a God up there who created everything. I imagine him happy about what he created. And though I don't know if he considers me as better or worse than anything or anybody else he created, I WILL make sacrifices, but in the sense of sacrificing something that I have to benefit others on the planet who do not. It's a meaning of the word sacrifice that I understand, and my rationale for it is that I've seen what God can do and it's pretty darn good and I'm just gonna help out, whether he asks me to or not.

By the way, it's in a commandment he sent down from Mount Sinai: Love thy neighbor. I think what he's trying to do here with this universe is write a Disney fairytale. I'm all for it.