By Joel Elkins, March 21, 2026
We’ve entered a brand spanking new book, Vayikra, also known as Leviticus, also known as Torat HaCohanim, also known as “the how-to guide for Priests” or “the Bnei Yisrael Owner’s Manual”, or, as AI transcribed it in one video I watched, Viagra. But I know that can’t be right, because we finished the erection of the Mishkan last week. (“If your Mishkan lasts longer than 40 years, consult your high priest.”)
In some communities, boys entering cheder begin studying Torah with Vayikra. After all, nothing captures the imagination of a five-year-old boy quite like the finer points of disemboweling bulls and sprinkling blood.
But while it does have lots of animals and animal parts, what Vayikra lacks is human characters. There is one character, however, who, although not specifically named in the text, does come up quite a lot in the commentaries, even though he died approximately fifteen hundred years before this week’s events. And that human character would be the first human character, Adam.
Starting with the very first word, you may have noticed that the aleph in Vayikra is smaller than the other letters. According to Rabbi Yosef Schneerson, who was the father-in-law and predecessor of the Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson:
“In the letters of the Torah, which G d gave at Sinai, there are three sizes: intermediate letters, oversized letters and miniature letters. As a rule, the Torah is written with intermediate letters, signifying that a person should strive for the level of ‘the intermediate man’.”
This idea of the intermediate man is the basic tenet of the Tanya. (That’s the book of Hasidic philosophy written in the late 18th century by the first Rebbe of Chabad, Shneur Zalman, also known as the Alter Rebbe.) The Tanya says that man has both a spiritual side and an animalistic side. And there are three types of people. There is the tzaddik, who has completely vanquished his or her animal instincts and no longer even desires evil. Then there is the rasha, on the other end of the spectrum, who completely gives in to temptation. Then there is the beinoni, the intermediate person, who still feels drawn to these baser instincts but fights against them. While very few of us will ever rise to the level of a tzaddik, the goal of being a beinoni is achievable by everyone.
Reb Schneerson goes on to note that in the first word of Chronicles, Adam’s name is spelled with an oversize aleph, because Adam (I guess like all first-borns) thought the world revolved around him, and this eventually led to his downfall. In contrast, Moses, himself a third child, felt a sense of insufficiency, and, like all third children, attained the very highest level of humility, expressed by the miniature aleph of Vayikra.
A midrash expands on this: When God was dictating the Torah to Moshe on Sinai, Moshe protested that he didn’t warrant a full Vayikra, a verb used when God has a deep relationship with someone, like to Abraham on the mountaintop or to Hagar in the wilderness. When God called to Bilam, on the other hand, the Torah uses the word Vayikar, without the final Aleph. God just happened upon, or met up with, Bilam. On four previous occasions God had called to Moshe using the word “Karah”, but all those preceded the giving of the Torah. On this occasion, when Moshe has editing privileges, he lobbies against the ‘VIP’ treatment of a full Vayikra, and instead for the ‘accidental’ version – Vayikar – used for Bilam. The small aleph is the compromise: the word is written in full, but it’s ‘downsized’ out of respect for Moses’s modesty. And for the rest of the Torah, God never calls to Moshe again using the full Vayikra.
Moving on to the second verse of the parsha (don’t worry, we only have 109 more verses to go through!), it says אָדָ֗ם כִּֽי־יַקְרִ֥יב מִכֶּ֛ם קׇרְבָּ֖ן לַֽיהֹוָ֑ה (when a man among you brings a sacrifice to God). But it doesn’t use the normal word for man (Ish). It uses Adam. The Talmud, perhaps a little results-driven, says that, since Adam could not have stolen an animal because had no one to steal from, we can learn from this that one may never use a stolen animal as a sacrifice. Others have said that this teaches that when bringing sacrifices, we should strive to be as pristine as “Adam,” a pure man untouched by sin. Well, until he wasn’t.
In fact, Rav Yossi, the Babylonian Amora, says we should learn from Adam’s mistake:
“If you wish to know the reward prepared for the righteous,” he says, “go and learn from the case of Adam Horishon, who was charged but with one negative command (not to eat from the fruit of the tree), and he transgressed it. See how many death-penalties were imposed as a punishment against himself and all his descendants!” (The implication being that, had he not sinned, he and his descendants would have lived forever in Gan Eden.) “Now,” he continues, “since the measure of reward is greater than that of punishment, surely, if a person abides by a negative command, such as refraining from eating prohibited sacrifices or from eating on Yom Kippur, how much more certain is it that he will acquire merit for himself and for his descendants and the descendants of his descendants until the end of all generations!”
Some commentators go even further and take a view that sounds decidedly Catholic, claiming that Adam’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden was the “original sin” and that the Mishkan and all the sacrifice rituals laid out in detail in this and the next few parshas were all decreed as a way to rectify that original sin
Centuries after Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden, the Divine Presence finally returns to a physical home on Earth (the Mishkan), allowing humanity to once again “draw near” to God. Picture this: let’s say a teenager misbehaves and, as a result, his parents throw him out of the house, and they become estranged. Down the line, perhaps because he has no parental figures in his life, he gets into trouble and gets thrown into jail. With no one else to turn to, he calls his parents, who then bail him out and they begin to reconcile. When he’s back on his feet, he builds an ADU over the garage for them to stay in when they’re in town. Sort of like that.
And yet there is still another midrash that relates Adam to this week’s parsha. According to that midrash, Adam was the very first person to offer a sacrifice, even before his sons. On the evening of the sixth day, when he saw for the first time the sun setting in the west, Adam feared that the world was coming to an end. When the sun rose the next morning, he offered an ox to God as a thanksgiving. So maybe lighting a fire on Shabbat was actually his first sin.
Why does any of this matter to us, thousands of years after the last animal was disemboweled and sacrificed on the altar? It comes back to that miniature Aleph and the idea of being the Beinoni—the ‘Intermediate Man.’
The Tanya teaches us that being a Beinoni isn’t about being average or mediocre. It’s about the constant, daily struggle to choose our better selves over our animal instincts. Adam failed because his Aleph was too big; he let his ego fill the entire Garden. Moses succeeded because his Aleph was small; he made room for God to speak through him.
Vayikra, with all its bloody details and arcane rituals, is ultimately a manual for how to be a Beinoni. The concept of korban/sacrifice isn’t about giving something up, as the English translation suggests. It means ‘to draw near.’ When Adam saw the sun set for the first time, he was terrified that his distance from God had become permanent. He offered an ox not as a bribe, but as a bridge.
We may not be disemboweling and sacrificing bulls in our backyards today, but we are all still Adam struggling in the dark, trying to find our way back to the light. We are all still Moses, trying to shrink our egos enough to allow in others.
The lesson of the small Aleph is that no one expects us to be perfect Tzaddikim We just need to be “Intermediate” people who show up and do the work. So maybe AI’s accidental renaming of the parsha wasn’t so far off. After all, the rituals described herein are designed to make sure that what we do on a day-to-day basis is ‘upstanding’. By bringing our own daily sacrifices—our time, our energy, our empathy and our humility—we channel the spirit and purpose of the Mishkan by constantly pushing to reconnect to our better selves. Ken y’hi ratzon.
Shabbat Shalom.