A poem from 70 faces:

KORBAN (VAYIKRA)

You'll need a smoker.
Get one from Home Depot
and tighten each screw and bolt
exactly as the directions teach.

Split birch logs, and maple
kindle knobs of charcoal
fan them with cardboard
layer the hardwoods to burn.

Place the bird with reverence
then close the lid. What rises
will perfume the neighborhood,
your clothes, your hair.

Two hours later it's blackened,
crisp and burnished, but
inside: so tender even
a butter knife cuts through...

What constitutes a drawing-near
two thousand years or so
after the last sacrifice, bull
or pigeon, went up in smoke?

It's not the roasting that matters,
that's just barbecue—though
maybe it's a reminder
on some level too deep to name—

but anticipation, and gratitude.
So that what burns bright
on the altars of our hearts
sends a pleasing odor to Adonai.

That's a fairly tongue-in-cheek response to the parsha. I read the parsha, I thought about the scent of meat on the fire, and that's where I wound up. But I think there may be some truth there.

There's a traditional understanding that after the fall of the Temple, the home table of every Jew becomes a mikdash me'at, a small sanctuary. This may be especially true on Shabbat and festivals, times when we take pains to make our tables holy spaces: with white tablecloths, with the sanctification of wine, with challah or matzah sprinkled with salt. But I think even our kitchen tables piled with bills, our coffee tables scattered with old newspapers or children's toys, can be holy altars if we eat on them with mindfulness and intent.

When we pause to bless the food we're about to eat, we have the opportunity to make ourselves mindful of the earth in which it was grown or on which it was raised, the hands which tended it and brought it to our table, the hands which prepared it. And, of course, of the infinite Source of Blessing from Whom all of these blessings flow. When we pause to be thankful after we've eaten, then the food becomes a stimulus for recognizing our gratitude.

Does God "need" our blessings? Reb Marcia Prager taught me to understand prayer as something like the cry of the infant which stimulates the flow of its mother's milk. "More than the calf wants to suckle," said the rabbis of the Talmud, "the cow wants to give milk." God wants to stream blessing into the world; our prayers, our cries, prime that cosmic pump. When we say "please," and when we say "thank you," we're sending our energy toward the Holy One—which in turn stimulates the flow of blessing back to us.

I really like that metaphor. It's one way of understanding why we pray, why we offer our words and our hearts. But I don't think that God "needs" prayer in the same way that we need food or water. We pray not because God needs it, but because we do.

Avodah—service—whether it's the avodah the priests once enacted on the altar, or the avodah she'ba'lev / service which is within and upon our hearts, is a practice designed to shape us. Once the priests made offerings on our behalf, a goat or a sheep or a bull without blemish, in order to help us feel expiation for our sins or to make an offering which would be pleasing to the Holy One of Blessing. Today we offer the words of our siddur, the words of our tradition, the words of poetry, the words—or silence—of our hearts... but the intention is the same. This is how we draw near.

Our tradition understands God as both transcendent and immanent, as far-away and inconceivable as infinity and as near to us as the beating of our own hearts.

What can you offer which will bridge that distance?