Food Tourah – Tzav
April 8, 2025 in Food Tourah
Because life so often happens around food, we’re spending the year exploring the weekly parshiot and finding connections to each week’s Shabbat menu. 25 parshiot down, 29 more to go!
Tzav gives greater detail to the five sacrifices that were mentioned in last week’s portion, Vayikra. It continues to describe the contents of what is included in the sacrifice and who is allowed to eat it. An additional special sacrifice is added for the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests. More of the ordination involves ceremonial washing, dressing, anointing with oil, and marking the ear, thumb, and big toe of the priest with sacrificial blood. The root of the Hebrew word for anointing mem-shin-chet is the origin of the English word Messiah – literally “the anointed one”. While this parsha is very meat heavy, describing the fats and organ meats of the sacrifice, it also places limitations on eating meat. It can only be eaten by those who are ritually pure. Meat from an animal that has been killed by a predator cannot be eaten by a person. And blood should never be consumed, hence the careful washing and salting of kosher meat.
Friday, April 11th is a complicated night for Jewish food. Since Pesach begins on Saturday night and one is not supposed to work on Shabbat, all of the cleaning of, searching for, burning of, and selling of all chametz (leaven), must be done before Shabbat begins Friday night. And yet, one is not supposed to eat matzah before the seder, since you are supposed to save that enthusiastic first bite for the designated time. A custom is to say hamotzi over egg matzah on Friday night. The meaty sacrifices and the lack of chametz make this a week for a meat dish. Here is a classic meat pot roast, as well as a vegetarian version. Like the olah (burnt offering), they can roast for a long time. The vegan one calls for cornstarch to thicken, but it is fine leaving it out, if you don’t do corn at your house for Pesach. Here are some spiced Persian walnut cookies that use nuts instead of flour, still reminding us of the fragrant flour offerings of the sacrifices.
On Saturday, April 19th, we will read a special Torah portion for Pesach. Food Tourah will take a break for that week and return with our summary of Shemini the week after
B’tayavon and Shabbat Shalom,
Alison (Baraf) & Sarah (Roark)
To read past installments of Food Tourah – Click Here.
For a more in-depth look at this week’s parsha, visit Sefaria.com.